The hidden Mediterranean diet : wild vegetables traditionally gathered and consumed in the Gargano area , Apulia , SE Italy

Despite the extensive bio-scientific literature concerning the Mediterranean diet, which emerged in the last three decades, systematic ethnography-centered investigations on a crucial portion of this food system, linked to the traditional consumption of non-cultivated vegetables, are still largely lacking in many areas of the Mediterranean Basin. In this research, an ethnobotanical field study focusing on wild vegetables traditionally gathered and consumed locally, was conducted in a few centers and villages located in the Gargano area, northern Apulia, SE Italy, by interviewing twentyfive elderly informants. The folk culinary uses of seventy-nine botanical taxa of wild vascular plants, belonging to nineteen families, were recorded, thus showing a remarkable resilience of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) related to wild food plants. In particular, approximately one-fourth of the recorded wild vegetables are still very commonly gathered and consumed nowadays, while ten taxa have never been reported in previous ethnobotanical studies conducted in Southern Italy. These findings demonstrate the crucial cultural role played by folk cuisines in preserving TEK, despite significant socio-economic changes that have affected the study area during the past four decades.


Introduction
The Mediterranean diet -the theorization of which was proposed for the first time in the cross-cultural epidemiological "Seven countries study" by the American nutritionist Ancel Benjamin Keys [1,2] -has been defined as a diet "characterized by abundant plant foods, fresh fruit as the typical daily dessert, olive oil as the principal source of fat, dairy products (principally cheese and yogurt), and fish and poultry consumed in low to moderate amounts, zero to four eggs consumed weekly, red meat consumed in low amounts, and wine consumed in low to moderate amounts, normally with meals" [3].
Moreover, this diet has been ascribed to "food patterns typical of Crete, much of the rest of Greece, and southern Italy in the early 1960s, where adult life expectancy was among the highest in the world and rates of coronary heart disease, certain cancers, and other diet-related chronic diseases were among the lowest" [3].
Within this context, the consumption of wild vegetables in Southern Europe, however, still represents a kind of "hidden" part of the Mediterranean diet, despite the large scientific literature pointing out the benefits of this dietary pattern and the fact that this diet has been recently recognized as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity [4], officially ascribed to a few circum-Mediterranean countries: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Greece, Cyprus, and Croatia.
Wild vegetables of the Mediterranean diet have been at the center of a series of phytochemical and phytopharmacological studies in recent years that have demonstrated their role in counteracting metabolic diseases and as remarkable anti-oxidants [5][6][7][8][9][10]; moreover, wild vegetables are nowadays also the focus of many new trends of contemporary European cuisine, which stress the importance of the health benefits of local foods and expressions of terroirs/"sense of place" [11].
Despite the fact that these plants have represented for centuries and millennia the folk daily foods in the Mediterranean and the Near East, particularly during the winter and spring months, in-depth ethnography-based ethnobotanical studies published in the international literature and specifically focusing on the identification of traditionally gathered wild vegetables, as well as on the detailed documentation of their folk culinary uses, are still relatively scarce for the Mediterranean Basin, if we exclude some areas of Spain, inland southern Italy and Sicily, the Western Aegean part of Turkey, and Dalmatia [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30].
The global scientific community should maybe consider the urgency of collecting information about these neglected foods from the remaining traditional knowledge holders in order to record in detail the plant-based part of the folk daily diet of the rural classes of the Mediterranean region.
In this study, we contribute to this challenging task by conducting an ethnobotanical survey on the wild vegetables still gathered and consumed in the Gargano area, SE Italy.This area is in fact considered crucial for understanding the true nature of vegetable-based diets in Italy, as it is located within a region (Apulia) where the local folk cuisine is wellknown for its remarkable use of both neglected (cultivated) and wild plants.
The specific aims of this study were: (i) to record the local names and specific traditional culinary uses of wild vegetables, which are still gathered in the selected area; (ii) to compare the collected ethnobotanical data with the south Italian and South European ethnobotanical literature, in order to point out possible new or unusual plant culinary uses; and (iii) to compare the collected data with an ethnographycentered ethnobotanical investigation conducted in the same area in 1961, in order to observe the continuity and change of folk culinary uses of wild vegetables.

