Overlooked in national reports and in conservation programs, wild food plants (WFPs) have been a vital component of food and nutrition security for centuries. Recently, several countries have reported on the widespread and regular consumption of WFPs, particularly by rural and indigenous communities but also in urban contexts. They are reported as critical for livelihood resilience and for providing essential micronutrients to people enduring food shortages or other emergency situations. However, threats derived from changes in land use and climate, overexploitation and urbanization are reducing the availability of these biological resources in the wild and contributing to the loss of traditional knowledge associated with their use. Meanwhile, few policy measures are in place explicitly targeting their conservation and sustainable use. This can be partially attributed to a lack of scientific evidence and awareness among policymakers and relevant stakeholders of the untapped potential of WFPs, accompanied by market and non-market barriers limiting their use. This paper reviews recent efforts being undertaken in several countries to build evidence of the importance of WFPs, while providing examples of cross-sectoral cooperation and multi-stakeholder approaches that are contributing to advance their conservation and sustainable use. An integrated conservation approach is proposed contributing to secure their availability for future generations.

Diet and nutrition-related behaviours are embedded in cultural and environmental contexts: adoption of new knowledge depends on how easily it can be integrated into existing knowledge systems. As dietary diversity promotion becomes an increasingly common component of nutrition education, understanding local nutrition knowledge systems and local concepts about dietary diversity is essential to formulate efficient messages. This paper draws on in-depth qualitative ethnographic research conducted in small-scale agricultural communities in Tanzania. Data were collected using interviews, focus group discussions and participant observation in the East Usambara Mountains, an area that is home primarily to the Shambaa and Bondei ethnic groups, but has a long history of ethnic diversity and ethnic intermixing. The data showed a high degree of consensus among participants who reported that dietary diversity is important because it maintains and enhances appetite across days, months and seasons. Local people reported that sufficient cash resources, agrobiodiversity, heterogeneity within the landscape, and livelihood diversity all supported their ability to consume a varied diet and achieve good nutritional status. Other variables affecting diet and dietary diversity included seasonality, household size, and gender. The results suggest that dietary diversity was perceived as something all people, both rich and poor, could achieve. There was significant overlap between local and scientific understandings of dietary diversity, suggesting that novel information on the importance of dietary diversity promoted through education will likely be easily integrated into the existing knowledge systems.

Agroecology frameworks do not explicitly include nutrition, but nutrition is an outcome of many principles of agroecology, with growing evidence that agroecological interventions improve diet quality and nutrition. In this paper, we argue that more explicit attention to the importance of wild foods from diverse agroecological landscapes will further enhance the nutrition outcomes associated with agroecology. In rural landscapes around the world, wild foods provide nutrient-dense and culturally important foods that make significant contributions to the diet in some contexts and are culturally important and highly valued delicacies in others. Agroecological principles, science, and practice already support the maintenance of wild foods in food systems by highlighting ecological principles. These include low or no use of pesticides, landscape diversity, and maintenance of biodiversity, alongside social principles such as traditional knowledge and cultural practices. The focus in agroecology on working with traditional knowledge and cultural practices supports the preservation of traditional knowledge required to responsibly harvest and prepare wild foods. Centering landscape diversity and nutrition as outcomes of agroecology supports the continued use of wild foods and cultural knowledge, especially in rural communities around the globe. More explicit attention to wild foods in agroecological systems will further contribute to associated nutrition outcomes, while simultaneously promoting the maintenance of landscape diversity, biodiversity, preservation of cultural knowledge, and other ecological sound and socially just agricultural practices.

In this longitudinal study we explore how changes in food environments have shaped the acquisition and consumption of wild foods among people living near forests. Our study conceptually improves food environment frameworks by including evidence on changes in wild food consumption. We used data collected in both the dry and rainy seasons in 2009 and 2021/2022 in four villages in the East Usambara Mountains, Tanzania. Across data collections, we conducted qualitative interviews, focus groups and repeated household surveys, including questions on dietary intake, food sources, agricultural practices, and use of wild resources. We found that the proportion of people who collected wild foods within the past seven days had declined from 90 to 61% in the dry season and from 99 to 72% in the wet season. The main reasons were 1) decreased availability caused by, for example, loss of biodiversity, 2) lack of access due to government forest regulations, and 3) increased desirability towards marked-based foods. Our results show how changes in both availability, access and desirability of wild foods have shifted dietary choices from wild foods towards cultivated and purchased foods. Also, we see less widespread consumption of sentinel food groups such as dark green leafy vegetables. Our results highlight the need for an additional dimension in existing food environment frameworks: “Legal access to wild resources” that would cover access to wild foods. This dimension is important as loss of legal access and declining consumption can have negative dietary implications, since the most commonly consumed wild foods, such as leafy vegetables, are nutritionally important.