Centralization can jeopardize local wild plant-based food security

ABSTRACT

Centralization is one mechanism of authoritative control, where citizens receive operation guidelines from a single source. This can impact various spheres of life including local gastronomic knowledge, a cornerstone of biocultural diversity. We explored how to evaluate the effects of Soviet centralization on wild food plant local gastronomic knowledge. We considered four case studies of ethnic communities that are divided by political borders. In total, we conducted 581 semi-structured interviews. Our results suggest three main findings. The first regards the high similarity of use of wild food plants among the communities living in Russia and Finland. The second involves the higher proportion of simple preparations made with wild food plants in Soviet contexts, which is not evident in adjacent non-Soviet countries. The third concerns the low(er) number of distinct wild plant-based foods retained by non-Soviet countries and, in post-Soviet contexts, those that refer to past uses. We argue that the erosion of wild food plant-based local gastronomic knowledge guided by homogenization and repression poses a serious risk to local food security.

KEYWORD:

• Local Gastronomic Knowledge (LGK)
• effect of centralization
• biocultural diversity
• Soviet Union
• Post-soviet countries
• Local Ecological Knowledge
• Wild edible plants

Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to all interviewees who kindly shared their knowledge and wisdom with us. We also thank Dr. Valeria Kolosova and Iwa Kołodziejska for their comments on a previous version of the manuscript.

This research received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (DiGe, grant agreement No 714874).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Author contributions

RS, AP, GM conceptualized the paper; GM, BP, MAA compiled the database and cured the data; MM, MAA, RS, GM analysed the data; BP visually represented the data; GM drafted the first version of the manuscript; all the authors have contributed by commenting, integrating ideas, and revising the text. All the authors have read and approved the final version of this manuscript.

Data availability statement

Full datasets are available upon reasonable request and will be soon published as required by the grant agreement.

Code availability

The “fisher.test” function, available in the base distribution of R, was used to compute the p-values of the Fisher tests in the Data Analysis Section.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council [ERC-2016-STG 714874 DiGe].