Contemporary Foraging as a Lever for Plant Conservation and Plant Awareness: Evidence from Denmark, Southern Scotland and Tel Aviv–Jaffa

Résumé fourni par la source

Wild-food foraging is booming across the Global North, but its meaning—and its value for plant conservation—differs sharply between settings. We compare three case studies: Denmark, an intensively cultivated country with a book- and app-led revival; Southern Scotland, a post-industrial landscape whose foragers are largely incomers with a media-sourced repertoire; and Tel Aviv–Jaffa (Israel), where Nordic-inspired “neo-foraging” coexists with an eroding Arab–Palestinian oral tradition. Pooling three independently collected ethnobotanical datasets (2012–2021; Denmark: questionnaires n = 27 and interviews n = 10; Southern Scotland: questionnaires n = 12 and interviews n = 9; Tel Aviv–Jaffa: interviews only, n = 10), we record 153 wild-food taxa—136 plants (including three macroalgae) and 17 fungi—in 51 plant families. Read through the Latvian (Riga) sociology of foraging, all three cases sit on the delocalised, “lifestyle” side of the forager spectrum. Yet, all three converge on one under-exploited fact: foraging can train ordinary urban people to see, name, track and value wild plants. The apparent contradiction between gathering plants and conserving them, we argue, is resolved by the target flora rather than by the practice itself: harvest risk is concentrated in a small minority of rare, range-edge and habitat-specialist taxa, whereas plant awareness is built through repeated encounters with the commonest species—precisely those whose gathering is demographically trivial. Where foragers anchor their teaching in this ordinary, ubiquitous flora, their role is not merely compatible with plant conservation but quintessential to it. Foragers are, thus, an underused constituency of citizen educators capable of countering plant awareness disparity (also termed “plant unawareness”), provided their enthusiasm is coupled to a stewardship ethic, and we set out how conservation actors might mobilise rather than merely regulate this potential.