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Here Come the Zombies, I Eat Weeds with Diego Bonetto
1k Plays6 months ago
Scarcity mindsets + scrofulous zombies are no match for nature’s weedy abundance! So says Diego Bonetto, wild food advocate and forager with a heart of greenish-gold.
Diego calls Wiradjuri Country, NSW, home and leads foraging workshops, seasonal edible adventures, community art projects, wild storytelling events, makes more weedy media appearances than I can list here and is the author of the excellent Eat Weeds: A Field Guide to Foraging.
I’m utterly enamoured of Diego’s teachings and this conversation, filled with the language of plants, the wisdom of place, forest communions, not-quite-closed loops, ecological hypocrisy and pretty good reasons to never ever ever mow your lawn.
Find links to Diego’s wonderful work listed below.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Rascilience Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned in to Rascilience, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't. I'm broadcasting from Jaira country in central Victoria, southern Australia.
00:00:22
Speaker
the unceded lands of the Jaja Wurrung people. And I pay my respects to the elders, the ancestors, the autumn rains, the echidnas, the fungi, the microbats, the powerful owls, the silver wattle, the wallaby grass, the worms, the seeds, and the slimy photosynthetic sludge that coats the rocks at the mineral springs.
Exploring Interpersonal Connections with Diego Bonetto
00:00:43
Speaker
Today's episode is theoretically about foraging. But after hopping off the call with my guest Diego Bonetto, my biggest takeaway was altogether interpersonal.
00:00:55
Speaker
Do you have people in your life who just make you feel great? Who instantly put you at ease, draw you out, lift your spirits? I do. Devon from episode 13 is one of these people. Whenever we bump into each other in the local health food shop, we burn the place down with crackling laughter and connection. Such is her warmth. During my conversation with Diego Bonetto, wild food advocate and forager,
00:01:23
Speaker
I experienced the same sensation, a vibe augmentation, a sense of safety and positive regard that allowed for an uncommonly heartfelt yarn. So I looked it up, and this phenomenon has a name. Two psychologists coined it in 2010 after trying to pinpoint that special something that makes certain humans just lovely to be around.
00:01:47
Speaker
They called it effective presence, the influence we have on other people's moods and emotions. Positive effective presence is when that influence is consistently uplifting, probably due to a complex suite of self-awareness, deep listening, compassion and body language.
00:02:05
Speaker
Of course, there are folks who have the opposite effect, who make you feel cramped, claustrophobic, thwarted, choked up, crestfallen, fidgety, dismal, silly, inadequate, ho-hum, bummed out, conversationally constipated, and small. We all know them. We can all be them. But the tragedy of it is that these tiny interpersonal hurts, these feelings of inadequacy and insignificance, become our collective pain.
00:02:35
Speaker
And humans in pain act out. People who don't feel seen build eyesores. People who don't feel heard become, well, politicians. People who just want to belong deck themselves out in diamonds for mobs of insatiable shoppers.
00:02:53
Speaker
Spending time with Diego reminded me of the simple power of our presence, the opportunity we have in every interaction to feed each other's soul deep need to be seen, to be heard, to be valued, so we don't go throwing our weight around at scale, messing shit up.
00:03:13
Speaker
What's more, effective presence is generative. When you're held in a field of goodwill, all kinds of interesting, creative, innovative and inspiring stuff arises. And isn't that what we need right now?
00:03:27
Speaker
Effective presence is resculience 101. Something you can develop through reflection, listening, compassion, and therapy, probably. I don't want to say it's a panacea. More like a comfrey poultice on the cultural wounds that perpetuate problematic progress.
Understanding Plant Language and Sustainable Practices
00:03:46
Speaker
And by now, you'll know that I have a high degree of faith in plant medicine, especially when those plants are common, abundant, and weedy, like comfrey, or nitbone, as the witches call it. I'm so pleased to share this episode with Diego Benetto with you.
