At the Hatiya weekly market in Dumka district, Jharkhand, Rupa Soren, 52, sits cross-legged on the bare ground, a spread of dark leafy greens arranged before her on a worn cloth. She holds up a stem. “Khoon badhta hai, taqat aati hai (the blood increases, strength comes),” she said. She is selling them for Rs 40 per quarter kilogram. Around her, the market hums with the sounds of motorcycles, vendors and children, but the pile in front of Soren draws little attention from shoppers who walk past without a second glance. Most do not know what it is.The plant Soren has gathered since childhood is known to botanists as ludwigia adscendens, a semi-aquatic herb found along paddy field margins and forest streams across eastern India. Ethnobotanical research confirms what she has known intuitively for decades: the species is high in iron and antioxidants and has long been used in tribal medicine to address anaemia and improve haemoglobin levels. Science, in other words, has finally caught up.However, this knowledge is rapidly disappearing.A woman sells wild leafy greens at a weekly haat in Dumka district. Such greens, gathered from forest margins and wetlands, are consumed locally but rarely recognised in formal food security discussions, Photo: Kulesh Bhandari.Over the past 13 months, across 20 forest-edge and granite outcrop villages in Dumka district, including Latipahar, Rajapathar, Sahargati, and Gadikoriya and the Sundarpahari region, I have documented documented the use of wild edible plants among Santhal and Adivasi communities in the Santhal Pargana uplands. The findings reveal a pattern that is quiet, unglamorous and deeply worrying.Community members aged 50 and above were able to identify, on average, more than 40 species of wild edible plants – their seasonal availability, preparation methods, medicinal properties and ecological habitats. This average fell to 12 among younger residents aged between 22 and 30. That is a loss of more than 70% within a single generation.The older knowledge-holders, many of them women, often struggle with failing eyesight. To participate in identification exercises, they sometimes had to be physically brought to the plants or have specimens carried to them. Their knowledge lives in their bodies: in decades of walking along forest edges at dawn and in hands that know how to prepare a leaf to remove its sting. When they go, that knowledge goes with them.Not all wild foods are regarded equally by those who sell and buy them. At the Sundarphari Hills haat in Dumka district, wild mushrooms appear in abundance during winter months. Termitomyces heimii, locally known as durga chhatu or parbana chhatu, is prized for its flavour and traditionally cooked in poppy seed paste. Volvariella volvacea emerges during the monsoon is called as pawal chhatu, while the rugiboletus extremiorientalis is known as khuduk chhatu in parts of Jharkhand and Odisha.In nearby urban markets, these same mushrooms are frequently dismissed as “unsafe” or, more bluntly, as “poor people’s food.” The stigma sits awkwardly alongside nutritional and culinary reality: these species have been safely eaten for generations and prepared according to knowledge systems refined over centuries.This gap between local use and public perception reflects something larger. Wild edible plants occupy no formal space in India’s food security conversations. They appear in no nutrition policy and are not tracked in any agricultural survey. They feed people, particularly during lean agricultural months when farm output drops and irregular incomes tighten, but they do so invisibly.Two women sort freshly gathered wild greens in a village in Santhal Pargana. The knowledge of which plants to gather, how to prepare them, and when they appear seasonally is transmitted primarily through household practice, a chain that is weakening across generations. Photo: Kulesh Bhandari.The species documented across these 20 villages range from the ordinary to the quietly extraordinary. Marsilea minuta, sushni saag, is an aquatic fern eaten as a leafy vegetable, found in seasonal wetlands and paddy fields. Oxalis corniculata, or netho saag, is a sour leafy green eaten raw or cooked in shaded, moist habitats. Ficus racemosa, called dumar (loha) in Santali and valued locally for treating dysentery, is prepared as a vegetable – its astringent properties, as one elder explained, “tightening the stomach.” Coccinia grandis, carissa spinarum and flocourtia indica are tart fruits eaten fresh from rocky hill margins.Monochoria hastata, an aquatic plant more widely recognised elsewhere as a weed, is consumed in several villages as a seasonal vegetable after careful preparation. Some residents report mild irritation, such as a tingling in the hands, caused by calcium oxalate crystals present in the raw plant. The preparation knowledge required to neutralise this effect is itself part of what is being lost: you cannot safely eat the plant if you do not know how to prepare it.One elder, when asked about a species called baibindi, described how its leaves are half-boiled, pressed through a strainer and eaten with daska, leftover rice from the previous night. “Shareer ko energy milti hai (The body gets energy),” she said. Younger residents in the same village had never heard of it.The landscape that produces these foods is also under pressure. According to data from the India State of Forest Report, Dumka district’s total forest cover stands at 577 square kms, roughly 15% of its geographical area. Between 2001 and 2025, 69% of tree cover loss in the district occurred in areas where the dominant driver was permanent deforestation for conversion to agriculture. In 2025 alone, the district lost six hectares of natural forest.For communities whose food systems depend on forest edges, wetlands and granite outcrops, this is not an abstraction. It is a shrinking pantry.Wild tubers and forest produce at a local market in Dumka district. Several species sold here, including wild roots and dried greens, have no equivalent in mainstream vegetable markets, Photo: Kulesh Bhandari.“Log bhool rahe hain (People are forgetting),” Soren said, setting down the stem of kulhad saag. She did not express any anger, as if merely stating a fact about the world, observed over a lifetime. The greens in front of her would sell slowly that day, bought mostly by older women who recognise their importance.The question this landscape poses is not only ecological, but also epistemological. A food system can survive the loss of a species – ecosystems recover, plants return after rains, seeds persist in soil. What is harder to recover is the knowledge of what to do when the plant grows back. Across the Santhal Pargana uplands, this knowledge is not being documented or taught in schools. It lives in the memories of women like Rupa Soren, in their hands, their habits and their walks at dawn. And it is leaving, one generation at a time.The author has conducted independent biodiversity research in Santhal Pargana for the past several years. Some of the broader field engagement informing this reporting overlaps with community-based work supported by The Pollination Project (USA).Kulesh Bhandari is an independent biodiversity researcher and wildlife conservationist in Santhal Pargana, Jharkhand, working on wild food systems, traditional ecological knowledge and wildlife conservation. He is the founder of the Biodiversity Atlas of Santhal Pargana and a member of the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management.