Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine / Edition 1

by Andrea Pieroni, Lisa Price

Overview

Discover neglected wild food sources—that can also be used as medicine!

The long-standing notion of "food as medicine, medicine as food," can be traced back to Hippocrates. Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine is a global overview of wild and semi-domesticated foods and their use as medicine in traditional societies. Important cultural information, along with extensive case studies, provides a clear, authoritative look at the many neglected food sources still being used around the world today. This book bridges the scientific disciplines of medicine, food science, human ecology, and environmental sciences with their ethno-scientific counterparts of ethnobotany, ethnoecology, and ethnomedicine to provide a valuable multidisciplinary resource for education and instruction.

Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine presents respected researchers’ in-depth case studies on foods different cultures use as medicines and as remedies for nutritional deficiencies in diet. Comparisons of living conditions in different geographic areas as well as differences in diet and medicines are thoroughly discussed and empirically evaluated to provide scientific evidence of the many uses of these traditional foods as medicine and as functional foods. The case studies focus on the uses of plants, seaweed, mushrooms, and fish within their cultural contexts while showing the dietary and medical importance of these foods. The book provides comprehensive tables, extensive references, useful photographs, and helpful illustrations to provide clear scientific support as well as opportunities for further thought and study.

Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine explores the ethnobiology of:

• Tibet—antioxidants as mediators of high-altitude nutritional physiology
  
• Northeast Thailand—"wild" food plant gathering
  
• Southern Italy—the consumption of wild plants by Albanians and Italians
  
• Northern Spain—medicinal digestive beverages
  
• United States—medicinal herb quality
  
• Commonwealth of Dominica—humoral medicine and food
  
• Cuba—promoting health through medicinal foods
  
• Brazil—medicinal uses of specific fishes
  
• Brazil—plants from the Amazon and Atlantic Forest
  
• Bolivian Andes—traditional food medicines
  
• New Patagonia—gathering of wild plant foods with medicinal uses
  
• Western Kenya—uses of traditional herbs among the Luo people
  
• South Cameroon—ethnomycology in Africa
  
• Morocco—food medicine and ethnopharmacology
  
  

Eating and Healing: Traditional Food As Medicine is an essential research guide and educational text about food and medicine in traditional societies for educators, students from undergraduate through graduate levels, botanists, and research specialists in nutrition and food science, anthropology, agriculture, ethnoecology, ethnobotany, and ethnobiology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560229834
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/07/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	430
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andrea Pieroni, PhD, is an ethnobotanist/pharmacognosist and Lecturer in Pharmacognosy at the School of Pharmacy of the University of Bradford, United Kingdom. He is also part-time associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Currently he is the scientific coordinator of a European Union-funded research project dealing with a circumMediterranean ethnobotanical study on wild and neglected plants for food and medicine. Lisa Leimar Price, PhD, is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She has been a Rockefeller Fellow for Social Scientists in Agriculture, a Ford Foundation Fellow, and a Fulbright Fellow. Prior to joining Wageningen University, she was a senior scientist at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Table of Contents

Introduction (Andrea Pieroni and Lisa Leimar Price) Asia Europe North America The Caribbean South America Africa Chapter 1. Edible Wild Plants As Food and As Medicine: Reflections on Thirty Years of Fieldwork (Louis E. Grivetti) Introduction Genesis Three Decades of Ethnobotanical Research Reflections and Potential Research Areas Coda Chapter 2. Tibetan Foods and Medicines: Antioxidants As Mediators of High-Altitude Nutritional Physiology (Patrick L. Owen) Introduction Adaptations to Altitude Oxidative Stress and Antioxidants Tibetan High-Altitude Food Systems Tibetan Medicine Summary Chapter 3. Wild Food Plants in Farming Environments with Special Reference to Northeast Thailand, Food As Function and Medicinal, and Social Roles of Women (Lisa Leimar Price) Introduction Wild Plant Foods in the Farming Environment Women's Roles, Women's Work, and Women's Knowledge Consumption and Nutrition Overlaps: Medicinal and Functional Food Medicinal and Functional Food Wild Plants of Northeast Thailand Gathered Food Plants of Northeast Thailand with Medicinal Value Investigations of Wild Plant Foods As Functional/Medicinal Foods in Thailand Multiple Use Value, Rarity, and Privatization Conclusions Chapter 4. Functional Foods or Food Medicines? On the Consumption of Wild Plants Among Albanians and Southern Italians in Lucania

What People are Saying About This

Nina L. Etkin PhD

Nina L. Etkin, PhD, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Hawaii
THIS IMPORTANT VOLUME showcases the convergence of medicinal and culinary practices. Scholars as well as popular consumers of food knowledge will be nourished by the insights they gain from this book. Its publication coincides with a growing interest in the West regarding the healthful qualities of foods, among both the scientific and lay communities. The research findings of the contributors represent various disciplinary perspectives and illustrate the rich diversity of cultural constructions and social negotiations of foods and medicines in traditional populations from all continents. Several contributors cast their work in the frame of ethnopharmacology by linking medical ethnography to the biology of therapeutic action. Others emphasize the importance of wild food sin traditional pharmacopoeias and diets, and link the erosion of that knowledge to problems of diminished biodiversity in the modern era. A minor but important theme illustrates the gendered nature of botanical knowledge as reflected in asymmetrical use patterns of certain plants. Issues of globalization are apparent as well in discussions of sourcing for the contemporary, primarily Western, nutraceutical and herbal products industry.

Timothy Johns PhD

Timothy Johns, PhD, Professor of Human Nutrition, McGill University
In drawing on current research and methodologies at the interface between the biological and social sciences, THE AUTHORS OFFER EXCITING NEW INSIGHTS into an under-explored theme in the ethnobotanical literature, and provide a timely focus of theoretical and practical importance linking human health the conservation and use of biodiversity. The fact that traditional systems, once lost, are hard to recreate underlines the imperative for the kind of documentation, compilation, and dissemination of eroding knowledge of biocultural diversity represented by this book.

Editorial Reviews

In the specialized fields of ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, and ethnomedicine, food and medicine have traditionally been considered separate realms of study. Recently, the two have begun to be studied in conjunction, as this book demonstrates. Editors Pieroni (pharmacognosy, Univ. of Bradford, U.K.) and Price (sociology of consumers and households, Wageningen Univ., the Netherlands) have compiled primary research from 26 contributors on wild and semidomesticated foods and their use as medicine in traditional or indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia, North and South America, Europe, and the Caribbean (the South Pacific/Australia and Arctic regions are not represented). Each chapter is, in essence, a scientific paper documenting the overlap of medicine and food in one region (e.g., northern Spain, New Patagonia). Although the book's scope is broad, each paper is quite specific-readers should not anticipate an overview of the field. Pieroni and Price have produced what would be an excellent accompaniment to a course textbook in applicable university settings. Recommended for academic libraries.-Andy Wickens, King Cty. Lib. Syst., Seattle Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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