Why learn about foraging today?
Kate is a lovely human, shining with the golden energy of peace and gratitude. She came to my workshop to learn about the practice of foraging and shared below a short article about her experience on the day: what she learned, why she thinks is important to bring back such skills into today's life and a host of other observations.
I eagerly present her words here so that others can understand better what are the lessons learned in the workshops I offer, from plant ID to overarching narratives of belonging and care.
Thank you Kate, an honour to meet you.
The spread from the morning workshop. Some are edible, some are not, some are native, some are new.
Diego Bonetto shares uncommon knowledge, that was once common knowledge. He is an uncommon person, of a kind that used to be common.
Diego was born on a dairy farm in a small town in the North West of Italy, in a place where the knowledge he shares was still common. His family gathered berries in the summer, mushrooms in the autumn, firewood in the winter, and fresh greens in the spring, all from wild places.
Diego’s mind works in sync with these natural rhythms. At his Saturday morning workshop in Marrickville, Diego is giving directions on the phone to a late participant. He says, “We’ll be walking downstream along the Cooks River”. The person on the other end of the line probably has no idea of the direction that the Cooks River flows (neither did I), and whether for that or another reason, they never arrive. Us city people are yet to define our worlds by these rhythms.
Diego is irresistibly cheerful, bouncing on the balls of his feet and speaking in a thick accent, carefully pronouncing when he says phrases like, “The people who hate it, never ate it”, of the delicious flowers of the much-despised onion weed.
Diego is a person who measures time not just by the ticking of a digital watch as we all must, but by the arrival and departure of different plants, fruits, and flowers. He points to a short edible weed called rshad on the river’s edge and says, “This always crops up whenever it’s rained lately”.
He is a person who understands medicine as something that doesn’t come from a chemist’s laboratory, but in the form of mundane plants and weeds that come from every person’s backyard. He shakes a dandelion in his hand as he extolls its benefits, speaking with the conviction of someone who’s offering a vital medicine – which he is.
As he points out, in some parts of the world these people are still common. “The reason Chinese medicine is such a sophisticated system today is because they never burned their witches”.
And Diego doesn’t just teach knowledge - he teaches attitudes.
He teaches the attitude of abundance. He stands in a dusty patch of stubby, over-mowed lawn and, spreading his tanned, muscular hands over the landscape, he proclaims, “I can feed you anywhere”. Then, with a wood-handled flip knife, he takes cuttings from five different plants, invisible to urbanised eyes, tells us their common names, their Latin names, their country of origin, and how we can use them as food or medicine.
“This is shepherd’s purse, capsella bursa-pastoris. Its seed pods look hearted-shaped but turn them upside down and they’re actually the shape of a sheep’s scrotum, which is what shepherds used to make their purses out of. It’s good for the blood, for problems with eyesight, for women’s business”, he says making a sweeping gesture of blood flow. And then we’re on to the next plant. And the next. And the next.
I can see the looks of surprise dawning across people’s faces as they realise that, all their lives, they’re been surrounded by food. “I just assumed they were poisonous”, one woman says as Diego picks the strikingly bright purple berries of the native dianella. “You can keep thinking that, more for me” he says, as he pops several in his mouth.
Diego teaches the attitude of reverence. He opens every workshop by acknowledging the Indigenous peoples of the area. But it’s much more than the brief, dry spiel we’ve come to expect in public gatherings. He shares with us a story, told to him by Aunty Fran Bodkin, of how Indigenous children, when lost, were told to find the mother tree (members of the casuarina family) and it would look after them.
“Indigenous stories are simple, but they contain an enormous amount of complexity”, Diego says, as he points out how sheltering under a casuarina means that you are next to a body of water (where casuarinas always grow), that you are sheltered from the rain by their dense canopy, offered a soft place to sleep on the fallen foliage around their base, and, because they grow in clusters, they form a mass identifiable from a distance so that relatives can find the children there.
Diego teaches the attitude of gratitude. As he lays out the twenty different edible plants that he’s collected over the course of the 500 metre stroll, he says, “Just remember, this is not free food. These are all gifts”. Seeing the world through Diego’s eyes you suddenly start to feel that the world has been trying to care for you in ways you never recognised, sprinkling gifts in front of you that you blindly walked over.
After the workshop is over and he and I are walking back together, he says to me “With the bushfires, with the drought, with everything, I’m questioning whether I’m doing enough”. His face, which has been animated with joy for the past two hours, drops, and his forehead furrows as the stares at the ground covered in weeds, which for a moment he does not see as his thoughts turn inwards. This expression is familiar to me – I see it flash across the faces of all the people I know who are concerned about the state of the planet.
I think it’s ironic that often the people who wonder whether they’re doing enough are the ones who are already doing so much. I don’t say anything at the time, but afterwards, I wish I’d said to him something I often remind myself of. That the only things that matter in a crisis are the only things which matter at any time - being calm, being kind, being present, and being gentle. I think of the ways he gathers in the soft needles of the casuarina like he was stroking someone’s hair. The way in delights in every question being asked. The way he doesn’t just thank people for coming, he softly bows with his hands on his heart.
Diego is at the height of his powers and it is vital that we learn from him while we can so that his knowledge can become common again and doesn’t slip through the generational gap. Not just the information, but the attitudes that Diego teaches – abundance, reverence, and gratitude – are enough to turn our world around, away from ecological crisis and towards harmony with the natural world.
His workshops are not a curiosity or an afternoon’s entertainment – if we really took on what he is teaching it has the potential to change the world. And then, he can be assured that he has done enough.