Abstract
Wild food plants (WFP) have always been present in our kitchen, although they have not always been given the same importance as crops. In the Catalan linguistic area (CLA), covered in this paper, WFP were of great importance as a subsistence food not only during the years of the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) and World War II (1939–1945), but also long before these periods and in the years thereafter. The CLA has been well studied at the level of traditional knowledge on plant biodiversity, and much of this information is collected in a database by the EtnoBioFiC research group. The aim of this work is to carry out a meta-analysis of the WFP dataset of the CLA (only regarding edible uses, drinks excluded) and to identify the most quoted plants, and the information associated with them. With data from 1659 informants, we recorded 10,078 use reports of 291 taxa (278 of which at specific or subspecific levels and 13 only determined at generic level) belonging to 67 families. The most reported taxa, also with highest cultural importance indexes, are Thymus vulgaris, Foeniculum vulgare subsp. piperitum, Laurus nobilis, Rubus ulmifolius and Mentha spicata. The ethnobotanicity index for food plants is 6.62% and the informant consensus factor, also for food uses, is a very high 0.97, supporting the robustness of the information. The results provided and discussed in this work concern a significant part of the edible resources in the territory considered, which is, often and mainly, underestimated and underutilised. Its consideration could be an opportunity to promote closer and more sustainable agriculture. From the state-of-the-art of this question, it is possible to propose old, in some cases forgotten foods that could be newly introduced onto the market, first, but not only, at a local level, which could be interesting for new crop development in the frame of a valorisation of territorial identity.
Highlights
Wild food plants (WFP) have always been present in the human diet, in general, and in industrialised areas, they have not always been given the same importance as crops
The pool of WFP traditionally used for food—excluding beverages—in the Catalan linguistic area is constituted by 291 taxa, 278 at specific and subspecific level and 13 determined only at generic level, belonging to 193 genera and to 67 families, according to the information gathered in ethnobotanical prospection from 1659 informants (53.65% men, 46.35% women)
The results and data analyses performed in the present paper show an important pool of 278 WFP traditionally used in the Catalan linguistic area
Summary
Wild food plants (WFP) have always been present in the human diet, in general, and in industrialised areas, they have not always been given the same importance as crops. In the Catalan linguistic area (CLA, i.e., the Catalan-speaking regions) studied in this paper the knowledge on WFP has had great importance during the Spanish civil war, World War II, and the years after these wars, as a subsistence or famine food, as in other places [3], their use decreased. WFP were known, appreciated and used before these periods, and the traditional knowledge, which was cumulated in emergency episodes, persisted, allowing the current use of some taxa even further than at local level [8,9]. A couple of generations ago WFP were associated with difficult periods, and acculturation processes have occurred but this has not prevented the continued use of various WFP (e.g., in different places [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19])
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