Selected site
The field study site consisted of the Gargano area, located within the Foggia Province, northern Apulia region, SE Italy (Fig. 1).Gargano is mainly represented by a hilly promontory that extends into the Adriatic Sea; since 1991, it has been entirely included within Gargano National Park, which has an area of 1180 km 2 , of which half is devoted to agro-pastoral activities and approximately one-fifth is covered by forests.
The flora is extremely rich and includes ca.2100 plant species [31], with a number of important endemic taxa (such as The agronomic landscape is characterized by orchards of citrus species, almond (Fig. 2), carob, and olive trees.Until a few decades ago, the traditional economic model of the area was characterized by a mixture of agricultural and pastoralist (sheep and cattle breeding) activities.While the development of tourism has changed this in the last few decades, the area still hosts a number of small-scale farmers.
The main town of Foggia is home to a daily fruit and vegetable market, where, during the winter and the spring months, a dozen stalls -a few of them managed unofficially by elderly famers/sellers -offer several wild vegetables; the same happens on street corners of this city as well as in a number of minor centers of the province.
In Foggia, the foraging of wild vegetables was part of the "specialized" skills retained by a specific section of the local city population, called Terrazzani.These "marginal" peoples were historically, and are still partially nowadays, involved in the gathering/foraging activities of wild food plants, and also mushrooms, snails, frogs, and (mainly illegally hunted) wild birds and small mammals, such as wild rabbits, hedgehogs, and badgers, for food.In the past, Terrazzani were used to gather and sell these items to the local agrarian bourgeoisie; nowadays, the few remaining Terrazzani sell their foraged foods on the street corners of Foggia (Fig. 3, Fig. 4).
The major part of the local population of the Gargano area is employed nowadays in small-scale agricultural activities (particularly related to olive tree and vegetable farming) and especially in the touristic industry, (the Gargano area hosting nowadays approximately 80% of all tourists visiting Apulia).The area is still heavily affected by migration of the youngest generations to northern Italy and Germany, motivated by the search for better job opportunities.
The local population of the Gargano area speaks a variety of dialects, which belong to the Daunian branch of the southern Italian languages.

Field study
In the years 2011-2014, the following centers and villages of the Gargano area were visited: Foggia, San Severo, Manfredonia, Cagnano Varano, Scanzano, San Nicandro, Vico del Gargano, Apricena, Lesina, Carpino, Lucera, and Mattinata.Twenty-five elderly informants between the ages of 39 and 80 years (but primarily 65-75 years) were selected among those locals who could be identified as traditional knowledge holders (normally Terrazzani and elderly smallscale farmers and shepherds), employing snowball-sampling techniques.These individuals then were interviewed after prior informed consent was verbally obtained.The focus of the interviews, which were conducted in both standard Italian and the Daunian dialect, was the folk knowledge (name and use) of the wild vegetables they still gather during the winter and spring months, i.e., the focus of the study was on current (and not past) wild vegetables perceptions and uses.
The Code of Ethics of the International Society of Ethnobiology [32] was strictly followed.
The wild plant species mentioned by the informants were collected, when available, and identified by the first author according to Flora d'Italia [33], and stored at the Herbarium   Anconitanum (Marche Polytechnical University, Ancona, Italy).Nomenclature follows the standards set by The Plant List database [34], while plant family assignments follow the current Angiosperm Phylogeny Group designations [35].
Finally, we compared the collected data with an ethnography-centered ethnobotanical investigation conducted in the same area in 1961 [55].

