Your Poison in My Pie—the Use of Potato Emphasis

Authors: Rainer W Bussmann Narel Y Paniagua Zambrana Shalva Sikharulidze Zaal Kikvidze David Kikodze David Tchelidze Manana Khutsishvili Ketevan Batsatsashvili Robbie E Hart Andrea Pieroni

Publish Date: 2016/12/16

Volume: 70, Issue: 4, Pages: 431-437

PDF Link

Abstract

This paper reports on a subset of data of two independent ethnobotanical studies in Georgia and Albania/Macedonia As part of the broader ethnobotanical interviews participants were asked about their use of plants in general When discussing the interviews of both regions the authors found an interesting shared use of potato Solanum tuberosum L leaves in parts of both study regions that had never been reported before and decided to combine their data in this paper While potatoes are widely grown for regular food purposes use of the tubers at all researched altitudes from 500 to 2335 m in both regions potato leaves are normally regarded as toxic Turner and von Aderkas 2009 We hypothesized that using them as food would be a custom of isolated high altitude villages where fresh herbs would be rare especially after the long winter and that second this custom would have been discontinued with increasing accessibility of the region after the construction of

Keywords: