ABSTRACT
I had my first encounter with nondomesticated wild plant foods in 1986, while conducting research in Northeast Thailand for my mas ter’s degree in anthropology. I had originally planned a time-andlabor allocation study on vegetable gardening. I was amazed that I saw virtually nothing that I could recognize as a garden and won dered about the origin of the strange and various vegetables that I saw people eating in the small village of my study. As I followed women around in their daily activities, it then became clear: women gathered plant foods from every imaginable location, most often in association with other tasks, such as irrigating rice fields that held seedlings, on their way to cultivate their more distant cassava fields, or collecting a bit of this or that in the general village surroundings. For the total ob servations of food procurement/production activities, women spent 4.35 percent of their time on actual vegetable gardens but 31.88 per cent of their time on the collection of wild foods (collection of plants and small protein items such as frogs, freshwater crabs, and insects) (Leimar, 1987). Since this first encounter, my interest in and research on wild plant foods has continued and grown with field research in a number of regions in Thailand and the Philippines.
