Wild Foods - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 490

Somnasang et al. (1998) found that young people working outside the village did not
have the chance, and in some cases the desire, to acquire food-relevant LEK. It is thus
possible that as young adults leave land-based livelihoods, knowledge transmission
to younger generations will be diminished. In Zambia, the intergenerational transfer
of LEK related to wild foods and famine coping strategies is disrupted by HIV/AIDS
(Mason et al. 2010), providing an example of how the drivers and impacts of changed
wild food use interact. In other cases, individuals' preferences change as they grow,
and thus their stock of LEK changes, even if they remain within their community. In
Ethiopia, Fentahun and Hager (2009, 215) found that “grown-ups succumb to the cul-
ture of the society which regards the consumption of wild fruits [commonly consumed
by children] as a source of shame” (insert added). As climate change alters habitats, so
knock-on effects are expected on LEK (Strauch et al. 2009).
Socioeconomic Change and the
Expansion of Markets
The replacement of wild foods with store-bought products is linked to reduced dietary
diversity, rising rates of chronic lifestyle-related conditions such as obesity and type II
diabetes, poor intake of micronutrients (Batal and Hunter 2007; Hawkes et al. 2009)
and malnutrition (Erikson et al. 2008). Food advertising and promotion are associated
with the globalization and simplification of diets (Hawkes et al. 2009). As exotic spe-
cies and new processed products become available, traditional species are undervalued
and underutilized, as has been found in India (Rathore 2009) and the Amazon (Byron
2003). Yet the importance of wild foods to nutritional security means that they are not
necessarily replaced by store-bought foods that provide the same amount of calories,
and their replacement has been associated with concomitant rises in the incidence of
diabetes and obesity (Hawkes et al. 2009). Global trends indicate that more people will,
however, come to depend solely on store-bought, cultivated foods (Johns and Maundu
2006), thus marginalizing wild foods. With the disappearance of traditional foods from
diets comes the gradual loosening of people's bonds with landscape, rituals, and ele-
ments of their culture.
In regions isolated from sweeping transformations, traditional food systems can per-
sist. Pieroni (1999) suggests that the geographical isolation of the upper Serchio valley in
northwestern Tuscany has enabled popular knowledge of wild foods to be maintained.
Here, over 120 wild species continue to provide food and medicine. Likewise, 123 edible
species are still used in Spain (Tardío et al. 2003); and in many Mediterranean countries,
wild foods are still prevalent enough to be considered an important part of local diets
(Leonti et al. 2006).
In the Arctic, changing climatic and sociocultural conditions have resulted in the
increased dependence on store-bought foods, with significant negative effects to