Wild Foods - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 479

Burning is a widespread management practice. Australian Aborigines call it “firestick
farming,” and they used fire to make the “country happy,” to keep it “clean” (Bird Rose
1996). Burning allowed people to walk without fear of snakes and the nuisance of grass
seeds; it created new food for kangaroos and wallabies; and it made it easy to see animal
tracks and burrows. The observation of smoke is still taken to be a sign that the country
is healthy. Burning was also common in North America, helping to create the “park-
land” type environments of Yosemite and Vancouver Island, and it was used by plains
groups to increase herd size on the prairies (Berkes 1999; Lee and Daly 1999).
To many cultures, the ideas of wild, wildlife, and wilderness remain problematic. The
term wild is commonly used today to refer to ecosystems and situations where people
have not interfered, yet we now know that people influence, interfere with, and manage
most if not all ecosystems and their plants and animals. In Papua New Guinea, wild and
domesticated pigs are central to many subsistence strategies (Rosman and Rubel 1989).
Wild pigs are hunted and managed in various ways: boars and sows are brought together
to breed, females are followed to their nests, litters and piglets removed for raising, and
wild pigs are fed with sago and roots. Some groups raise extra gardens of sweet potatoes
just for pigs. Forest-dwelling cassowaries are never bred, but their chicks are captured,
tamed, and raised. Similar merging of the wild and raised occurs in reindeer (caribou)
herding and hunting communities of Siberia (e.g.Anderson 1999).
What is common in all cases is that people pay close attention to what the land is telling
them. Such knowledge and understanding is then encoded into norms, rules, institutions,
and stories, and thus forms the basis for continued adaptive management over generations
(Basso 1996; Pretty 2007; Berkes 2009). This knowledge is an important capital resource.
Many farmers continue to blur distinctions between cultivated and uncultivated
foods (Mazhar et al. 2007), reinforcing the lack of a simple dichotomy between
agricultural and hunter-gatherer livelihoods, or wild and cultivated species. Food
research and policy, in contrast, do not take account of these linkages. Yet wild food
species are also actively managed. Farmers transplant species onto or near fields. In
northeastern Thailand, a quarter of the 159 wild food species gathered are deliberately
propagated (Price 1997; High and Shackleton 2000; Harris and Mohammed 2003).
Smallholders' home gardens are another example of wild food interactions—these are
notably diverse, sometimes containing more than 200 useful species (Eyzaguirre and
Linares 2004).
Farming communities have long benefited from a “hidden harvest,” using co-evolved
species and other wild biodiversity in and around their farms to supplement their foods
and earnings (Harris and Hillman 1989; Scoones et al. 1992; Heywood 1999; Grivetti
and Ogle 2000). Many species are found within the fields themselves. The harvesting
of wild species from paddy fields is an excellent example. In Thailand, farmers harvest
wild herbs, insects, trees, and vines (Price 1997; Halwart 2008); in Bangladesh, 102 spe-
cies of greens and 69 of fish (Mazhar et al. 2007) are collected. In Svay Rieng, Cambodia,
wild fish from in and around paddies contribute up to 70 percent of total protein
intake as well as being a source of income. Their relevance as a buffer against hunger
is considerable in this area, since rice yields here are amongst the lowest in Southeast
Asia (Guttman 1999). Table 19.2 summarizes the range of species used by rice-based