Foraging Wild Edibles: Dietary Diversity in Expanded Food Systems

Human food foraging in community forests offers extensive and expandable sources of food and high-quality nutrition that support chronic disease prevention and management and are underrepresented in US diets. Despite severe gaps in non-commercial “wild food” data, research in Syracuse, NY, identified substantial amounts of five key antioxidant phytochemicals in locally available, forageable foods with the potential to augment local dietary diversity and quality. Findings endorse the need for micro- and macro-nutrient research on an expanded range of forageable foods, community nutrition education on those foods, an expanded study on antioxidant phytochemical function, and the inclusion of forageables in the food system definition.