Why Diego Bonetto wants you to eat weeds

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ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.

Mark Finnell (0:07)

There are a lot of perfectly sensible reasons to start a war. Territory, resources, pigs. Wait, what?

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You've got to pay for that pig.

Mark Finnell (0:15)

Yes, a pig, a pastry shop, a football game, sometimes even birds.

Natasha Mitchell (0:20)

They don't seem to be easy to kill.

Mark Finnell (0:23)

History is filled with some stupid wars. On the No One Saw It Coming podcast, we are diving right into them. With me, Mark Finnell.

Search No One Saw It Coming podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.

Natasha Mitchell (0:37)

And it's off to the Liar Bird Festival in the mega long valley of New South Wales that we're taking you today on Big Ideas. Do you know which wild plants in your backyard or local park you can eat? Which weeds are good for you? Even delicious?

Look, I know you're more likely to view those wayward nettles or dandelions as invasive pests than to cook them up in your kitchen. But should all weeds get a bad rap? What if they have an important role to play in your cooking, even in the Australian environment? Diving into the weeds today for some plant controversies?

Yes, hello, I'm Natasha Mitchell. Welcome.

Diego Bonetto (1:20)

Naturalized species means the plants are here and here to stay. They're going nowhere, okay? Put down your guns. Let's find a different way to engage with it. Nature is generous, gives you plenty as long as you see it.

That's how I see weeds.

They're there for a purpose. Plants are in a specific environment, not because they like the view. Plants are in a specific environment because that's the specific biological role that they need to fulfil. If you suppress them, you stop the process of fulfiling that biological role, so you just keep punishing the dirt for trying to heal itself.

Natasha Mitchell (2:03)

Here to stick up for weeds and their worth is Diego Bonetto, who is a forager and author of the bestseller, Eat Weeds, a Field Guide to Foraging. First Nations Australians have certainly foraged wild plants for over 60,000 years here on this continent.

An ancient tradition in this ancient land. Is it a more sustainable way to produce food perhaps? Let's join Diego with host, Gregg Borschmann, who is a writer, journalist and interviewer contributing to the National Library of Australia's oral history collections on the environment.

Gregg Borschmann (2:39)

Diego, you said this morning on a foraging walk, I'm a Wog and I'm allowed to say that because I've got the accent.

Diego Bonetto (2:48)

Indeed.

Gregg Borschmann (2:49)

You know, Australia has had an interesting relationship with people who aren't white and who aren't European. We've had Wogs in this country for a long time, Diego, did you still feel like a Wog?

Diego Bonetto (3:02)

Sir, I am a lucky migrant because I'm already by now two, three generations in, so I'm not anymore, as an Italian, I'm not anymore so peculiar, unique and strange as many other new cultures, okay? So by now, Italians are pretty much, we all eat pizza by now, don't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you'll be fine. Italians do pizza, so they're good people after all.

And as a new migrant, I am one of the lucky ones. I'm just not so difficult to engage with or to understand. Yeah.

Gregg Borschmann (3:42)

I'm really interested in exploring today with you, this idea of trying to understand a place with fresh eyes, because we who are lucky enough to be born here, take a lot for granted. You arrived with fresh eyes to a new land.

You mentioned getting out of the big city.

Diego Bonetto (4:04)

Yeah.

Gregg Borschmann (4:05)

But what did you see? What was your sense of the land and the landscape? What did you think you'd stumbled upon?

Diego Bonetto (4:11)

When I actually landed on land, when I actually went to see the country, so by the third week I was in Australia, I was in orange, harvesting apples in orchards. With Italians, third generations Italians. There you have it.

With my eyes, what I noticed is how industrialized is farming in this country. I mean, I don't think there never was much of a time when people actually used the plow or the hand plow or the shovel to do things. It's tractors, rows, acres of things, which is fantastic. That's how you produce a lot of produce. But in the process, you miss the manuality and the attention that you would have when actually you got them in your hands. And the farmers I met at the time were all industrial farmers.