00:04:03
Speaker
filled as it is with the language of plants, the wisdom of place, forest communion, not quite closed loops, ecological hypocrisy and pretty good reasons to never ever ever mow your lawn.
00:04:18
Speaker
Diego is a legend. If you're not already his mate on social media, if you don't already have his book Eat Weeds on your bedside table, let this be the day those things change. All the stuff we reference is linked in the show notes and I'd love to hear if you can hear the effective presence. Stick around for shout outs at the end of the episode. Here's Diego.
00:04:43
Speaker
What percentage mushroom would you say you are? Oh, that's an interesting question. You know, if you want to look at it from a biological point of view, we are very akin to mushrooms. Evolutionary, we diverged from mushrooms much later than plants did. So we are more akin to mushrooms than we are to plants as a species.
00:05:06
Speaker
And so what person to mushrooms? That's a good question. I'd like to reflect on that. I don't want to give you a number, but we are more mushrooms than plants. How's that?
00:05:19
Speaker
I remember we have spoken before Diego on the Future Steading podcast and that was a few years ago and it's a really lovely thing to think about what I was asking you then and what I was curious about then and where I'm at now and the kind of questions that are really alive for me. And I think I recall asking you something very conspiratorial like, do you think that plants have feelings? Do you think that plants are sentient? And now I'm like,
00:05:45
Speaker
Plants are my elders. I'm working for the plants. They are actually eldering me. And so my curiosity and my question for you is, and especially speaking about mushrooms and our evolutionary similarities and kinship, what is your sense of kinship with plants and mushrooms and all that you are foraging and taking into your body?
00:06:07
Speaker
Yes. Thank you for the beautiful questions, Katie, you know, that allows me to go to open up and say things that I don't usually do. So my kinship with mushrooms is old. I learned about mushrooms when I was a young boy.
00:06:30
Speaker
growing up in the dairy farm in northern Italy, and the mushrooms outing in autumn was a must-do. You know, like it comes autumn, you go out in the fields for the field mushrooms, you go out to the ditches to get what we called famioli in my language. I don't even know what they called in English, live alone in Latin.
00:06:55
Speaker
But, you know, there was a whole bunch of mushrooms that were very, very special seasonal markers. You know, you wait for them year after year when the season is good, then temperatures rise, the humidity is perfect, and then you go and find the mushrooms. And years later, you know,
00:07:21
Speaker
I don't want to say, but let's put a number. Decades later. Decades later. I'm still there. I'm still fascinated. I still love it. And there is the rituality of going harvesting mushrooms because it's a highly seasonal and highly dependent on conditions.
00:07:43
Speaker
To find mushrooms is more than just walking the forest. To find mushrooms, you need to understand the stimuli, understand the environment and the condition that allow for the organism to fruit. And so you're always
Lessons from Foraging and Ecology
00:08:03
Speaker
on the lookout. You're always checking the weather and always checking the humidity. You're always going the forest, seeing if it's not season. Just have a look.
00:08:12
Speaker
And as I say, you learn when you find, you learn when you don't, because you learn even when you don't find anything, because you're going to have a look, you know the location has mushrooms, there's nothing, there is something to learn there.
00:08:30
Speaker
even, oh, but it's been raining, but it's not the right conditions yet. And there is lesson to be learned in all aspects of the journey of appointing yourself with the ecology and the rhythms of the season. So for me, the mushroom season, what it means in the way I approach, in the way
00:08:58
Speaker
I leave it and the way I learn from it is something that it keeps giving because it keeps learning. There's always something to learn. There's always new. And there's always other things that kind of became apparent. And decades on, I'm still learning. I'm still learning about mushrooms and how they operate in an ecology.
00:09:27
Speaker
and are learning places that I...
00:09:30
Speaker
go back year after year for decades. I'm still learning in these places. And this journey of keep going back to place and keep accumulating knowledge is beautiful, is humbling. It's something that in a way dwarfed you.
