DOI: 10.5061/dryad.7m0cfxpzq
title: Fruits of the city: The nature, nurture and future of urban foraging

description: Urban foraging is a global informal phenomenon that has been investigated
 in the Global North more than other parts of the world. Characterising the
 nature of urban foraging in the Global South is imperative given the rapid
 urbanisation and sustainable development priorities in the region. In this
 study, we interviewed 80 urban foragers in four cities in the eastern
 coastal region of South Africa, with an aim to understand the nature of
 urban foraging in a developing nation context. We asked foragers about
 their initiation to and motivations for foraging, their logistics, yields,
 and associated activities, descriptions of their foraging grounds, and if
 and how they had changed, and what they envisage as an ideal future for
 foraging. Many foragers started foraging in their childhood, in
 the company of friends and family, and, as in the Global North, regarded
 it as a cultural and recreational activity. Foraging was mostly done
 within a five-kilometre radius of home, on a weekly or fortnightly basis,
 and very few foragers processed or sold their foraged
 products. Unlike the Global North, formal green spaces were not
 foraged in and were perceived to be poorly provisioned in urban planning.
 Forests and roadsides were equally used by the foragers, and very few had
 been discouraged from foraging. Most foragers were enthusiastic about the
 possibility of more people foraging, having designated spaces for
 foraging, and foraging-based businesses such as processed products and
 ecotourism. We recommend that policymakers and land managers recognise and
 encourage foraging as a potentially sustainable use for stewardship of
 urban green spaces. To this end, we list the main wild edible fruit
 species used by foragers in the area, which could be planted in public
 spaces. We also suggest harnessing foragers’ knowledge of useful
 species and spaces to develop green spaces and foraging-based supply
 chains. 
description: Site
 selection The study area is the Indian Ocean Coastal Belt
 (IOCB), a relatively small biome with high human population density and
 high biodiversity (Mucina and Rutherford 2006). The study area is
 experiencing rapid changes in land cover and land use (Jewitt et al.
 2015), and urban foraging is common in this area (Sardeshpande and
 Shackleton 2020a). Within the IOCB are 10 urban municipalities, and
 Durban, a metropolitan municipality (Municipalities of South Africa 2018).
 The mean population in these municipalities is 492,720 people, with a
 range of about 120,000 people in KwaMbonambi, and about 3.4 million people
 in Durban (StatsSA 2016). Each of these municipalities was surveyed
 (including formal residential areas, informal settlements, and
 marketplaces) for foragers on at least one day between October and
 November 2018. Municipalities where one day of surveying yielded more than
 three respondents were selected for continued surveying until 20 forager
 interviews were collected. Interviews and municipalities where one day of
 surveying yielded no more than three respondents were discarded. Thus, a
 total of 80 forager respondents were interviewed in four cities (mean
 20±1.6). Photographs of some of the sites where
 foraging occurs can be found in Supplementary
 Materials. Data collection
 Adult individuals were
 opportunistically approached at their doorstep to enquire about their
 foraging activities if any. No prior criteria (position in household, age,
 gender) were used to select respondents. One consenting adult per
 household who foraged was interviewed individually, about their foraging
 practices and preferences based on the research questions (Appendix 1).
 Key questions included their household composition (number of adult,
 child, employed, and foraging members), their introduction to and company
 while foraging, the frequency of and time spent foraging, the various
 items foraged and activities undertaken alongside foraging, descriptions
 of the foraging grounds, and their normative views on the future of
 foraging, including local enterprises centred on foraging, with a specific
 focus on wild edible fruits. A booklet of 51 common wild edible fruit
 species was used to facilitate identification by respondents with the help
 of pictures of fruits, flowers, leaves, and morphometrics and local names
 (Sardeshpande and Shackleton 2020a, Supplementary Materials). The
 semi-structured interviews were conducted in English by MS, or in isiZulu
 with the help of a field assistant interpreter, according to the
 respondents’ preference. All interviews were recorded as
 audio files with verbal consent from the respondents, and transcribed by
 MS at a later stage. This study was approved by the Rhodes University
 ethics committee (Application No. ES17/46). As per the ethics approval,
 respondents were provided with a printed and verbal brief description of
 the study, verbal consent was obtained from each respondent, and the data
 were anonymized. Verbal consent was obtained in keeping with the verbal
 recording format of data collection, and to overcome barriers related to
 illiteracy and anonymity. Data analysis
 Data were entered into MS
 Excel for analyses, namely descriptive statistics, and manual coding based
 on emergent themes along the five lines of investigation, i.e., the
 research questions. Coding was done by MS using an inductive approach, and
 framework and thematic analysis based on the research questions (e.g.
 Braun and Clarke 2019, Robinson et al. 2019). Data were anonymised, and
 for the purpose of reporting, respondents were identified by alphanumeric
 representations of their municipality, neighbourhood, and interview
 number; for example, the third respondent from the neighbourhood of Msinsi
 in Mtubatuba would be MTMS3. Kruskal-Wallis anovas were used to test for
 between-site differences for: distances traveled, frequency of, time
 spent, and quantity and number of wild edible fruit species collected
 when, foraging. Mann-Whitney U tests were applied to investigate
 differences between genders for the same variables. Spearman rank
 correlations were performed to test for relationships between household
 composition and the aforementioned variables. Inferential statistics were
 performed in R 3.2.3 (R Core Team 2015).