Where tulips and crocuses are popular food snacks: Kurdish traditional foraging reveals traces of mobile pastoralism in Southern Iraqi Kurdistan

Abstract

BackgroundIraqi Kurdistan is a special hotspot for bio-cultural diversity and for investigating patterns of traditional wild food plant foraging, considering that this area was the home of the first Neolithic communities and has been, over millennia, a crossroad of different civilizations and cultures. The aim of this ethnobotanical field study was to cross-culturally compare the wild food plants traditionally gathered by Kurdish Muslims and those gathered by the ancient Kurdish Kakai (Yarsan) religious group and to possibly better understand the human ecology behind these practices.MethodsTwelve villages were visited and 123 study participants (55 Kakai and 68 Muslim Kurds) were interviewed on the specific topic of the wild food plants they currently gather and consume.ResultsThe culinary use of 54 folk wild plant taxa (corresponding to 65 botanical taxa) and two folk wild mushroom taxa were documented. While Kakais and Muslims do share a majority of the quoted food plants and also their uses, among the plant ingredients exclusively and commonly quoted by Muslims non-weedy plants are slightly preponderant. Moreover, more than half of the overall recorded wild food plants are used raw as snacks, i.e. plant parts are consumed on the spot after their gathering and only sometimes do they enter into the domestic arena. Among them, it is worth mentioning the consumption of raw wild crocus corms, also still common in Turkish Kurdistan and that of wild tulip bulbs, which was documented to be popular until the beginning of the twentieth century in the Middle East. Comparison with other ethnobotanical field studies recently conducted among surrounding populations has shown that Kurds tend to gather and consume the largest number of non-weedy wild vegetables.ConclusionThe collected data indicate robust traces of nomadic pastoralism in Kurdish traditional foraging. This finding confirms that studies on wild food plant gathering in the Fertile Crescent and Turco-Arabic-Iranic regions of the Middle East are crucial for understanding the possible evolution of wild food plant gathering through history within the post-Neolithic continuum between pastoralism and horticulturalism.

On the Trail of an Ancient Middle Eastern Ethnobotany: Traditional Wild Food Plants Gathered by Ormuri Speakers in Kaniguram, NW Pakistan

“…In food ethnobotanies, raw snack consumption primarily emerges during the adoption of mobile pastoralism, which local communities might have co-evolved. Our findings are in line with previous ethnobotanical studies that frequently reported snacks as the dominant food category [19,20,[52][53][54]. The most commonly quoted wild vegetables were Allium spp., Amaranthus viridis, Lepidium draba, Portulaca quadrifida, Polygonatum verticillatum, Rumex dentatus, Urtica dioica and an unidentified taxon, and these wild vegetables have been frequently reported in the Pakistani food ethnobotanical literature [18][19][20][42][43][44][45][46][47][48].…”

Gathered Wild Food Plants among Diverse Religious Groups in Jhelum District, Punjab, Pakistan

“…Some important wild food plants ( Figure 4 ) and dishes prepared by the visited communities were available for photographing ( Figure 5 ). Traditional culinary processing included cooking the plants as vegetables (43 mentions), followed by raw snacks (33), confirming what documented in other ethnobotanical studies too [ 73 , 74 , 75 ]. Raw snacks were eaten especially by transhumant herders, and it has been shown that herding develops specific linkages between humans and their surrounding ecosystem [ 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 ].…”

Wild Food Thistle Gathering and Pastoralism: An Inextricable Link in the Biocultural Landscape of Barbagia, Central Sardinia (Italy)

“…Indeed, in Sardinia, cardu are gathered, often with the help of a knife (due to their thorniness), peeled with the blade, and consumed on the spot, possibly as a way to pass the time while grazing sheep, but ultimately, their crunchiness provides a pleasant chewing experience. Indeed, the texture of the plant may have contributed to the shaping of food preferences in the pastoralist context [22]. In addition, cardu stems or tubers are often watery and may have been used as thirst quenchers, especially in late spring and the beginning of summer when the plants are more turgescent.…”

“…Indeed, pastoralism is often related to specific categories of plants. For example, in Iraq, Kurdish pastoralists were found to consume more snacks than the neighboring more horticulturalist-driven Kakei [22] and much more than Assyrians [23]. Even more specifically, Volpato and Di Nardo [24] explored the pivotal relation between the Sahrawi camel nomads and a specific savannah plant in Western Sahara.…”