andrea
pieroni

i am an ethnobiologist who studies how local ecological knowledge changes over time and across places, especially among minorities: how communities gather, cook, heal with and value natural organisms, especially plants and fungi, and how they perceive climate change and the ecosystems they live in. this knowledge matters well beyond academia: it can inform biocultural, food and environmental policies and support community-based strategies for food security, health, conservation and adaptation, designed with, and not only for, the people who hold it.

Full Professor of Ethnobiology · Rector 2017–2021 University of Gastronomic Sciences, Pollenzo ↗
PhD Coordinator PhD Program in Ecogastronomy, Food Sciences and Cultures ↗
Founder & Editor-in-Chief Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine ↗
Editor-in-Chief Gastronomy (MDPI) ↗
Foreign Member Academy of Sciences of Albania, Tirana ↗
Visiting Research Associate Tishk International University, Erbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq ↗

Andrea Pieroni speaking at a public talk — andrea pieroni during a public talk.

last news

just accepted for publication · pdf soon available

in conversation

Deutschlandfunk · radio interview · in German “The tyranny of identity must be stopped” „Die Tyrannei der Identität muss gestoppt werden“ · listen to the interview ↗

SEB Student Blog · 2020 · in English How I Got Here: Andrea Pieroni ↗ YouTube · video lecture · in Italian Gastronomic ethnobotany: a bridge between the humanities and the natural sciences? ↗ “Etnobotanica gastronomica: un ponte tra scienze umane e scienze naturali?”

and a pill of foraging: what is foraging? a short video, in English ↗

village scientists

“A researcher who grew up in a village understands what it means to sit with an elder at harvest time or to walk a forest path in early spring, gathering medicinal plants.”

From the margins to the core: village and community scientists should increasingly shape the future of ethnobiology and ethnoecologyPieroni et al., editorial, Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, 2026 · read it ↗

about

I am a village boy from the Garfagnana, in the Tuscan Apennines, born in Lucca in 1967 into a family that gathered wild plants and mushrooms as part of everyday life. I trained in the life sciences in Pisa and Bonn, where I took my PhD as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow.

After research and teaching posts in London, Bradford and Wageningen, I joined the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo in 2009. I founded and edit the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, edit Gastronomy, and live in Cologne.

full biography (pdf) ↗

publications· cv· orcid· scholar· scopus· unisg

research

01Foraging and foragers

Documentation of gathered plants, fungi and animal products, and of how gathering practices are learned, transmitted, contracted or abandoned. Alongside inherited local knowledge, this axis addresses neo-foraging, the contemporary re-invention of wild food gathering by urban and peri-urban publics, and its use in environmental education, as well as the attendant risks: misidentification, over-harvesting and the romanticisation of “tradition”.

ethnobiology · foraging · neo-foraging · wild food plants · herbal remedies · local knowledge · environmental education

02Human ecology and adaptation

How communities reconfigure their relationship with local environments under depopulation, land abandonment, rewilding, border shifts, market integration and climate pressure, read through a socio-ecological systems lens, with resilience and the erosion or retention of environmental knowledge as the central questions.

human ecology · socio-ecological systems · adaptation · resilience · biocultural diversity

03Migrants’ food systems and food-medicines

Foodways and plant knowledge in diaspora: transnational supply chains for “home” ingredients, the substitution of taxa in the host flora, and the food–medicine continuum within the migrant household, where infusions, soups, syrups, ferments and preserves are at once nourishment and remedy.

migration · foodways · transnationalism · food–medicine continuum · home remedies · urban ethnobiology

04Food heritage and gastronomy

Processes of heritage-making around local products, dishes and gathering traditions: who decides what becomes “heritage”, how designation schemes and gastronomic tourism reshape everyday practice, and the tension between safeguarding and commodifying biocultural diversity.

food heritage · gastronomy · heritagisation · biocultural diversity · local products

latest

all publications →

my silk road

network &
friendship

research today is only ever shared. these are the friends and colleagues of my ongoing collaborations: the people with whom i have walked the field, written the papers and built the projects of the past five years, and with whom the work goes on.