00:09:58
Speaker
draw few in your pretentiousness of knowledge, but the same times enrich you because there is always something to discover. It's exhilarating in a way, you know. Well, you know, that's, that's great. Thank you, Forrest. I needed that, you know, I needed that extra bit to add to the Big Enormous puzzle that we will never complete. And
00:10:26
Speaker
So, yeah, then the forest is a teacher. And when I go to the forest, I pay respect to the plants.
00:10:35
Speaker
And I pay respect to the produce, and I even go to, I'm sorry to say, but I even go to levels that whenever I go and run a workshop, I go to early, I go to early and walk the place to familiarize yourself what's about, so I know where to take people, but also to introduce myself to forest.
00:11:02
Speaker
I find myself singing, which is not kind of a song, it's kind of a, you know, voicing, a kind of high forest in here. I'm the good guy. I'm the guy that, you know, teach people how to love you, you know, and the birds go around and sing early in the morning.
00:11:30
Speaker
It's beautiful, it's a beautiful thing to also introduce yourself time and time again. It's good for your soul as much as I don't know what the forest here is, the forest sentient. Yes, no, does it matter? It's about intent.
00:11:49
Speaker
it's about what we feel that he's being heard and then itself informed us on the loop of communication. Does it make sense? Is it to what? I can write it back in, I can just tell you facts.
00:12:14
Speaker
Never too wild. Facts are dry and brittle in comparison to your beautiful living description of how you enter those spaces. I know I've seen on your Instagram, I think recently you posted about getting to the workshop space early so you can pick up the litter.
00:12:33
Speaker
I mean, there's something to say about that. So an interesting aspect, just to take into a different corner, the spaces I'm talking about are monocultures. We're talking about pine plantations. We're not talking about pristine forests never touched by humans.
00:12:53
Speaker
whatever that means. And, but we're talking about, you know, basically, our body culture, big enormous spaces, crown land, planted with sustainable timber industry, pine trees, that is the basis of whatever we use and buy at the end.
00:13:13
Speaker
at the hardware store or whatever, the timbers we build our houses, the chipboards we use to build the MDF, the toilet paper, all of this pulp that we use in our societies is much of it, you know, not all of it unfortunately, but much of it is grown sustainably in pine plantations. So I'm talking about
00:13:42
Speaker
somewhat an artificial ecology, inverted commas, purposely planted and replanted every 15-20 years whenever they harvest. And yet, it does have a soul. It is an ecology. It is a living organism.
00:14:01
Speaker
and it is inhabited by all sorts of animals and insects and native and non-native animals and is used by humans for all sorts of purposes, including harvesting mushrooms. So it
The Role of Weeds and Gratitude in Nature
00:14:23
Speaker
still is, despite being a monoculture, a living organism.
00:14:29
Speaker
Thank you for providing the perfect.
00:14:32
Speaker
There's one of my favorite words is smoose, which is the tiny little thoroughfare that goes through the thicket that animals take like into the thicker bush. You know what I mean? Like those little holes in the blackberry. Yeah. And like, there's all these little smooses that I'm seeing as you speak. And that, that smoose led me directly to your work as a, you know, as the weedy one. And as I would say, an entity who.
00:15:02
Speaker
starts to add a little bit of color and nuance to our black and white thinking about what's good and bad, what's a weed, what's a native, what's exotic, what's meant to be here, what's, you know, what we need to poison and what we need to let proliferate. And I know that there's a layer too or a parallel with
00:15:18
Speaker
you yourself, Diego, coming to Australia as like an import, right? And feeling, you know, I see you in this deep sense of belonging to place and also relating with local mob and doing the work of grounding yourself here. I'd love to open up the conversation about weeds and how you see their place in the world when we are a little bit obsessed with
00:15:43
Speaker
you know, that nativism and prioritizing only things that are here and were here for thousands of years. Yeah, yeah. So how do I, how do I go with that? You know, there's lots of layers, there's lots of boxes we can open in there. But okay, let's start with this. I
00:16:08
Speaker
I tend to, I rather walk in gratitude than walking resentment. And yes, an enormous damage has been down to this continent.
