1 Introduction

One of the most crucial components of sustainable food systems is the prudent and cautious use of natural resources, which, in turn, requires seriously taking into account local Traditional Knowledge (TK), as Article 8 (j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity clearly affirms (CBD 2016). Bio-cultural refugia (Barthel et al. 2013) all over the world often host reservoirs of TK related to wild food plants, upon which local communities have built their food security and food sovereignty (Bharucha and Pretty 2010; Neudeck et al. 2012; Kuhnlein 2014; Nolan and Pieroni 2014; Shumsky et al. 2014; Quave and Pieroni 2014; Ong and Kim 2017; Shaheen et al. 2017) or which have help them survive, even recently, periods of famine (Redžić 2010; Redžić et al. 2010; Redžić and Ferrier 2014).

The bio-cultural heritage related to wild food plants and neglected and underutilized species (NUS) have been the focus of a number of investigations in the past decade all around the world, given that the diversification of diets and traditional ingredients (orphan crops, wild plants, wild crop relatives, and wild meat varieties) is considered a key issue in combating malnutrition and hunger (Heywood 2013). Moreover, to focus on traditional plant foraging (i.e. gathering of wild food plants) is essential in many remote areas of the world for a better understanding of its role in informing the sustainability of food systems, for its possible beneficial effects on human health, and also for fostering traditional, reinvented, and new local gastronomies (Heinrich et al. 2005 and 2006; Łuczaj et al. 2012; Pieroni et al. 2015; Hunter et al. 2019).

Several field studies conducted in the past two decades in mountainous regions of Eastern Europe have shown that these areas represent often remarkable reservoirs of disappearing folk plant and ecological knowledge (Pieroni et al. 2005; Redžić 2006; Nedelcheva 2013; Papp et al. 2013; Pieroni et al. 2013; Rexhepi et al. 2013; Molnár et al. 2015; Quave and Pieroni 2014, 2015; Pawera et al. 2017; Pieroni and Sõukand 2017). Moreover, the homogenizing effects of centralization within the former Soviet area, which have affected medicinal plant knowledge seem to have been much less relevant in the food arena and in remote mountainous regions (Sõukand and Pieroni 2016), and therefore the TK related to traditional foraging may still offer very important insights.

The Caucasus has thus far been investigated in only a few areas with regard to traditional wild food plants (Kaliszewska and Kołodziejska-Degórska 2015; Bussmann et al. 2016, 2017; Hovsepyan et al. 2016; Łuczaj et al. 2017; Pieroni and Sõukand 2019; Sõukand and Pieroni 2019); moreover, the ethnobotanical research conducted to date has sporadically followed cross-cultural approaches, despite the fact that this territory was, and still partially is, home to remarkable linguistic and religious diversity (Comrie 2008) and a complex gastronomic heritage (Hercules 2017; Capalbo 2017). In particular, the Caucasus is located at the crossroads of five major historical cultural axes, namely Armenian, Turkish/Azeri, Persian, Russian, and autochthonous Caucasian (Georgian and other minorities), which have also heavily influenced its cuisines.

In the current study, we focused on mountainous multi-ethnic central Armenia, since wild food plant gathering has not yet been systematically and cross-culturally investigated in the country. The objectives of this study were therefore: a. to record traditional plant foraging among four ethno-religious communities living in central Armenia; b. to compare the data among the four communities in order to identify commonalities and differences, and to formulate hypotheses to help explain them; and c. to envision concrete ways in which this bio-cultural food heritage could foster future sustainable food systems.

2 Study area and methodology

2.1 Study area and communities

Figure 1 shows the visited villages in mountainous central Armenia, whose landscape is depicted in Fig. 2. Table 1 presents the characteristics of the selected ethno-religious groups, as well as the socio-economic and cultural characteristics of the utilized sample.

Fig. 1
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Study area and visited villages

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Fig. 2
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Landscape of central Armenia

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Table 1 Characteristics of the study participants
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The small proportion of female study participants in the Greek sample was due to the fact that this minority group is extremely small and close to extinction in the considered village in central Armenia, where effectively all remaining inhabitants were sampled.

2.2 Field study and methods

The field study was conducted during September 2019 and the study participants were selected, using a snowball technique, from among middle-aged and elderly inhabitants (over 50 y.o.) living in rural areas, who we identified as possible local traditional knowledge holders.

