Here’s a number that might surprise you: throughout human history, people have eaten more than 7,000 different plant species.¹ Seven thousand. Think about that for a second.

Today, 17 crops supply 90% of all the calories eaten on Earth.² A small group of nine crops, including sugar cane, maize, rice, and wheat, accounts for over 66% of global crop production by weight.³

We went from 7,000 plants to 17 crops, doing almost all the work. And the plants that got left behind? Many of them were more nutritious than the ones that stayed.

It Wasn’t About Nutrition

The crops that dominate today’s food system didn’t win because they were the best for human health. They won because they worked for industrial agriculture.

They could be grown in massive, uniform rows. Harvested by machine. Packed, shipped, and stored for months without spoiling. Sold in global markets that needed a consistent, predictable supply.

Plants that didn’t fit that model, no matter how nutritious, no matter how long communities had been eating them, were quietly dropped. Not because anyone decided they were inferior. Simply because they didn’t scale.

Since the early 1900s, about 75% of plant genetic diversity has been lost. More than 90% of crop varieties that once existed in farmers’ fields are gone.⁴⁵ A 2024 review in Nutrition Reviews described the result plainly: the modern food system has led to “plants with unsatisfactory nutritional value being overproduced, whereas nutrient-rich plant species used in earlier times remain neglected.”⁶

In other words, we optimized for logistics, not nutrition. And the gap shows up in our health. Researchers are increasingly linking this dietary narrowing to rising rates of micronutrient deficiency and chronic disease around the world.⁷⁸

Brazil Had a Name for What Got Left Behind

While industrial agriculture was narrowing the global food supply, something else was happening in Brazil.

Rural communities, especially Indigenous communities and small farmers, kept eating from a much wider range of plants. Plants that grew wild along roadsides and forest edges. Plants their grandparents had eaten. Plants that didn’t have a place in any supermarket but had sustained people for generations.

In 2007, a Brazilian botanist named Valdely Kinupp decided these plants deserved a proper name. In his doctoral thesis at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, he coined the term plantas alimentícias não convencionais aka PANCs.⁹ It translates to “non-conventional food plants.” Not exotic. Not superfoods. Just plants that are edible, often highly nutritious, and overlooked by the mainstream food system.

Brazil is one of the most plant-rich countries on Earth, home to roughly 15–20% of the world’s biological diversity.¹⁰ Yet even there, most edible plants go unnoticed. In their 2014 catalog, botanists Kinupp and Lorenzi identified 351 plants with food potential that Brazilians had largely forgotten or never knew they could eat.¹¹ In 2017, the FAO’s Family Farming Knowledge Platform featured the Guia Prático de PANC, a practical guide to non-conventional food plants, signaling institutional interest in the framework at the international level.¹²

What makes PANCs interesting isn’t just their nutritional value. It’s their resilience. Many grow with minimal care, adapt to local conditions, and thrive in places conventional agriculture ignores. The FAO has formally classified certain neglected plants as “Future Smart Food”, defined as species that are nutrient-dense, climate-resilient, economically viable, and locally available.¹³ That is not a wellness marketing claim. That is a food security designation.

Ora pro nobis: The PANC That Communities Refused to Forget

Of the thousands of PANCs in Brazil, one stands out: Pereskia aculeata Miller, known as ora pro nobis.

It’s a leafy green from the cactus family, soft-leaved, climbing, and native to Brazil’s Atlantic Forest region. It’s been eaten in Minas Gerais and surrounding areas since the colonial period.

The leaves contain a natural mucilage, a gel-forming soluble fiber composed of arabinogalactan, a complex polysaccharide that supports healthy digestion and gut motility. This is likely why people who add it to their routine often report less bloating and more digestive comfort. The fiber feeds the gut the way fiber is supposed to: gently, consistently, without drama.^14,15

The leaves are also rich in antioxidants, carotenoids, including beta-carotene, lutein, and violaxanthin, alongside flavonoids and phenolic compounds, as well as minerals including magnesium, calcium, iron, and manganese. All of this in a single teaspoon of dried powder. No blends, no fillers, nothing added.^14,15

So why haven’t you heard of it?

Because it doesn’t work for industrial agriculture. The leaves are soft and don’t ship well at scale. It grows best in small polyculture gardens tended by hand, not in monoculture fields run by machines. Everything the food industry needs, it isn’t.

The plant survived not because of market forces, but because people kept growing it and eating it when they needed to. The name itself carries that history: ora pro nobis is Latin for “pray for us”, words from a Catholic prayer that poor and rural communities were said to whisper while harvesting the plant, quietly feeding themselves from what grew at the edges of a world that gave them little else. According to Brazilian folklore, while the congregation’s eyes were fixed on the altar, slaves slipped outside to gather what they could from the bushes growing near the church walls.