00:16:28
Speaker
And yes, I come from elsewhere, but so is 95% of Australia. And yes, I'm new to this land, I still have an accent, but the one, even the Australian, the most I can show off is what, six, seven generations.
00:16:53
Speaker
At the same time, this is happening on top of cultures being here for 60 plus thousand years. A culture has been continuously engaging with resources with a deep understanding of careful country.
00:17:11
Speaker
And that careful country is a concept that should not only be casted, retained or contained within indigenous culture because careful country should be a mantra that we should all abide to.
00:17:31
Speaker
You know, in the here spoke with lots of all the indigenous people, elders and so forth. And the common theme that people keep saying away, you know, you're coming from elsewhere, but now you're here, and you're part of the stories, look after the country.
00:17:52
Speaker
So connection to country and careful country should not be something put in the hand of indigenous people. And that's what they should do. It should do something that we all should. You know, you live here.
00:18:05
Speaker
careful country. And in careful country, the way I see it, it's beyond the post-colonial gilding form ideas that we should delete all of the footsteps ever stepped into us, because it's kind of full of hypocrisy.
00:18:29
Speaker
You know, we want to kill all of the weeds and yet all of our agricultural species are exotics. We want to kill all the pests and yet there is four ships per human in this continent.
00:18:45
Speaker
You know, and, you know, so there is this hypocrisy when it comes around what is native or should belong here. And yet, you know, everything that we do revolves around the exotics. But there is the good exotics and the bad exotics.
00:19:03
Speaker
And at the same time, the good native and the bad natives, because I know plenty of farmers go out and shoot kangaroos, because they compete in the grazing. And they go out and shoot wild dogs, which are DNA tested nearly dingo. But the wild dogs, and they eat the lambs. So you shoot the wild dogs. So when they don't eat your ambs,
00:19:33
Speaker
they dingers when they eat your lambs the wild dogs therefore license to kill you know so you know there's all bunch of people critical stance and when it comes to nativism which is kind of kind of interesting to reflect on i don't want to point the finger i do not want to minimize or ridiculeize the intent because there's an incredible about the good intent people come from a good place they want to look after
00:20:01
Speaker
the native ecology. We should all look after native ecologies. You know, it's been severely disrupted. We should look after native ecologies that I'm not saying we shouldn't.
00:20:12
Speaker
At the same time, there is an incredible amount of disrupted landscape that with ecologies providing species that they are important ecological players. They are, you know, the weeds are the healers of the land. They're there because they have jobs to do. And by keep
00:20:37
Speaker
um deleting or keep destroying the job that they're doing um in order to appease your post-colonial guilt is not doing the land a favor you know and so you know this interesting conversation that should be uh opened up when it comes to nativism and and the whole you know
00:21:03
Speaker
ecological looks that's happening around it. Native is good, non-native is bad. Coming from a land of foreigners. There's a lot of scapegoating.
00:21:20
Speaker
happen in there too. But regardless, I don't advocate to let the weed take over the land. That's not what I say. What I say is walking gratitude. You have weeds in your backyard, many of them are food and medicine. Rather than look them in in hate, acknowledge the work of nature. This is what you've got given.
00:21:45
Speaker
that's what you should eat.
Continuous Learning through Foraging
00:21:47
Speaker
We destroy the weeds and then we go and buy the wheat at the supermarket which grows in monoculture agricultural systems are way more they destroy way more native lands than the weeds ever do and then twist the number as much as you want.
00:22:08
Speaker
Thanks for such a considered response. And I would like to ask you about your gardening style, Diego, because I watched, I watched a Gardening Australia segment with you and I was absolutely, I was gratified to my eyeballs to see your weedy style of gardening because it's similarly, it's similar to my own. And I sometimes, I used to play tennis
00:22:31
Speaker
And then I started playing squash. And squash, as everyone knows, ruins your tennis game. And I wonder if foraging ruins your gardening game in the same way. Because once you've foraged, once you understand the nutrition of dandelion, the deliciousness of mallow, the wonder of the wild violets, it's really hard to pull them out in preference of some finicky annual that is not locally adapted.
