Plantas silvestres comestibles. Parte 1

Human beings have fed on wild plants since the beginning of time. Harvesting has accompanied us as a species, even after the discovery of agriculture and has endured in the rural world to this day, at the hands of older people and their popular wisdom. In today's program we visit the El Encín farm, in Alcalá de Henares, where one of the centers of the Madrid Institute of Rural, Agrarian and Food Research and Development is located. Several researchers are waiting for us there to collect some of them and explain their properties. The collection of this traditional knowledge relating to edible wild plants is very important because most of it is being lost and not passed on to future generations.

And yet, we consider this knowledge to be important, since it can still be of great interest in the future for various reasons, but one of them is... survival reasons, for cases of survival in the field due to issues such as wars or famines, which although we now think that all this is far away from us, it has been possible to verify in... for example, in the Balkan war not so many years ago, how the use of edible wild plants has been of great importance to be able to survive in extreme conditions and lack of food. On the other hand, these plants may be of great interest to... provide greater diversity to our diet, because although they are species that have been traditionally consumed, for most of us, they result... new species, new flavors, new textures... and also These species can be and have been incorporated, effectively, in some haute cuisine restaurants, as is the case, for example, of a restaurant that is among the first in the world, the Noma in Copenhagen, which includes a large quantity among its menus. of wild edible plants.

To collect wild edible plants you must first know which plants you want to pick. Many times, in a vegetative state, it is difficult to recognize them, because they are the leaves that grow from below and there are many that are very similar. You also have to know what time is the best to collect it and where the plants live, in other words, it is important knowledge. You have to be careful, because there are some edible wild plants that are very similar to toxic plants, for example, wild chard, the leaves of wild chard look like the leaves of the mandrake.

Mandrake is a very, very toxic plant, which was used by witches in the Middle Ages to make witches' ointment and to intoxicate and poison. The same thing happens, for example, with... parsley can be confused with hemlock, which is also a very toxic plant, when the hemlock is small. Furthermore, you have to know well... and you have to see where the plants are collected, because... right now, in the countryside there are many toxins, there are many insecticides, many insecticides, fungicides, pesticides are used... the farmland is full of chemical fertilizers, in general, agrochemicals, and in those places where the lands are treated, wild edible plants should not be collected, the same happens on the edges of the roads.

Roadsides have toxic substances and edible plants should not be collected as well. Well, look, here I present to you wild asparagus, which is this plant that you see around here with... which is quite unmistakable, there is no problem that it can be confused with other poisonous plants. It is a plant that grows elongated stems and... the leaves prick a little, unlike cultivated asparagus which is softer and does not prick. This plant, the scientific name is "asparagus acutifolius", there are several wild species that can be found in Spain, and "asparagus" means "tender shoot", which is what we are going to look for, asparagus.

Many people say that to collect asparagus you have to... you have to develop the eye to learn how to search, because many times they are difficult to find, because they mix with the rest of the vegetation and cannot be distinguished well. Maybe you have it in front of you and you don't realize it's there. So, for example, we have to look for where… where the stems of the plant, of the asparagus, emerge. Although the plant is here, we have to follow it... and look for where it originates and comes out of the ground, which in this case would be here.

Well, we were lucky and we found an asparagus, which is here. This asparagus, if we didn't uproot it this year, it would become another thorny bush as you see here, another of these stems. And now that it is tender, and it is much juicier and more tender, it is very different from cultivated asparagus in that the flavor is much more intense and totally different, and... nothing, to collect it, once we have located it, like the The bottom part is more fibrous, what we have to do is look for the point where... the stem is easily cut because it clicks easily, so, we go along the stem like this, this part is more fibrous, and here we see that It's more tender... and over here... we already have our wild asparagus.

Well, here you have the bunch of asparagus that we have collected on this walk, as you can see there are some a little fatter and others thinner, and today we haven't had much luck either, other times we can get them a little fatter than these... but, well, Well this is today's harvest. María Molina researched at IMIDRA and her thesis was co-supervised by the professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Manuel Pardo de Santayana. Once we had collected all the popular knowledge about these plants, we wanted to do a study to collect more concrete data on what interest edible wild plants had as a food resource.

