(Re)encontrando e (re)conhecendo a diversidade alimentar alternativa da flora camponesa em Lavras – MG

Abstract

Plants walk co-evolutionarily with the cultures of traditional societies, especially food plants. However, modernity structured by the paradigms of food empires does not recognize and devalue the knowledge and practices of the rich lifestyles that have been developed over the generations, placing peoples, knowledge and ecosystems in a state of vulnerability. Our dishes based on increasingly homogeneous, monotonous and standardized foods, reflect this logic. Unconventional edible plants demonstrate the wide food diversity that has been devalued, suppressed and neglected. In this sense, the present work aimed at recovering, recognizing and recording the knowledge stored by peasants of Lavras on the PANCs, as well as to identify some of the factors that vulnerabilize these knowledge and spices of plants. The work was conducted through participant observation, semi-structured interview and guided tour. Six peasants were interviewed, and 74 species were found distributed in 40 families and 61 genera. The families Myrtaceae and Asteraceae presented greater prominence. The peasants showed a remarkable wealth of knowledge about these food plants, however, it was observed that some factors may compromise the transmission of these knowledge and decrease the presence of these species in the dishes and ecosystems of the properties.