Many plants are eaten as wild vegetables in China. Wild vegetables have the characteristics of unique flavor, natural pollution-free, safety, no pesticide residue, high nutritional value and homology of medicine and food. They not only cultivate cultivated vegetables, but also have incomparable nutritional value, medicinal efficacy and health care function. Wild vegetables can be used as fresh vegetables for raw cold salad, stir-fry and stir-fry, soup side dishes, dried vegetables, sauerkraut, pickles and so on.
Distribution area
Wild vegetables are widely distributed in China, with large reserves, from northeast, northwest and north China to southwest Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, and from the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River to south China. For example, wild day lily is widely distributed in Northeast China, North China and Inner Mongolia, and Adenophora adenophora is also distributed in forest areas and grasslands. Podophyllum fern and Aralia elata are common in forests in Northeast China, North China and Northwest China. Pteridium aquilinum, Microvegetables and Cimicifuga are widely distributed in China. According to incomplete statistics, there are more than 200 kinds of common wild vegetables distributed in China, and the general trend is more in the south and less in the north, which is consistent with the richness of plant resources. ?
Early humans mainly relied on collecting natural wild plants, such as wild vegetables, fruits, roots, etc., accompanied by fishing and hunting activities. Because fishing and hunting do not always get stable means of subsistence, collection occupies a more important position. "In ancient times, there were many animals and few people, so people lived in nests to escape, picking oak chestnuts during the day and living in civil engineering at dusk, so people with nests were said." In order to improve labor efficiency, the initial natural division of labor appeared. Men are mainly engaged in fishing and hunting, while women are mainly engaged in gathering. In the long-term collection activities, the ancestors discovered the natural mystery of plants from seed growth to germination, flowering and fruiting, and tried to plant them artificially around their homes, resulting in primitive agriculture. But wild vegetables are still a common food in human life.
For a long time, China people have a special feeling for wild vegetables. "The Book of Songs Guanju" begins: "Staggered leeks flow around" is still a wild vegetable. There are a lot of descriptions of wild vegetables in The Book of Songs and Erya, and "wild vegetables" were endowed with good intentions by the ancients. From a biological point of view, the word "wild vegetables" is a concept relative to artificially cultivated and domesticated vegetables. After all, the line between edible and inedible plants is very blurred. Wild vegetables, as a daily supplementary food, have long attracted the attention of the ancients. However, the monograph on systematic introduction of wild vegetables did not rise until the Ming Dynasty. In the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Kui was worried that people would have no food to eat in famine years, so he presided over the compilation of "Herb for Saving Wild Grass", which was the first monograph in ancient China to systematically introduce wild vegetables, and made a detailed introduction to the types, edible parts and processing methods of wild vegetables. Since then, wild vegetables, as a kind of famine relief food, have been taken as special research objects by many scholars. Since then, all previous dynasties have regarded it as a disaster relief object and compiled a large number of such books. ? [5] Tu Benjun's Notes on Wild Vegetables in Ming Dynasty, Wang Pan's Recipe of Wild Vegetables in Ming Dynasty and Gu Jingxing's Zan on Wild Vegetables in Qing Dynasty described the characters and eating methods of 44 kinds of wild vegetables.