Indigenous vegetables consumed as lalapan by a Sundanese ethnic group in West Java, Indonesia: Potential, traditions, local knowledge, and it's future

Abstract

• Lalapan is an important part of a food source for indige indigenous people in the East Priangan region. • All of the parts of plants that can be eaten as lalapan included young shoots and leaves, flowers and whorls, raw fruit, ripe fruit and its seeds, tuber, bark, and skin of tuber. • Lalapan is a tradition by the local Sundanese community from generation to generation. • There correlation between the age of the indigenous people in East Priangan and the level of traditional knowledge with the use of lalapan in their daily lives is poor level. • The bibliometric analysis showed that the prospect of indigenous vegetables is still wide for future research. The local knowledge of indigenous people about traditional vegetables has been well documented. However, there is little conventional plant documentation biodiversity on indigenous vegetables used as lalapan in West Java, Indonesia. The method used in this study was a qualitative method using an exploratory approach. Informants, including traditional leaders, indigenous people, and the Sundanese younger generation, provided data. Credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability tests were used to determine the data validity. The data were evaluated using data reduction, visualization, and verification techniques. Then, to show the local importance of each species, Relative Frequency of Citation (RFC) analysis was conducted, and The usage value (UV) analysis was used to determine the relative usefulness of plants in a given location. There were 86 species of edible indigenous vegetables consumed as lalapan, which belong to 32 families. The vegetables were accumulated from four traditional villages. The implication of indigenous vegetables as lalapan is a top priority to ensure nutrition, public health, and food security.