Knowledge, Use, and Disuse of Unconventional Food Plants Mayana Lacerda Leal1*, Rubana Palhares Alves2 and Natalia Hanazaki1
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Leal et al. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (2018) 14:6 DOI 10.1186/s13002-018-0209-8 RESEARCH Open Access Knowledge, use, and disuse of unconventional food plants Mayana Lacerda Leal1*, Rubana Palhares Alves2 and Natalia Hanazaki1 Abstract Background: People’s diets are usually restricted to a small number of plant species, even in regions with great diversity. We investigated the knowledge of residents in Ribeirão da Ilha, a district of Florianópolis (Santa Catarina, Brazil), about unconventional food plants (UFP). We report the UFP of the region, the parts used, the methods of processing, and the reasons for reduced use or even lack of use. Methods: From June 2014 to January 2015, we interviewed 26 long-established residents and made free listings of plant resources in the region. We also did three guided tours, and 24 residents (among the 26) checked pictures of the mentioned plants in order to identify them. Results: We identified 63 species distributed in 25 botanical families. Half of the species were mentioned only by one informant. The fruit was the most frequently used part (80% of citations), consumed mainly without processing. Among those species, 27% were used exclusively in the past. The residents attributed non-use to the difficulty in locating the plants and loss of interest in the resource. Conclusion: Urbanization and environmental restrictions contribute to the difficulty of access to UFP. Encouraging residents to continue using UFP is necessary to perpetuate this threatened knowledge, promote a more diversified and healthier diet, stimulate a greater interaction among people and nature, and promote on farm conservation of edible plants. Keywords: ethnobotany, local knowledge, edible plants, PANC, urban foraging Background does not reflect the number of species that are actually Plants have always been part of human life. Historically, used [4], it challenges us to understand the role of factors human knowledge and use of plants has been guided by not covered by these authors’ analysis (e.g., homegardens practical needs and cultural predilections [1]. Some plant as food sources), since it is very likely that there is a large species are widely distributed and their uses are stand- number of species with restricted distributions, whose ard, especially food plants and their uses. Food plants uses are localized or have become neglected. are those that have one or more parts or products that This group of underutilized plants has received increas- can be used as human food [2]. This definition includes ing attention, especially as a reaction to the expansion of plants that are directly consumed and those that furnish monocultures, and has received different denominations. oils, spices and condiments used for cooking. It is esti- Some terms used to refer to them are: “famine foods” [5]; mated that there are around 27 thousand plant species “alternative food plants” [6]; “wild edible plants” [7, 8]; with food potential in the world [3]. How many of these “unconventional vegetables” or “traditional vegetables” [9]; plants are used for this purpose is a very complex ques- “plants for the future” [10]. Kinupp and Lorenzi [11] con- tion. Prescott-Allen and Prescott-Allen [4] estimated that sider that the terms used to refer to these food plants have 103 plant species are responsible for 90% of the world restrictions because they usually contemplate only one food supply. Although this number is underestimated and plant category (e.g., vegetables, wild, native), which may generate ambiguities and also requires complements. These authors propose the use of another expression that * Correspondence: [email protected] 1Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil refers to the food species that have one or more parts with Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Leal et al. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (2018) 14:6 Page 2 of 9 food potential and no common use: “unconventional food these wild edibles can be considered UFP. Local studies plants”–UFP (Plantas Alimentícias Não-Convencionais - about UFP are important for documenting species with PANC, in Portuguese) [11]. This term also refers to plants traditional use value, and for stimulating cultural use and that have uncommon processing methods and usually do conservation, especially in communities facing socioeco- not have market value or are only commercialized on nomic transformations due to close proximity to urban small scales [11]. Using this broad definition, UFP can centers. In this study, our aim was to investigate the include native and exotic plants, and cultivated and knowledge about UFP of residents in Ribeirão da Ilha, a spontaneous ones. periurban district of Florianópolis, Brazil. We report the Brazil is one of the most biodiverse countries in the UFP species, parts used, processing methods, and the rea- world, with a great number of plants with domesticated sons for the reduction of use, and even the abandonment populations [12, 13]. However, this diversity is rarely of the use of UFP, and discuss the implications of these exploited and thus fails to contribute to the agricultural observations. development of the country [13]. In addition, many of these species are undergoing genetic erosion, with con- Methods sequent loss of genetic diversity [12, 13] and loss of asso- Study area ciated knowledge about them. A reduction in cultivation This study was carried out in the district of Ribeirão da and use of other UFP has also been recognized [9]. In Ilha, located in the southwestern part of Santa Catarina the last decades, urbanization has progressively weakened Island, Florianópolis municipality, state of Santa Catar- the relationship among humans, land and food cultivation. ina, Brazil (Fig. 1). The region is located along the coast In this process, traditional agricultural systems lose space of the Atlantic Forest, whose original natural vegetation to agribusiness [14] and, as a consequence, the depend- was composed by Dense Ombrophilous Forest [22] and its ency on products supplied by the food industry increases, transition to coastal ecosystems. The study area includes resulting in the decrease of local food consumption, diet forests, mangroves, beaches, hills and dunes [23]. Accord- changes, and even peoples’ loss of cultural identity [9]. ing to the Köppen classification, Florianópolis’ climate is Examining this process under a dynamic perspective, mesothermal humid, with a hot summer [24]. The relative such changes can be associated to the loss of knowledge humidity is 85% and the average rainfall in the south of the related to modernization, which was observed elsewhere city is 1400 mm per year. The average annual temperature [see, for example, 15]. Different authors observed the loss is 20 °C along the seafront, where the monthly average of knowledge about plants among communities close to temperature is 24 °C in January and 16 °C in July [25]. urban centers when compared to isolated ones [15, 16], Ribeirão da Ilha includes eight communities: Carianos, and related this process to delocalization. Pelto and Tapera da Base, Alto Ribeirão, Ribeirão da Ilha, Costa do Pelto [17] used the concept of delocalization to refer to Ribeirão, Caiacanga, Tapera do Ribeirão and Caieira da the ever-increasing network of socioeconomic and polit- Barra do Sul [26]. In this study, we excluded Carianos ical interdependency, which affects people’s diets making them more dependent of foods and products coming from distant places through commercial channels. In contrast, another process is recently reported in the literature, showing how urban forests and urban areas with wild edibles are becoming increasing important in people’s diets [18, 19]. The degree of urbanization or the distance to the urban centers can influence the access to food plant resources, and the knowledge and use of these plants [15, 16]. In the Bolivian Amazon, a study about knowledge and use of wild and semi-domesticated plants in two villages with dif- ferent distances to the market town showed that people from the remote village knew and used more of these plants than those from the more accessible village [20]. In the Brazilian Pantanal, a study of food plants in four com- munities showed that the residents of the communities further from the city always mentioned more wild edibles, Fig. 1 Ribeirão da Ilha district, Santa Catarina Island and communities suggesting that the distance to the urban center favored included in the study. 1 = Alto do Ribeirão, 2 = Ribeirão da Ilha, 3 = the relations with the environment, increasing the use of Costeira do Ribeirão, 4 = Caiacanga, 5 = Tapera do Ribeirão, 6 = Caieira da Barra do Sul wild products for food [21], and we noticed that some of Leal et al. Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (2018) 14:6 Page 3 of 9 and Tapera da Base communities, because they are not old, the youngest 56 and the oldest 89 years old. Nine considered by residents to belong to the district [27]. interviewees are male and 17 females. All were born in Until the early twentieth century, agricultural production Santa Catarina and only three of them were not born in was intense in this district. Over the following decades, Ribeirão da Ilha, but they had lived in the district for at residents left local production to work in the tertiary least 40 years.