On the one hand, we investigated the nutritional properties of... some of the most consumed and popularly valued plants and, on the other hand, we were doing production studies to know the abundance and quantity of edible matter, already discarding the part that cannot be collect, what are the leaves or the harvestable part of each plant... well, what quantity did it have and... if at the level of quantity it was an interesting and abundant resource. We were doing it in several towns and for several years these studies... and, well, for example, in the field of production the most striking results are... on the one hand, that they are very abundant plants and that, in general, they are easily available, they are close to towns and areas managed by man, and although they are less productive than cultivated plants, it is also an important resource in terms of quantity and, curiously, many of the plants that are most valued, such as cardillos, collarejas or asparagus, curiously, are the ones that produce the least, the ones that require the most search and movement to get them, and the fact that they also require effort to find them also gives them a certain value.

Another of the wild plants... that consume their asparagus, is the hop plant, which is a climbing plant characteristic of many of our gallery forests, the forests that grow next to rivers. This is a climbing plant that can climb up to eight, even ten meters, and what we use as edible are the asparagus, which are... the tender shoots, the final part, in which the leaves have not yet fully developed. , and we cut them... in this way, and, well, here we have a bunch, they are normally consumed cooked, like almost all asparagus, although they can also be consumed raw and have a quite curious taste.

This same plant is the... everyone will know, it is the hop plant that, from its female flowers, the female efflorescences, lupulin is obtained, which is what beer is flavored with, which, in addition to serving as a flavoring and give it... the characteristic bitter flavor of beer, it also serves as its stabilizer. Well, and here we have a bunch already collected... with the asparagus "hops asparagus de canamiza", also called in some places. In one of the works of this group of researchers, the nutritional properties of wild plants were also studied. These analyzes were carried out by the team of María de Cortes, professor of Nutrition and Bromatology at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Complutense University of Madrid.

They are plants... in general, rich in vitamins, minerals, fiber... also in the proportion of fats and omega 3 fatty acids and unsaturated fats, because they are very interesting, and unlike cultivated plants, which are more comfortable and Everything is more padded, they are cared for more, all the land and all the water and all the resources they need, these plants, having to find a life on their own, because they have to compete with the surrounding plants, in many cases , accumulate more of these bioactive substances, because the proportion of relative water is lower. Most of this traditional knowledge about edible wild plants, and wild plants in general, has been lost due to lack of use and changing customs.

For example, in the case of wild edible plants, a task that was traditionally done was weeding crop fields, cereal fields, for example, and weeds that grew among wheat, for example, were They were collected, removed like weeds, but many of them were used... either to consume them as wild vegetables, or to feed them to livestock. As currently, weeding is done using chemical methods, with herbicides, or other methods with tractors, this has been lost, for example, a large part of this source of these foods has been lost. On the other hand, there were also many plants that were consumed by children, as sweets, when they returned or went to school or went out to do some work in the field, and, well, nowadays, as we all know , children use other types of very different sweets, probably much worse from a health point of view, with a large amount of sugars, and all these natural sweets have been abandoned.

One of the most consumed wild vegetables in most of the Spanish regions is cardillo. It is a species of the compound family... thorny, as can be seen, the part that is used is the rosette of basal leaves, which to collect it is necessary to tear it from the roots with a hoe, so well... we use the hoe until We cut the root and then take the rosette of leaves and what is actually consumed is the part of the nerve of the leaf, which is usually called stalk, and it must be peeled, which means removing the thorny area. , the green part of the leaf, we are left with only the nerve.

So... simply with the fingers, while holding the root part with the left hand, with the fingers of the other hand we peel... when we already have the stalks of the cardillo peeled, this is chopped and, normally, it is a vegetable that it consumes... although it could be consumed raw and it does not have a bad taste, but the most common thing is to cook it, first it is chopped, boiled well until it is soft and then, later, usually... it is usually prepared sautéed with garlic, a little egg, or sometimes it is also very delicious battered and fried, in the style we make anchovies.