00:22:54
Speaker
and is not hardy or filled with the same kind of nutrition. So I loved seeing your segment on Gardening Australia where you left that weedy meadow at the center of your backyard and had the border of like what looked, what would look to some people as a mess of weeds, but to you as a salad bar. Yeah. Can you share a little about how you go about, if at all, cultivating things in your own patch?
00:23:20
Speaker
OK, thank you for that question again. My backyard comes to a point just beyond the hoist and just behind the hoist I cut the grass because that's what we use the most. And in that area we have our home gardens, we have our garden beds and everything else and so forth.
00:23:48
Speaker
and that we like to just and also that we walk everywhere you know so it's the place we have some table and chairs so and I cut the grass to keep the grass at certain levels where mind though I live several spaces where I let the grass grow and in small patches because this little island of tall grass in the first part of the grounds of the garden act as
00:24:18
Speaker
refuge for the skins, the insects, you know, everything else that all of the little animals, they live in my garden, you know, I live space for them, I live space for them without cutting the grass, little corner of not cutting the grass, but most of it is, is lawn, lawn with the garden beds and everything else.
00:24:45
Speaker
And then the other half of the garland, I never caught it.
00:24:50
Speaker
I never cut the grass. And that's what I'm establishing, a food forest and an area where there is a whole bunch of wall things, you know, so that's where they grow. As the trees are growing, so is the mallow, the fattan. What else I get a lot of it? I mean, the mallow and the fattan is the chickweed that the moment is coming, a lot of it.
00:25:19
Speaker
and so there's that's and the dandelions planted dandelions in there and so that's where they grow by themselves I never cut the grass the only thing I do when the second part of the part of them oh my god I just trim a pathway
00:25:42
Speaker
into it, my pathway to the compost bottle at the end of the garden, my pathway to the shed where I keep the wood, and that's it. The rest is just never cut the grass. Why do I do that? Because
00:26:00
Speaker
In a way, it's a learning process. In full respect, there is part in my backyard I never even stepped on. In a way, it's me to learn.
00:26:17
Speaker
how ecology is living in this space, without the interaction of me forcing anything, just what it is, okay? And the first year we had a lot of rumors, for example, is grass with big seeds.
00:26:39
Speaker
And the first year, you know, they grew big. It was a whole field of brumas. There was nothing else but brumas, you know, basically just the field going wild and all this grass going tall, going all the way to seeds. And I even harvested a whole bunch of seeds at the end of the first summer and collected the seeds and brewed them and made bee, you know.
00:27:03
Speaker
And so just to learn what it is and start the process of engaging with what the land is giving you and start the process of finding food and value in what the land is giving you.
00:27:23
Speaker
I ingest these kind of things and myself become, this is sound sippy, but you know, you start the whole loop of knowing your land, eating your land, and creating compost with whatever you eat otherwise, and that compost goes back to the land,
00:27:44
Speaker
so that the plants that then grow back is the plants that need to pull out the minerals that are absent in your compost. It creates kind of fulfilling the whole cycle of the nutrients that you need in your system. Me, I'm part of my backyard, my garden, my backyard is part of me and I do that in full respect. I touch nothing, I just let it inform me what it is that is there and in return I
00:28:14
Speaker
get my clues of how to go forward. Can we just pause there for one second, Diego? You've just unleashed a keystone concept into my mind that I've never joined the dots between those things before and I'd love to
00:28:29
Speaker
pause and exaggerate or highlight that point that I think I just heard you making, which was in closing that loop in cycling nutrients through your own body and back into your backyard. And then composting again, there's like a mechanism of reading and then adjusting that happens in the ecosystem based on the feedback.
00:28:55
Speaker
Yes, yes. Oh my gosh. Can you just say a little bit more about that because that is honestly like the theory that makes the closing of the loop so, so much more meaningful to me. Yeah, important. And closing of the loop in a location so that the loop keep evolving. So the loop you don't close in, that's it in rows. The loops just keep informing one another.