Verbal consent was always obtained before each interview and the Code of Ethics of the International Society of Ethnobiology (ISE 2008) was followed. Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Russian or sometimes in Armenian. The interviews focused on gathered wild food plants including: non-cultivated vegetables; wild plants used as starters in baking or yogurt making, such as rennet for preparing sarma, or in home-made fermented products; wild fruits and other wild plants used in sweet preserves and/or liquors; and wild plants used for seasoning foods and making home-made herbal teas. Moreover, we made note of a few unusual uses of cultivated plants as well. For each of the free-listed plant items, local names and exact details of traditional culinary preparations were recorded.

Plants were identified using the Flora of Armenia (Takhtajan et al. 1954–2009), while nomenclature follows The Plant List database (2013) and family assignments are consistent with the Angiosperm Phylogeny Website (Stevens 2017). The collected voucher specimens are deposited at the Herbarium of the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics, and Statistics of the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy (UVV). All local plant names were transcribed from the recorded local languages using the Latin alphabet; among the most relevant phonemes that do not occur in English it is worth mentioning that the voiceless velar fricative was reported as “kh”, the schwa as “ə”, and the voiceless uvular fricative as “gh”.

2.3 Data analysis

Data were compared with the most important worldwide wild food plant compendia (Hedrick 1919; Tanaka 1976; Facciola 1998) as well as the wild food ethnobotanical studies conducted in the last decade in the Caucasus (see aforementioned literature in the Introduction).

In addition, a Venn diagram was drawn based on the wild food taxa quoted by the four selected communities and the Jaccard Similarity Index for each pairing of the considered groups was calculated (Gonzáles-Tejero et al. 2008).

3 Results and discussion

3.1 Traditional wild food plants in central Armenia

Table 2 shows the wild food plants traditionally gathered and consumed in the study area. For each folk taxon, the botanical binomials and families, their folk names, the plant parts used, the exact details of the traditional culinary preparations, and the frequencies of quotation are reported. Sixty-six wild food taxa were identified and recorded while eight remained unidentified.

Table 2 Wild food plants gathered among the four considered ethnic groups
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All of the quoted wild plants are very widely available in the natural environment of the study area, and not a single taxon represents a threatened or rare species. This confirms the intrinsic sustainable nature of traditional foraging in central Armenia, where most plants collected by Armenians, Yazidis, and Pontic Greeks are gathered from pastures, while Molokans seem to also favor weeds found around houses and home gardens. Greeks and Molokans gather some plants from the forest as well. This pattern is linked to the fact that Armenians and Yazidis are still traditionally engaged in shepherding activities, while Molokans are primarily horticulturalists and, together with Pontic Greeks, still actively involved in the management of forests (see Table 1). Moreover, both pastures and forests, and the communal land which provides access to them, is free to every community member in the study area.

The wild vegetables gathered in mountain pastures are mainly crunchy aerial shoots belonging to the Apiaceae family, which are nowadays largely consumed as a side-dish only after lacto-fermentation (Fig. 3), but which in the past possibly represented snacks to be consumed on the spot.

Fig. 3
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Lacto-fermented Falcaria, Chaerophyllum, and Heracleum spp. stems

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Very rarely a few wild vegetables and culinary herbs are preserved for the winter in dried form, such as Rumex spp., Thymus kotschyanus (these two genera are also very often sold in farmers’ markets) and Chenopodium album (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4
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Chenopodium, Rumex, and Thymus spp. stored for winter

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A large portion of the recorded taxa has also been previously recorded in Armenia (among Yazidis and Kurds), as well as in Georgia and Azerbaijan (see aforementioned literature), suggesting a common foraging ground in the Caucasus, due to both similar mountainous environments and especially socio-cultural contexts, the latter possibly reinforced during the Soviet period. In particular, the common food uses of Allium paradoxum, A. victorialis, Anthriscus, Chaerophyllum, Falcaria, Heracleum, Portulaca, Prangos, and Rumex spp. (mostly preserved in the form of lacto-fermented pickles) could possibly be considered part of a “pan-Caucasian” bio-cultural gastronomic heritage, which also has important links to Turkish, Kurdish and Western Persian wild food ethnobotany (Pieroni and Sõukand 2017; Pieroni et al. 2018, 2019, and references therein).

3.2 Cross-cultural comparison

Figure 5 presents a Venn diagram showing the overlap among the four studied communities (number of cited folk taxa) and the related Jaccard Similarity Indexes.

