Forest access does not equal food access: institutional and household pathways to wild foods in Czechia

Martin Němec, Marcel Riedl, Vilém Jarský

Introduction Wild foods are increasingly recognized as components of food environments, but population-level studies often treat them as a single consumption domain despite substantial differences in how individual products are accessed. Access matters because their potential contributions to sustainable diets, cultural stewardship, and non-market provisioning depend on how households actually obtain them. Using Czechia as a case, this study examines whether six forest-related or forest-adjacent wild-food categories–wild mushrooms, forest berries, culinary forest herbs, medicinal forest herbs, game meat, and wild-caught freshwater fish–represent a common food-access domain or differentiated access pathways shaped by forest exposure, social networks, knowledge, and formal institutions. Methods The analysis draws on two independent national quota-based computer-assisted web interviewing surveys of Czech adults, each comprising 1,000 respondents. The 2023 survey provided harmonized measures of consumption or use across the six wild-food categories, forest exposure, and socio-demographic characteristics. The 2022 survey provided supplementary evidence on game-meat procurement channels and barriers. The analyses included prevalence estimates, Spearman correlations, a planned bootstrap contrast, adjusted logistic regression models, McNemar's test, and latent class analysis. Results In 2023, any consumption or use was highest for wild mushrooms (85.1%) and forest berries (82.2%), followed by wild-caught freshwater fish (55.1%), game meat (49.1%), medicinal forest herbs (36.4%), and culinary forest herbs (25.1%). Forest-visit frequency was positively associated with all categories, but associations were stronger for mushrooms, berries, and culinary herbs (Spearman ρ = 0.20−0.25) than for medicinal herbs, game meat, and wild fish (ρ = 0.12−0.14; all p < 0.001). A planned bootstrap contrast confirmed this separation (Δρ = 0.103; 95% CI 0.06−0.15). Adjusted logistic models retained this differentiation and showed the weakest forest-exposure contribution for game meat, which instead displayed stronger socio-demographic selectivity. In the 2022 survey, informal game-meat procurement was substantially more common than formal retail procurement (33.2% vs. 11.7%; McNemar χ 2 = 149.2, p < 0.001). Latent class analysis identified four consumer profiles supporting the interpretation of differentiated access pathways. Discussion Wild foods do not constitute a homogeneous household access domain. Protecting physical access to forests is important but insufficient; governance approaches should reflect the exposure-based, knowledge-mediated, network-mediated, and institutionally organized pathways through which different wild foods reach households.