Wild and semi-domesticated food plant consumption in seven circum-Mediterranean areas

Abstract

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Improving diets with wild and cultivated biodiversity from across the landscape

“…For example, the nutritional importance of wild foods in sago-dependent forest communities of Indonesia (Ellen 2006;Dounias et al 2007;Sasaoka et al 2014) is likely very different from that for Mediterranean communities who value wild foods as part of their traditional culinary heritage (Pieroni et al 2005;Pardo-De-Santayana et al 2005;Batal and Hunter 2007;Hadjichambis et al 2008;Powell et al 2014). Although reviews have often portrayed wild foods as ubiquitous and habitually used by rural populations around the world (Scoones and Bishop 1994;Grivetti and Ogle 2000;Bharucha and Pretty 2010;Penafiel et al 2011), their actual contribution to nutrition is dependent not only on availability but also on the number of people using them, frequency of use, and quantities consumed relative to other foods.…”

The Consumption of Wild Edible Plants

“…Hadjichambis et al (2008) performed a comparative analysis of the wild food plants recorded by seven selected study sites around the Mediterranean (Albania, Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, Italy, Morocco, and Spain). They documented 406 wild food plants, corresponding to 294 taxa, of which 77% were used exclusively at a local level, and concluded that even though some species have a general distribution and are commonly used around the Mediterranean, others have a strong connection with local biocultural heritage.…”

A century of changes in wild food plant use in coastal Croatia: the example of Krk and Poljica

“…It is sometimes even said that eating wild greens is a "hidden" part of the Mediterranean diet [11,12]. However, even there this use is declining [10,[12][13][14][15][16][17]. The decrease in the usage of other categories of wild foods in the Mediterranean is probably less profound (e.g., [15,18]).…”