Wild food plant use in 21st century Europe: the disappearance of old traditions and the search for new cuisines involving wild edibles

Abstract

IntroductionIn several countries and regions of Europe ethnobotanical studies and reviews give us a picture of traditionally used wild food plants (e.g. Poland [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8], Spain [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], Portugal [26,27], Italy [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37], Greece [38,39], France [40], , the whole Mediterranean area [42][43][44], Austria [45][46][47], Slovakia [48] and the Nordic countries [49,50]).Plant use patterns are usually not static. In many cases ethnobotanical studies reveal either a dramatic or gradual loss of traditional knowledge and practices (e.g. [3,50,51]). The changes in patterns of wild plant use differ by region and are associated with lifestyle changes, urbanization, large-scale farming, lesser contact with nature and many other reasons. Moreover, times of famine seem to be in the distant past for industrially developed countries. Food made of cultivated plants and bought from the supermarket appears on the table with relatively little effort, while collecting wild species is more time consuming and season-dependent. In spite of that, the importance of wild food plants for food security and in shaping alternative models of consumption is emphasized [52]. Wild food plants cannot be considered "famine food" only, as many of them were and still are used on several other occasions as well (cf. [53]). Moreover, in Europe there are new phenomena associated with plant use appearing in modern societies. Some of them have to do with migration and new ethnic minorities appearing in cities and bringing new traditions with them. Other phenomena appear due to new trends in nutrition and self-medication facilitated by the instantaneous spread of information via the Internet. On top of that not all the traditions are gone, in some areas for a variety of reasons old traditions are cultivated while in others, they are lost.In this review we would like to give an overall picture of what is happening to the traditional use of wild food plants in different parts of Europe at the dawn of the 21st century. What are wild food plants?The term "wild" refers to those plants that grow without being cultivated. It mostly includes native species growing in their natural habitat, but sometimes managed, as well as introduced species that have been naturalized [15].Apart from that, a large number of other species are perceived as "wild" and labelled in this way, sometimes for marketing purposes (positive term) or as a negative term (as AbstractThe aim of this review is to present an overview of changes in the contemporary use of wild food plants in Europe, mainly using the examples of our home countries: Poland, Italy, Spain, Estonia and Sweden. We set the scene referring to the nutrition of 19th century peasants, involving many famine and emergency foods. Later we discuss such issues as children's wild snacks, the association between the decline of plant knowledge and the disappearance of plant use, the effects of over-exploitation, the decrease of t...

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