Results
Tab. 1 shows the recorded folk names and culinary uses of wild vegetables.
Sixty-seven folk taxa corresponding to seventy-nine botanical taxa of wild vascular plants, belonging to nineteen families, were found to represent the current local wild vegetable-based culinary heritage.The discrepancy between the two numbers is due, as already well documented for wild vegetables in other South-European areas [21], to the phenomenon known in ethnobiological linguistics as under-differentiation (locals naming diverse, mainly "similar", botanical taxa with one folk name only).
If we compare this data with the south Italian ethnobotanical literature of the last two decades [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36], this is probably one the richest heritages in terms of the diversity of wild food plants still gathered and consumed ever recorded in mainland Italy.
Most of the reported wild vegetables are represented by "greens", i.e., wild leafy vegetables, that mainly belong to the families of Asteraceae (30 botanical taxa) and Brassicaceae (10 botanical taxa), as is the case in most Mediterranean wild food plant-based folk cuisines, and, for what regards the popularity of wild food Brassicaceae, particularly in Sicily [25].
The prevalence of these two families may be explained by both the appreciation of the bitter and pungent tastes of the gathered botanical species belonging to these families, and the fact that elderly locals tend to link these tastes to the belief that these ingredients are important elements of a "healthy" diet, sometimes even ascribing them clear medicinal properties, as described in other studies focusing on the South-Italian paradigm of wild plant-based food-medicines and folk functional foods [21,56,57].
Beyond leafy vegetables, there are, however, a few exceptions: two vines (Dioscorea communis, Smilax aspera) and one shrub (Pistacia terebinthus), of which Gargano locals use the young, tender shoots; three wild leek and garlic species (Allium ampeloprasum, A. commutatum, and A. pendulinum), of which (also) the bulbs are consumed; and tassel hyacinth (Leopoldia comosa), whose bulbs may represent the most iconic foraged ingredient of Apulian folk cuisine, according to which they are fried with eggs to make a kind of bitter omelette (Fig. 5).
The most common culinary use of the recorded wild greens is boiling them in mixtures, locally known as fogghjà mmìsché ("mixed leaves"), and simply consuming them dressed only with olive oil and vinegar or lemon juice.
A variation of this mixture is the folk culinary preparation pancotto, in which old bread is boiled in water together with the wild greens, and, at the end, the entire preparation is dressed with abundant olive oil.
With some of the reported taxa (notably Diplotaxis tenuifolia, Foeniculum vulgare, Sinapis spp., Raphanus raphanistrum) a typical local festivity dish is prepared: home-made pasta (maccheroni or orecchiette) is "married" with the wild vegetables, either raw or blanched, which are then fried together in a pan with olive oil and garlic.
In rare cases, specific wild greens become the main ingredients of special dishes, such as eel-based (Tripolium pannonicum, Taraxacum obovatum) or lake fish-based (Sonchus maritimus) soups, as well as side dishes of roasted lamb meat during Easter festivities (Scolymus hispanicus).
A small number of taxa are simply consumed raw, as a snack, with bread, or, more often, in salads (Reichardia picroides, Diplotaxis tenuifolia, Sanguisorba minor, and even the light toxic shoots of Dioscorea communis); for example, a peculiar traditional salad preparation consists of mixing the young aerial parts of Cerinthe major with oranges (Fig. 6).It is also worth mentioning the culinary tradition of roasting wild garlic and leek bulbs (particularly Allium ampeloprasum, but also A. commutatum and A. pendulinum which are very rarely used elsewhere in Italy), and especially young shoots of Asphodeline spp.
Moreover, we compared the collected data with an indepth folkloric investigation conducted in the same area in 1961 by the ethnographer and cleric Cleto Corrain [55].The wild vegetables which were mentioned as widely used 55 years ago were: Asparagus acutifolius, Beta vulgaris, Capparis spp., Cichorium intybus, Foeniculum vulgare, Hirschfeldia incana, Portulaca oleracea, Reichardia picroides, Sonchus spp., Sinapis spp., and Taraxacum officinale.These species represented and still represent the core of the wild vegetable-based folk cuisine of the Gargano area.The collection of wild Ruta ssp.(probably as seasoning) and Sedum acre, which were mentioned by the Reverend Corrain, seem to have been abandoned in the study area.