Fig. 5
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Venn diagram showing the overlap among the four studied communities for the recorded wild food taxa and related Jaccard Similarity Indexes (JIs)

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Molokans and, more remarkable, Yazidis gather less wild food plants and share only a few plants with Armenians. This may be due to the fact that these ethno-religious groups have followed endogamic marriage patterns for centuries, which may have limited the exchange of plant knowledge and practices with their Armenian neighbors, and also to the difficult adaptation to a new natural and socio-cultural environment. Additionally, Yazidis, who moved from Eastern Anatolia and the Nineveh Plains to the study area approximately one century ago, may not have encountered in the new natural environment the flora with which they were familiar in their area of origin. This could also explain why Yazidis gather fewer wild food plants in comparison to Molokans.

In other studies we conducted among diaspora, we hypothesized that migrants preserve more restricted wild plant repertoires not necessarily only because of the lack of availability of certain natural resources in the new environment, but possibly also because of complex cultural adaptation processes (Pieroni and Quave 2005). Yazidis in central Armenia seem to have focused much less than the other groups on using wild food plants: they exhibit only one plant cultural marker (sensu Pieroni et al. 2015), in contrast to the other groups which show 13, 12, and 10 uniquely used wild taxa.

This peculiar pattern may also be due to a difficult social adaptation to the new environment: Yazidis, in fact, represent the most economically disadvantaged group in the study area and this may have affected, and may continue to affect, the cultural and practical space (i.e. access) in which experimenting with new food plants could take place.

The traditional practice of gathering wild plants for food is, however, still vividly alive among all considered locals in central Armenia and at least a part of this bio-cultural heritage could represent one of the future pillars of local sustainable food systems and platforms.

Armenians and Greeks share some important similarities and approximately half of their gathered taxa are identical, which may be due to the fact that these groups share the same religion and have historically had frequent inter-marriages.

The idea that religious affiliation may play a crucial role in informing kinship relations and subsequently the vertical transmission of TK confirms the main results of a few other recent studies conducted by our research group in Europe (Bellia and Pieroni 2015; Pieroni et al. 2015; Pieroni and Sõukand 2019) and the Middle East (Pieroni et al. 2018).

Moreover, the wild food plants exclusively used by the Molokan community include two forest genera (Fagus and Viburnum) and four weedy taxa (Amaranthus, Armoracia, Humulus and Urospermum spp.), which seems to confirm the prominent horticultural nature of this group.

3.3 Wild food plants in Armenia: archaic ingredients or novel/new sustainable foods?

While the European Union defines novel foods as those items not consumed “significantly” prior to May 1997 and, therefore, mainly includes food types from new sources, new substances used in food, as well as new ways and technologies for producing food (EFSA 2019), wild food plants represent ancient food sources emerging from human substance economies, ranging from hunting and gathering societies to post-Neolithic horticultural and pastoralist communities.

Particularly within the context of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, foraging for weedy plants might have increased during the Neolithic Revolution, when populations have possibly started to preferably gather species growing around cultivated horticultural areas (Leonti 2012; Pieroni et al. 2018; Pieroni and Cattero 2019). Most of these weedy species have a bitter or pungent taste, which is also a distinctive characteristic of the wild portion of the Mediterranean Diet (Della et al. 2006; Nebel et al. 2006; Rivera et al. 2006; Biscotti and Pieroni 2015).

We also believe that after the Neolithic period the foraging of wild plant “snacks” (possibly derived from pre-existing practices), which grow in pastures where nomadic and semi-nomadic shepherding communities used to bring their herds to graze (Pieroni et al. 2019; Mattalia et al. submitted), may have intensified.

From the perspective of human ecology, the foraging of wild food plants in the study area, therefore, represents a way of optimizing the sustainable use of widely available natural resources, contributing to the food security of local communities with relatively little expenditure of time and energy. Thus, knowledge and practices, including both environmental and culinary aspects, need to be actively preserved.

Food security has been defined by FAO in 1996 as a situation in which “all people at all times have physical, social and economic access to food, which is safe and consumed in sufficient quantity and quality to meet their dietary needs and food preferences, and is supported by an environment of adequate sanitation, health services and care, allowing for a healthy and active life” (FAO 2008). In other words, in relation to the concept of food security the key issue of access is central: access does not only mean, therefore, the availability of food, but also the possibility of obtaining it both physically and socio-economically and within a context of adequate health care. All these aspects are ensured by the traditional foraging of wild food plants we analyzed in central Armenia.

The recorded plants are in fact available in the natural environment and most of them are even quite easily physically accessible in private home-gardens, as well as communal lands and forests. Moreover, it is increasingly known that wild food plants (especially wild vegetables) may have a beneficial effect on human health (Heinrich et al. 2005; Bvenura and Sivakumar 2017; Aworh 2018; Savo et al. 2019).