Traditional knowledge that has been maintained for generations... there is historical data that documents this knowledge... already from Roman times, of course, of course. And then, fundamentally, also many medieval writings, particularly the writings of the Arabs. And then, later, there are very precious documents on the use of plants already in the 19th century, and, finally, of course, in the 20th. The continuity between them is limited, in some cases... mint, for example, has a similar use over time, but... other things like reeds, for example, or other things like that, or even thistle itself, have It has been changing its use, and one of them has been edible.

To harvest garlic leeks you need to use a hoe... because... otherwise, normally, it is difficult... the leek is broken and we don't pluck it from the base, so, with a hoe, we already have the leeks here. We shake off a little dirt from them... and I'm going to peel one off for you, so you can see how good they look. We remove the roots... and, well, just like a leek. We remove the roots and peel a little bit of the... the outer leaves, which are covered in dirt... and you can see how juicy it looks. It has a very particular and very intense aroma.

And here they are. These are the leek garlic that, as you see, I have had a better harvest than the asparagus, and... well, they are popularly called leek garlic because... as you see, it is a kind of mix between a garlic and a leek. It is the wild ancestor of the cultivated leek, but unlike this one it does have a head at the end of... at the lower end, and... then, let's say that the bottom part looks like a garlic, although it has no teeth, it is not divided into teeth, and the upper part would be like a leek, although finer.

Then, also, it is very peculiar to differentiate... apart from the smell, which is very easy to differentiate for that reason, it is because it has some bulblets... between the main bulb, along with the roots, which are like the little ones, which are useful for breed. And if you want, we cut more garlic and leeks. Although there are tens of thousands of species of plants that are edible and that throughout history about 7,000 have been cultivated and used as food, today, 90% of our food comes from about 17 species. , of which, cereals (wheat, rice, corn) constitute the largest percentage. This is called... loss of plant diversity infeeding.

The domestication process of a wild plant that takes place over... probably thousands of years, is a microevolution directed by artificial selection that, in many cases, is a voluntary selection of certain characters that interest us the most, In general, we seek... to select plants that have... a larger size of organs, larger fruits, leaves... in the case of plants that we grow for their leaves, well... the greater development of the leaves. The fact is that in addition to this voluntary selection, there is also another selection of other characters that accompany those others that interest us, an involuntary selection, as happens in the case of cereals that... by collecting those ears that do not They decompose, well... we are unintentionally selecting those wheats whose ears do not decompose.

And, well, all these changes that occur over probably thousands of years of evolution, most cultivated species are, at most, eight or ten thousand years old. And all these changes mean that, for many of these species, it is almost impossible or very difficult to know which wild progenitor they come from, due to this amount of changes that have occurred in these species, and that many of them are already species that They can only be produced artificially. They do not have the ability to reproduce naturally. In the bibliography on the subject you can find the Spanish Inventory of Traditional Knowledge related to Biodiversity, a record of traditional knowledge about plants and animals, and even about geology.

The inventory is a big project, a national scale project. To carry it out we have agreed on very different institutions, around 15 universities, around 20 research groups, both in any part of Spain, also, naturally, in the Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, Galicia, Catalonia, Castilla, Asturias, Cantabria, Andalusia... there, UNED, clearly, we are collaborating with this joint project, we have great communication between us. It arose from a first congress that we held in Albacete, precisely, with the support of the associated center of the UNED of Albacete. From there we developed a common work methodology. The distribution of the work has always corresponded, clearly, let's say, to the areas in which we are located, in Catalonia they have done the work on different areas in Catalonia, also in Valencia and so on.

But once the data has been collected, there is a common task of homogenization so that the information is collected in searchable files, accompanied by very detailed indexes that allow the information to be found easily and, on the other hand, with the desire that it be as widely disseminated as possible. all the citizens. This work can be downloaded or purchased from the website of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Food and Environment. Three more volumes will be released in June.