More than 4,100 taxa, mostly at the species level, with some subspecies, hybrids and varieties.
Contained in 3,990 entries the compendium includes: We do not contend that all of the plants presented have commercial potential, but merely that nature’s food pantry is wide, deep and scarcely appreciated. The hope for this dictionary is to help draw attention to the potential of the tremendous diversity of food plants in the Americas by documenting their origins, uses and common names. In general, we demand only that our food satisfies our palates (which is easily done with fat, sugar and salt), curbs hunger and provides basic nutrients and calories. Despite recent food movements (e.g., “slow food” and “local food”), as a society, we ask few probing questions about the foods we eat, we know little about where and how they are grown and processed, we are largely incapable of identifying food plant origins, we are disconnected from the importance of the wild relatives of our favorite foods that help maintain healthy crops, and we wonder little about how many desirable edible plants we might be missing. Although it might be nice to have precise numbers relating to specific questions with well-defined criteria in addressing the question of “how many plants feed the world,” the real value in this discussion is the knowledge that the diets of most contemporary people are not as diverse as they could be and not as diverse as perhaps they should be for optimal nutrition, culinary interest, gastronomic enjoyment, food security and the overall sustainability of food systems. Elusive though the exact number of how many edible plants exist and how many dominate in providing human nutrition, it is easy to identify a list of the principle crops including: sugarcane, maize, rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, beets, cassava (manioc), tomatoes, bananas/plantains, citrus, barley, watermelons, sweet potatoes, onions, apples, grapes, cabbage and other leafy brassicas, cucumbers and gherkins, rapeseed (for oil), yams, sorghum, coconuts, eggplant, beans, cottonseed (for oil), mangoes, peanuts, sunflower seed, peppers (Capsicum), melons, peas, millet, pears, lettuce, squash, garlic, spinach and oats. For example, Myers (1984) reported that 7 crops provide 75% of human nutrition, Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen (1990) found that 103 species account for 90% of the global food supply, and Padulosi and Pignone (1997) documented only 150 commercialized species of edible plants around the world. Yet despite this vast endowment of edible plants, relatively few species have come to dominate human diets.
Perhaps 3,000 (Shand 2005) to 6,000 (Chweya and Mnzava 1997) taxa of plants are still harvested with some regularity for use as food or in food products worldwide. Of these edible species, estimates of the numbers that have been used as food by people somewhere at some time range from 7,000 (FAO n.d.) to 12,000 (Kunkel 1984).
Between 30,000 and 50,000 plants may be edible in some form to people (SEB n.d. It has been estimated that 369,000 species of flowering plants are known to science (RBG Kew 2016) and that the planet harbors somewhere between 400,000 (Gaston 2010) and perhaps 450,000 (Pimm and Joppa 2015) species of flowering plants total.
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