Wild Foods - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 475

The role and importance of wild foods requires the development of explicit linkages
between policies for species conservation and food security. For communities depen-
dent on wild species, conservation policies result in trade-offs with food security. The
combined success of conservation agendas and development policy requires that these
trade-offs be confronted and minimized.
The Continuum between “Wild” and
Domesticated Food
A key insight from the literature on wild foods is that there are no easy distinctions
between farmed and nonfarmed species, nor between farmers, foragers, and hunter-
gatherers. Wild and cultivated species exist along a continuum, with varying levels of
domestication and management, rather than as a simple dichotomy. Since “ domestica-
tion grew out of food gathering, which almost imperceptibly led to cultivation,” many
wild edible species can be considered to be “in various stages of domestication as a result
of human selection, however slight” (Heywood 1999). Thus, wild food species exist along
a continuum, with no management interventions on one extreme, progressing to vari-
ous degrees of transplanting, propagation and other management practices designed to
support their use (Harris and Hillman 1989; Thomas and Van Damme 2010).
Similarly, the livelihoods of those who depend on wild foods might be more properly
thought of as variants of cultivator-hunters or farmer-foragers, in recognition of the fact
that foraging and farming can be viewed as “overlapping, interdependent, contempora-
neous, coequal and complementary” (Sponsel 1989, 37).
It was long supposed that cultures progressed, in distinct phases, from hunter-gatherer
to agricultural to industrial. Each of these was viewed as superior to the one that pre-
ceded it. Beginning with Hobbes's 1651 observation that the life of “natural man” was
“solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short,” cultural evolutionary views—distinguishing
between “natural” and “civilized” peoples—persisted from the eighteenth to the late
twentieth centuries (Meggers 1954; Lathrap, 1968).
However, evidence from across the world shows that communities are more com-
plex and varied. Some horticulturalists move, some hunter-gatherers are sedentary
(Vickers 1989; Kelly 1995). Some groups maintain gardens for cultivated food as well
as to attract antelopes, monkeys, and birds for hunting (Posey 1985). Many apparently
hunter-gatherer and forager cultures farm; many agricultural communities use large
numbers of nondomesticated resources. The Hohokam are well-known as sophis-
ticated canal irrigators and desert farmers of the American Southwest, yet they were
hunters, gatherers, and foragers, too. Szuter and Bayham (1989) thus observed that the
labels of hunter-gatherer and farmer are not valuable, as the two activities are in fact
complementary. Hypotheses generated in the 1980s questioned the assumption that
hunter-gatherers could ever subsist in tropical forest environments without access to