Food insecurity in the world, caused by demographic factors, the industrialization of agriculture and environmental deterioration, can therefore be seriously addressed by re-considering and revitalizing the rich bio-cultural food heritage that local communities have shaped over centuries (Declaration of Nyéléni 2007; Gordillo and Jerónimo 2013) and which represents a focal component of sustainable food systems (Nabhan 2014). Armenia, along with Georgia, has the highest hunger index in Europe, despite the fact that hunger decreased more than 50% in the last two decades (Global Hunger Index 2019). In order to implement food security in Armenia, the recorded local wild food plants will need to be promoted via appropriate education tools within the country and perhaps become the focus of niche local food products that could be internally marketed (Table 3), especially—but not exclusively—in local farmers’ markets and within eco-tourism and agro-tourism initiatives. Only a few recorded wild plants (most notably, young stems and shoots of Allium victorialis, Chaerophyllum, Portulaca and Prangos, and possibly Bilacunaria spp.) are processed in domestic arenas or by small-scale food factories (pickled in brine, or lacto-fermented, in glass jars) and are currently sold both in farmers’ markets and by a few retailers in the largest urban centers. The large majority of the recorded wild plants, however, do not yet reach the market, despite their remarkable potential.

Table 3 Possible wild food plant-derived central Armenia local products that could be promoted in the near future (for description of the wild plant ingredients and their processing see Table 2)
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Food ethnobiological field studies, therefore, play an essential role in what we nowadays call foodscouting, i.e. recognizing, documenting, valorizing, and—together with local communities—disseminating the unique and diverse local food resources of the world. This would subsequently help stimulate the creation of platforms where the diverse actors of the foodscape could encourage small scale entrepreneurs, local communities, and neighboring consumers to expand their dietary repertoire (Slow Food 2019).

In contrast, the perceptions, knowledge and practices concerning the plant items we recorded, as well as their cooking processes and consumption contexts, represent the result of complex co-evolution between local populations and the natural environment, which have ultimately built their resilience over centuries (Berkes et al. 2003). This complex and diverse heritage, therefore, needs to be not only dynamically preserved in bio-conservation and cultural heritage-driven strategies but also concretely put at the center of rural development programs in order to foster culturally-sensitive endogenous solutions aimed at shaping food sustainability and food security (Bvenura and Afolayan 2015).

Additionally, a lot of work is still needed at the crossroads between foodscouting and public health/nutritional governmental strategies in fostering projects aimed at improving food diversity and at promoting health. To achieve these goals, appropriate educational platforms able to regenerate local knowledge systems among the younger and middle-aged generations, as well as public engagement for increasing awareness among all citizens regarding the importance of neglected and disappearing traditional food ingredients, will be essential.

4 Conclusion

The traditional practice of gathering wild plants for food is still very much alive among locals in central Armenia and this bio-cultural heritage could represent one of the pillars of future local sustainable food systems and platforms.

While Armenians and Greeks gather a remarkable number of wild food plants and share approximately half of them, Molokans and, more remarkable, Yazidis gather less wild food plants and share only a few plants with Armenians. This may be due to the fact that the latter ethno-religious groups have followed endogamic marriage patterns for centuries, which may have limited the exchange of plant knowledge and practices with their Armenian neighbors and also to the difficult adaptation to a new environment that Yazidis experienced after moving from Eastern Anatolia and the Nineveh Plains to the study area around one century ago.

As the recorded wild plants entirely represent widely available species belonging to the local biodiversity, the recorded neglected food plant ingredients could play a role in Armenia in shaping culturally appropriate policies of rural development and eco-tourism, which may be particularly important in peripheral, less-advantaged, mountainous areas.

Moreover, the current study may suggest that some of these food sources could also be important for coping with food insecurity, especially within the most disadvantaged households and among Yazidi families.

Some of these food ingredients (for example, the wild food plants uniquely used by each group) represent identity-drivers that could promote the local gastronomic heritage of the different studied communities. For each of these communities, the culturally more salient wild food plants occasionally represent identity-drivers and could help locals in promoting their specific gastronomic heritage.

Finally, it will also be important to link this work to further nutraceutical studies aimed at evaluating the biologically beneficial properties of these wild food botanicals and associated dishes and their possible effects in the prevention of diseases, which could in turn help further national and regional institutions and food activism in promoting local wild plant food ingredients.