Urban Forage

Urban Forage

Subject : Environment

Section: Ecosystem

Context: Urban foraging is gaining prominence as a means to interact with urban green spaces, in addition to being crucial in ensuring nutritional security for underserved communities.

Urban Foraging:

• Urban foraging is the practice of identifying and collecting the wild foods (tree nuts, plant roots, mushrooms, and even flowers) growing freely around your city.
• Urban foraging, which is the harvesting of plants, fruits, fungi, herbs and other produce, from formal and informal urban greenspaces such as parks, lakes, unused lands, roadsides and other public areas.
• As the interaction between people and nature in cities has increasingly come into focus, foraging becomes one of the ways to understand these transactions.
• Significance
  • These are free food sources, foraging is an affordable way to add greens to their diets.
  • Foraged foods also provide nutritional benefits for the communities.
  • Climate-resilient foods, having the ability to grow with minimal inputs, uncultivated foods provide a viable answer for challenging conditions like drought, heat and floods.
  • Foraging can bring larger changes to urban commons, such as ensuring cleanliness, less use of pesticides in parks and keeping a check on the overall water quality.