FOOD PLANTS

FOOD PLANTS, the wild and cultivated plants, used or fit for human consumption. In the RB, cereals, legumes, melons, vegetables, oilseeds, and fruits are widely consumed. According to the nature of their use, wild F.p. fall under the following classifications: beverage plants (berry plants, marjoram, goatweed, wild strawberry, blooming sally, mint, etc), vegetable plants (about 50 species, young leaves of Siberian hogweed, nettle, onion, goutweed, sorrel, etc), fruit plants (cockspur, cherry, snowball, bird cherry, etc), and spicy plants (species of sage, stone-basil, thyme Marschall, field caraway, etc). According to their chemical composition, F.p. can be classified in the following groups: oleiferous (wild hemp, mustard, orange agaric, avellan fruits), amyliferous (common bulrush, burdock, reed subterranean stem, species of macereed, etc; seeds of muchweed, barn grass, yellow-foxtail grass, common manna grass, etc), essential-oil-bearing (bush basil, nepeta, melissa, etc), and sugar- and inulin-bearing (juices of birch and maple, berries of common juniper, subterranean stems of horseheal, burdock, chiccory). More than 30 species of F.p. (bog cranberry, wild nodding onion, etc, and relict species of Siberian caltrop, Kurilian shrubby tea, twisted-leaf onion, endemic species of Thymus cimicinus, Glycyrrhiza Korshinskyi) are included in The Red List of the RB.