The plants that statistics forgot

FAO has just put out new guidance on capturing wild foods and neglected and underutilized species (NUS) in dietary surveys. It’s very much worth a look, even if your interest runs more to grain landraces than to gathered greens. The methodology is built to overcome a very valid problem: standard dietary assessment tools are generally designed with staple crops in mind, so anything outside that narrow frame (think foraged, seasonal, localized, thinly documented) tends to fall straight through the cracks.

FAO’s fix is a set of very sensible, practical steps: engage local knowledge holders to compile inventories under their own names for things, survey markets to see what’s actually being sold and eaten, map harvest calendars against agroecological zones and seasons, and build simple identification tools (photobooks, reference databases) that let enumerators and communities work from a shared understanding of what they’re counting.

None of that machinery is specific to wild foods though. The same toolkit could easily be adapted to survey the diversity hiding in plain sight within domesticated crops: landraces known only by local names, grown in a handful of villages, and invisible to national crop statistics that only track a handful of named improved varieties, if that. A market survey designed to catch wild greens sold at the roadside works just as well for catching a bean landrace in the same market. A harvest calendar built to track when forest foods peak works just as well for tracking when an old sorghum type gets planted or harvested, and why farmers still bother with it.

And there’s a useful downstream application: surveys built this way could help flag where crop diversity is thinning out on the ground, or where it’s abundant but under-represented in genebank holdings. In other words, the kind of gap analysis that ought to be steering germplasm collecting missions.

FAO’s framing kind of gestures at this already: wild, managed and cultivated aren’t three separate boxes but points on a continuum. A methodology built to navigate that blurriness for wild foods is also a methodology that ought to work for navigating the blurriness on the cultivated end too. It would be a shame if this toolkit stayed confined to the wild-food side of the spectrum when the conceptual heavy lifting behind it applies just as well to the neglected cultivated bit.