Food for two seasons: Culinary uses of non-cultivated local vegetables and mushrooms in a south Italian village

Abstract

The use of non-cultivated plants in a daily diet based on local cuisines is potentially of considerable interest to nutritional scientists, because of the plants’ role as local products and their potential as sources of novel nutraceuticals. In many Mediterranean regions these traditions are at risk of disappearing, hence the urgent need to study such knowledge systems. Accordingly, an ethnobotanical survey was carried out among the 850 inhabitants of the village of Castelmezzano, in central Lucania, which is located in the inland southern Italy. Seventy-five taxa of non-cultivated and semi-cultivated local food plants and mushrooms were documented, and uncommon food uses of a few species were reported for the first time. These include Bellavalia romana, Lepista nebularis and Onopordum illyricum. Most of the recorded non-cultivated food plants and mushrooms are cooked in oil or fat. Very few are consumed raw. This article discusses in detail the traditional culinary uses of these plants, their seasonality, ethnoecology, and their economic and nutritional potentials. The article also demonstrates how food agro-biodiversity is inextricably connected with cultural heritage.

• Non-cultivated plants
• seasonability
• ethnoecology
• cultural heritage
• Italy

Notes

1. A clarification is also needed here concerning the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘traditionally’, which are frequently (ab-)used in the terminology of many discourses touching ethnobotany and food anthropological horizons. We use here these terms for defining something that has been an integrated part of a culture for more than one generation (Ogoye-Ndegwa & Aaagaard-Hansen 2003).

2. The region where Castelmezzano is located has been historically named Lucania, a term that is still used by the local population.

3. This local breed of cattle has descended from the Bos primigenius podolicus, the very large, long-horned cattle thought to have been domesticated in the Middle East during the fourth century BC. Most authors agree that this animal was introduced into Southern Italy by the Longobards during the sixth century AD (Picchi 2001).

4. In Castelmezzano the term pizza indicates a sort of home-made flat bread, which can be dressed in many different ways: with tomatoes, as in the famous Italian pizza, or with cubes of pork lard, sweet peppers, and sometimes even sugar only.

5. ‘Semi-cultivated plants’ not deliberately planted in the home-gardens/vineyards, but deliberately tolerated by the people and grown semi-spontaneously, even if they do not represent spontaneous plants in a strictly botanical sense, are different from ‘weeds’, which have similar ethno-ecological characteristics but are botanically considered spontaneous.