Challenges in Promoting Wild Food Plants: Exploring Expectations and Sensory Evaluation of Foods
Biocultural conservation, expectation, novel foods, sensory analysis, wild food plants.
Wild edible plants (WEPs), when integrated into sustainable management strategies, hold tremendous potential for bolstering the income of local populations and enriching food systems. Nevertheless, within the urban landscape of Brazil, a majority of these plant resources remain largely unknown or underutilized. This study seeks to unveil the biases influencing the reception of a food product derived from WEPs. To achieve this, we conducted a twofold investigation involving both expectation analysis and sensory evaluation. In the initial experiment, we crafted juices and coconut-based candies using WEPs (cambuí and coco piaçava), along with conventional plants (coconut and acerola). The aim was to ascertain whether combining WEPs with conventional ingredients could elicit heightened consumer expectations and garner greater acceptance. Concurrently, we identified the socio-economic factors that underpin these expectations and levels of acceptance. In the subsequent test, we formulated juices using indigenous plants (cambuí and araçá), in parallel with conventional counterparts (acerola and goiaba). We explored whether terminological associations, wherein WEPs were linked to conventional plants through neutral suffixes (e.g., "jasmim"), and terminological cues denoting their forest origin (e.g., "mata"), would influence the levels of expectation and acceptance. Our findings unveil that culinary amalgamations act as a pivotal means to circumvent food neophobia, fostering a greater sense of familiarity among consumers towards these novel food sources. Consequently, this augments the prospects of mainstreaming WEPs into human diets. Generally, we observed that older individuals, males, those with higher educational levels and income, and individuals exhibiting lower tendencies of food neophobia, ascribe more favorable expectation and acceptance ratings to foods incorporating WEPs. Overall, while the terminological linkage to a forest origin did not exert a significant influence on expectations and acceptance, it did yield a discernible effect on taste expectations among the neophobic demographic.