Of the 7.8 billion of us on the planet today, just a few thousand people continue to source most of their calories from the wild. Colonialism has historically played its part in this decline, and other forces are at work today. The farms, plantations and industries that feed most of us are destroying the habitats of many traditional societies. Manufactured and branded products from the industrialized world make it into the furthest reaches of the Amazon forest and the African savannah, in a form of neocolonialism through food. If the last of the hunter-gatherers ceased to exist — which could happen within our lifetimes — the world would lose valuable knowledge amassed over countless generations, and a link to the way of life that formed us. It would be a tragic end to a 2-million-year-long story.

Wild foods are also becoming endangered at a time when we are struggling to understand what our diets should look like. We look to incomplete science for answers but ignore lessons already learned. Although wild foods provide less than 1 percent of all of the calories consumed around the world today, they account for a much higher proportion of nutrients. Among hunter-gatherers such as the Hadza, rates of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and cancer are so low that cases are hard to find. This is partly because of the rich diversity of foods they eat and the high levels of fiber they consume (five times more than people in the industrialized world). Bitterness and sourness, both associated with wild foods, are often signals of health-giving properties. In the Peruvian Amazon, people gather camu camu (Myrciaria dubia), a fruit which resembles a cherry and contains 20 times more vitamin C than an orange.

The foods we are about to meet in this part all help to explain why wild foods matter. The answers to the mess we’re in, environmentally and physically, will not, of course, include a return to the wild, but they can be informed by the knowledge that has carried our species this far, over millennia. We might not be able to imitate the hunter-gatherers that remain, but we can and should be inspired by the people who continue to venture into the wild.

Read the full article about wild foods by Dan Saladino at GreenBiz .