Traditional food and land-use systems are critical to contemporary efforts to advance sustainability, climate resilience and food security. Yet the traditional ecological knowledge that underpins these systems is rapidly disappearing, particularly across much of the African Sahel, where interconnected challenges are reshaping local livelihoods and disrupting traditional practices.

A key example of this are the remarkable edible wild grass harvests which featured prominently in 19th- and 20th-century ethnographic accounts and have since largely disappeared from local food systems. Early explorers regularly described extensive market economies and trade networks based on a diverse array of wild grasses, many of which are also commonly identified in Sahelian and Saharan archaeological sites.

While prolonged management of some of these species led to the domestication of the African cereals during the mid- to late-Holocene, food producers continued to protect, manage and harvest stands of wild grasses until relatively recently. Yet, as Jack Harlan noted in the 1980s, these remarkable systems seem “to have escaped the notice of anthropologists” and, by extension, ethnobotanists. Today, with the transformation of food systems, harvesting of edible wild grasses is often linked to periods of acute food insecurity. With these remarkable systems and associated traditional ecological knowledge at risk of being lost entirely, this paper presents a new ethnobotanical project aimed at documenting and conserving them. Building on Harlan’s pioneering research, this project seeks to evaluate the past and continuing role of edible wild grasses in Sahelian and Saharan food systems.