Verdure spontanee per l'alimentazione e la salute. Guida alla raccolta, al riconoscimento e alla preparazione

Wild herbs since time immemorial and even before the birth of agriculture have been, and in many countries still are, the travelling companions of human nutrition and human health itself. Genesis not by chance associates man's condemnation to draw food from the soil with pain every day of his life with having to eat field grass. The Romans distinguished their world, that of the civilisation of the Horatian Italus hortus, from that of the “barbarians” incapable of cultivating the land and bound to hunting and gathering wild herbs and fruits (agrestia poma). The domestication and continuous selection of a very limited number of “useful” species on which human nutrition is based, cereals and legumes above all others was, and remains ever since, the trait that distinguishes agriculture from the utilisation of spontaneous flora, which has been relegated to competing, useless if not harmful and, therefore, pest species. Two worlds so separate that even in markets, herbivorous plants have always been given the most humble and remote place.