Informal food markets, particularly those managed by (elderly) women in post-communist Eastern Europe, represent a biocultural phenomenon of profound significance since globalisation and increasingly strict legal frameworks often threaten these reservoirs of biocultural food heritage. In the fall of 2022 and 2023, a preliminary field study was conducted by visiting the informal markets of six Moldovan centres: Chișinău, Orhei, Bălți, Călărași, Comrat, and Taraclia, and conversing with approximately 40 mid-aged and elderly sellers. We argue that these markets are crucial in sustaining small-scale farming, preserving biodiversity, and maintaining a connection between urban communities and rural communities and, ultimately, between these rural citizens and their nature, keeping small-scale family farming and domestic traditional gastronomic activities alive. By trading fresh, homegrown, and homemade food and goods (including handicrafts), these mid-aged and elderly vendors support local economies, promote environmental sustainability, and safeguard traditional ecological knowledge and cultural heritage. This paper explores how grannies' markets contribute to biocultural diversity and sustainable food practices, especially amid the country's recent turbulent political, socioeconomic, and demographic challenges. The analysis advocates for the survival rights of these ecological, economic, and cultural (2-x-eco-cultural) refugia and invites ethnobiologists, food studies and cultural heritage scholars, rural sociologists, and agricultural economists to defend the biocultural diversity of informal food markets, moving them from an "out of necessity" status to a solid pillar of a possible future, new, family farming and small-scale ecological and gastronomic (conscientious) tourism. Policymakers should protect and enhance these informal spaces, especially the socioecological farming systems behind them, as essential socioeconomic and environmental assets. They should emphasise their importance as hubs for biological diversity, cultural preservation, community cohesion, and ecological sustainability.

Department of Environmental Sciences Informatics and Statistics Ca' Foscari University of Venice Via Torino 155 30174 Venice Italy

Department of Medical Analysis Tishk International University Erbil Kurdistan 44001 Iraq

Dipartimento Di Lingue Letterature E Culture Straniere University of Bergamo Piazza Rosate 2 24129 Bergamo Italy

Faculty of Agricultural Environmental and Food Sciences Free University of Bolzano Piazza Università 5 39100 Bolzano Italy

Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Kamýcká 129 16500 Praha Suchdol Czech Republic

Institute of Agricultural Economics and Information Mánesova 75 120 58 Prague Czech Republic

University of Gastronomic Sciences Piazza Vittorio Emanuele 2 9 12042 Pollenzo Italy

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