Discussion
Although traditional small-scale agro-pastoral activities increasingly mixed in the last few decades with the development of tourism, and the lifestyle of peasants during the past several centuries no longer exists in the study area, the use of wild vegetables in folk cuisines is still very much alive.
The reasons for this permanence can be found in the resilience of a plant-based traditional cuisine, which retains a crucial cultural value in northern Apulia and in SE Italy in general.The fact that approximately one-third of the recorded wild vegetables are still very frequently used in folk cuisine shows how the preservation of traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) related to wild food plants is actually enormously linked to the cultural meaning of the entire domain of traditional foods.However, erosion of TEK related to wild vegetables is evident among the middle and youngest generations, and we question if this special environmental and culinary knowledge will be passed on to future generations of Gargano.
In the study area, local wild vegetables may have played an important role in the context of food security; the popularity of wild vegetables in the study area can also be traced in the historical socio-economic conditions of the rural classes in northern Apulia in the last few centuries.Gargano and the Foggia Province were (and partially still are) marked by large estates that occupy up to 80% of these territories, leaving until the recent past a multitude of "landless peasants" coping with dire economic conditions, which may have lead the them to shape their folk cuisine by using a significant diversity of wild food plants, instead of relying on cultivated vegetables.Additionally, the high diversity of taxa found in the study area could also be linked to environmental diversity, i.e., variety of landscapes and habitats in Gargano; this is demonstrated by the high variability of recorded plant uses: the use of Picris echioides dominates in San Nicandro, Apricena, San Severo, Foggia, and Vieste; the use of Reichardia picroides, Smyrnium olusatrum, and Smilax aspera is prevalent in Vico del Gargano; the culinary utilization of Tripolium pannonicum is restricted to Cagnano Varano, Sonchus maritimus to Lesina, Crithmum maritimum to Vieste, and Sarcocornia and Salicornia spp. to Cagnano, San Nicandro, and Carpino.
Ten species were not previously recorded as edible items in the south Italian ethnobotany, thus showing that within southern Italy the Gargano area seems to have a special propensity for the survival of bio-cultural plant food refugia [58].A few of these species are unknown or have been very rarely reported as part of the folk cuisines of South Europe: Allium pendulinum, Calepina irregularis, Scrophularia peregrina, Tripolium pannanicum, and Cerinthe major.
The unusual food uses of a few non-cultivated vegetables in the Gargano area, partially idiosyncratic with respect to southern Italian ethnobotany, can perhaps be explained as the result of not only the resilience of archaic uses which have disappeared elsewhere, but also the very complex historical vicissitudes that this area experienced over centuries.In particular, very diverse cultural influences and populations can be traced in Gargano: from the autochthonous, ancient Daunians, which probably originated from an Illyrian substrate, to successive Mediaeval Swabian, French, Turk, and Aragonese dominations.
The findings of this study indicate that the preservation of the bio-cultural intangible heritage of the local cuisine may need to go beyond the usual representations of the Mediterranean diet made by the media, which generally underline "only" common cultivated food plants, olive oil, home-made durum wheat pasta, and cheese.
Wild vegetables have represented and still represent a crucial, yet largely unknown, section of the Mediterranean diet, and the "dynamic" conservation of this food heritage requires strategies that carefully consider natural landscapes and resources as well as cultural customs, as wild plant folk knowledge systems are the result of a continuous interplay between these domains, which took place over centuries.
In other words, any bio-conservation strategy must consider the traditional culinary heritage of a territory, which may in turn foster strategies of sustainable gastronomy [59], promoting awareness for the need of both healthy environments and healthy diets.
In this way, the most uncommon wild vegetables noted in this study could represent a source of inspiration for both local restaurants and educational initiatives, as well as small-scale circuits of sustainable gathering and marketing of wild food plant ingredients.

Fig. 2
Fig. 2 Almond tree orchards in the Gargano, one of the most favorite spots for gathering wild vegetables in the winter and spring months.

Fig. 3
Fig. 3 One of the last Terrazzani and most knowledgeable informants in the present study, while selling wild vegetables in the city center of Foggia: Antonio Marzano (nickname: U' Cinese, "The Chinese").

Fig. 5
Fig.5 The symbol of the Apulian wild vegetable-based cuisine: omelette made with the bulbs of wild Leopoldia comosa.

Fig. 6 A
Fig. 6 A peculiar dish of the local cuisine: salad with young aerial parts of Cerinthe major and oranges.
Wild vegetables gathered and consumed in the study area.