Microgreens. Nuovi alimenti freschi e funzionali per esplorare tutto il valore della biodiversità. Novel fresh and functional food to explore all the value of biodiversity. Nuevos alimentos frescos y funcional para explorar todo el valor de la biodiversidad.

Ensure enough food and water to the growing world population and preserve the biodiversity of our planet are among the major challenges of our immediate future. These challenges are essentially addressed to the agricultural world, which is constantly evolving to satisfy the most basic needs of the humankind. The approaches and the possible answers to these big challenges are many and, even if partial, each sustainable solution or innovation can contribute to improve the quality of our life. Among the different crop production sectors, the vegetable sector is most likely the one expressing the greatest agro-biodiversity. Beyond the agroecosystems diversity, the richness of species, varieties and products, the biodiversity of the vegetable crops, is also expressed by the use for edible purpose of different plant portions, even within the same species: in other terms, all the organs that constitute a plant, often metamorphosed, can be used as vegetables. In this book, funded by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, we describe what can be considered the result of the latest evolution of the concept of vegetables, which has led to the definition of a new category of vegetable products, called microgreens. Besides promoting the knowledge of this new category of vegetable products, attempting to reach a wide audience, this publication aims to increase the public awareness on the major challenges previously mentioned, showing also how, in their own small way, microgreens can give a concrete answer to these challenges. In the book we discuss how microgreens can contribute, directly or indirectly, to preserve and valorize the biodiversity, improve the environmental sustainability, increase food and nutritional security, and how, taking advantage of their beauty and simplicity, microgreens may be also used as an educational tool. Finally, the book provides the basic information to grow microgreens and some suggestion for their culinary use. Microgreens may be considered an innovation of the concept of vegetables and of the vegetable industry, just like that of the fresh cut and the precooked ready to eat products, or that of the soilless vegetable production systems, for example. These are innovations that contribute to transform the whole concept of agriculture. Microgreens, with the large variety of colors, shapes and flavors described in this book, should not be necessarily seen as substitute of their relative standard vegetables. They should be discovered and placed inside our own imagination, considering some of the keywords that characterize microgreens and modern agriculture, and that are highlighted in this book: agrobiodiversity, sustainability, beauty, food and nutrition security, education, health, and wellness.