It was an act of survival. And it turned out to be an act of nutritional wisdom.

What This Means Today

The science is getting clearer: eating a narrow range of foods is not just boring, it has real consequences. A less diverse diet means fewer micronutrients, less fiber variety, fewer protective plant compounds, and over time, higher risk of the chronic conditions that are now the leading causes of death in most countries.

PANCs aren’t a trend or a niche interest. They’re part of a growing conversation in food science and agriculture about how to build a more nutritious, more resilient food system, one that draws on the botanical knowledge that industrial agriculture left behind.⁸

Our ora pro nobis starts with a single farmer in Brazil, someone who grew it first for himself and his family, the way families in his region have for generations. When he saw an opportunity to share it, we were there to meet him. We source directly from him, dry it, grind it, and bring it to people who have never had access to it before. No blends. No fillers. No ingredient lists that need a dictionary. Just one plant, single-sourced, grown with intention. That’s what nobis is about.

Just a plant that industrial agriculture decided wasn’t worth scaling, and communities that knew it was worth keeping.

Sources

1. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (n.d.-a). Effect of human activity on biodiversity: Food security. https://www.fao.org/agriculture/crops/thematic-sitemap/theme/spi/soil-biodiversity/effect-of-human-activity-on-biodiversity/food-security/en/
2. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (n.d.-b). Biodiversity and nutrition: A common path. FAO Nutrition and Consumer Protection Division. https://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/food_composition/documents/upload/Interodocumento.pdf
3. FAO. (2025). The Third Report on the State of the World’s Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. FAO. https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/368ec1f9-0897-4c37-b6c7-a65678ebb4b8
4. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2005). Building on gender, agrobiodiversity and local knowledge: A training manual. FAO. https://www.fao.org/4/y5609e/y5609e02.htm
5. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. (2019). The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture. FAO. http://www.fao.org/interactive/state-of-biodiversity-for-food-agriculture/en/
6. Knez, M., Ranić, M., & Gurinović, M. (2024). Underutilized plants increase biodiversity, improve food and nutrition security, reduce malnutrition, and enhance human health and well-being: Let’s put them back on the plate! Nutrition Reviews, 82(8), 1111–1124. https://doi.org/10.1093/nutrit/nuad103
7. Ali, A., & Bhattacharjee, B. (2023). Nutrition security, constraints, and agro-diversification strategies of neglected and underutilized crops to fight global hidden hunger. Frontiers in Nutrition, 10, 1144439. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2023.1144439
8. Purba, N. H., & Krishnaswamy, K. (2025). Exploring the potentials of neglected underutilized crops (NUCs): an integrative review for developing a sustainable food system model. npj Science of Food, 9(1), 199. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41538-025-00554-0
9. Kinupp, V. F. (2007). Plantas alimentícias não convencionais da região metropolitana de Porto Alegre [Doctoral thesis]. Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). https://lume.ufrgs.br/handle/10183/12870
10. Convention on Biological Diversity. (n.d.). Brazil – country profile. https://www.cbd.int/countries/profile?country=br
11. Kinupp, V. F., & Lorenzi, H. (2014). Plantas alimentícias não convencionais (PANC) no Brasil: Guia de identificação, aspectos nutricionais e receitas ilustradas. Instituto Plantarum de Estudos da Flora.
12. Instituto Kairós. (2017). Guia prático de PANC: Plantas alimentícias não convencionais. Instituto Kairós. https://web.archive.org/web/20210430224101/https://institutokairos.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Cartilha-Guia-Pr%C3%A1tico-de-PANC-Plantas-Alimenticias-Nao-Convencionais.pdf
13. Li, X., & Siddique, K. H. M. (2018). Future smart food: Rediscovering hidden treasures of neglected and underutilized species for zero hunger in Asia. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/c96d9929-584c-4e8b-b1b9-b68068a8bec9/content
14. Silva, N. F. N., Silva, S. H., Baron, D., Neves, I. C. O., & Casanova, F. (2023). Pereskia aculeata Miller as a novel food source: a review. Foods, 12(11), 2092. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods12112092
15. Takeiti, C. Y., Antonio, G. C., Motta, E. M. P., Collares-Queiroz, F. P., & Park, K. J. (2009). Nutritive evaluation of a non-conventional leafy vegetable (Pereskia aculeata Miller). International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition, 60(S1), 148–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/09637480802534509