Traditional foraging in Southern Italy and Mesopotamia: The inextricable links among human ecology, food heritage, and taste

Abstract

<h2>Abstract</h2> In recent years, research concerning local perceptions and uses of wild food plants, and that which is nowadays called "foraging", has increased in the Mediterranean and Near East. Most of these works, however, mainly focused on simple lists of food plant uses and did not thoroughly address the issue of cross-cultural comparison, and therefore they could not explore possible links between foraging and both human ecology and taste. This talk will reflect upon 20 years of ethnobotanical field studies conducted in the Mediterranean and Near Est, specifically focusing on the perceptions and categorizations of wild vegetables and their embeddedness in the local ecology and taste perceptions. Drawn from case studies conducted in Southern Italy (among ethnic Albanians) and in Northern Iraq (among Kurds, Assyrians, and Yezidis), profound interconnections between ecology and foraged species, as well as between the diverse human ecology of the foraged wild vegetables and their different perceived tastes, will be shown. The presentation suggests that the human ecology of local populations, i.e. their traditional strategies of plant food procurement, has not only influenced the typology of foraged wild vegetables, but also the prevalence of certain tastes. Moreover, the talk will briefly address promising future research trajectories at the crossroads between ethnobotany and cognitive and sensory sciences.