Wild Food Plant Knowledge and Agroecosystem Resilience Across the Urban–Rural Gradient in Northern Italy

Abstract

Peri-urban belts are where most metropolitan residents actually meet farmland, and where urban food policy and agroecological transition physically overlap. They are also where wild food plants (WFPs) grow: on verges, ditch bank, and field margins, the interstitial biodiversity that complements cultivated crops. We ask whether the knowledge that makes those plants usable survives peri-urbanisation, and whether it can serve as a proxy for the resilience of the surrounding agroecosystem. Two Northern Italian landscapes with comparable perennial monoculture but opposite positions on the urban–rural gradient were compared through a diachronic design: the peri-urban lowland of the Trevigiano (Veneto), inside the dispersed-city fabric of the Venice–Padua–Treviso region and under rapid Prosecco expansion, and the Langhe (Piedmont), a UNESCO-listed hill district of low settlement density whose agriculture is nonetheless fully industrialised around wine grapes, hazelnuts, and tourism. Interviews with 74 informants were conducted through complementary designs: a cohort-structured approach in the Trevigiano and actor-diversified and diachronic interviews in the Langhe, recorded 13 folk food taxa in the Trevigiano against 43 in the Langhe (Jaccard 0.19). The peri-urban repertoire is thin and mostly inert: recognition survives while practice does not, with gaps of up to 86 percentage points between the two, and only Humulus lupulus, anchored in ritual, dialect, and a commercial product, is transmitted intact. The non-peri-urban repertoire is broader and still mobile, relocated by younger foragers onto unmanaged refugia and partly professionalised. The proxy, however, has a precondition. WFP knowledge indexes a healthy agroecosystem only where the land is clean enough to gather from, and the Trevigiano is not: informants avoid treated margins. The one EU instrument that would have banned pesticides in public green areas was withdrawn in 2024. We conclude that peri-urban planning should treat edges, unmanaged interstitial land, and treatment transparency as food-system infrastructure, and propose paired habitat and knowledge indicators for peri-urban agroecological assessment.