00:29:21
Speaker
and it amplifies and thickens and then becomes more and more relevant. So it's a process of, it's nothing about the plant, it's about the microbiology of the land you live in.
00:29:39
Speaker
Okay, so the land you live in and where you grow your food has a specific mineral profile because that's what it is. Okay, it's got a specific nutrients profile or whatever, biology profile, a biome, it's a biome in itself. And so by,
Responsible Foraging and Ancient Knowledge
00:30:02
Speaker
and we are
00:30:04
Speaker
dominant species, we are the one that makes the most impact on that biome because of what we do, because of how we interact, because of the nutrients we bring in, or the nutrients we delete, or so forth, the interaction with that biome, we are a key ecological player. Now, if you
00:30:26
Speaker
If you think of that ecological interaction through feedback loops,
00:30:35
Speaker
so that you eat from your garden and the compost you create from the leftovers, plus all of the things you need to come from elsewhere, like I buy bread because I don't grow wheat, do I? I buy rice because I don't grow rice.
00:30:56
Speaker
And all of these things that are amiss in you getting nutrients from your garden, then inform the composting form where you grow your garden, and the plants which miss these micronutrients that are not present in there, go and seek them out.
00:31:22
Speaker
Okay. Because plants are diggers, plants, you know, seek out these nutrients, bring them back. And when you ingest them, you slowly, but surely closing the loop is kind of a sound like finite, finite, you know, it's not the closing the loop. It's a continuous informing of what the loop means.
00:31:43
Speaker
It's probably more like a water wheel. It's not just a circle. It's something that's thickened and it becomes amplified as you keep circling it. Yeah, yeah. And so this is dependent on you composting your own shit. Do you have a human nervous system?
00:32:04
Speaker
No, I do not have a human year that will take it to the next level. Absolutely composting your shit, it would be great. And I myself in, you know, I live in a country town, but still a suburban block.
00:32:21
Speaker
Establishing a system, a new manure, it will be a bit tricky because you need to find the place to do it. And it has to be something that you need to see. It's a long process. You don't just do it like that. It's a long process. I'm not there yet. I'd love to go there, but I'm not there yet. But yes, composting your manure with even a boost
00:32:47
Speaker
we're actually talking about because then you will have direct information from your gut biome into the compost, informing the plants that then re-enter your gut biome. Amazing. And this is the word that's looming large for me is succession. So you're observing
00:33:10
Speaker
your patch in succession and what that means and how things change and what, how shift happens. You know, food forests are all about succession and maybe to your own teaching, and I'm just, I'm hesitating a guess here and please correct me, but your education style and foraging and leading people into this world.
00:33:32
Speaker
of just being ecologically literate or being in place and not even having to come home with anything is a type of is a season is a transitional a transitional place for people because you know we can't all just become hunter-gatherers overnight i don't know if it's sustainable for us all to be foraging for our needs en masse but yeah is that how you see
00:34:00
Speaker
your work in a sense, Diego, and our time in human, you know, in this civilizational moment that we're in, are we in a succession and when there'll be something different kind of coming down the line?
00:34:13
Speaker
Okay, so cessation is ever going. Cessation has been happening since forever, since we were a single cell organism, before we were fishes, before we were monkeys. So cessation is ever going, cessation does not stop. Cessation is, you know, these days agrologists and ecologists are looking at, rethinking the whole idea of cessation, the whole idea of the
00:34:44
Speaker
rainforest cycles that a cessation is linear and it thrives towards apex species, now it's been disproven. It's not as simple as that. Cessation is more complex than that. That's an idea of the 1940s.
00:35:01
Speaker
These days, we're talking about way more complex understanding. There's lots of disruptions, and it's not a linear thing, and it's not cyclical, it's just ever-changing. Teaching foraging, teaching people how to read the abundance of nature.
00:35:24
Speaker
First of all, foraging is not sustainable for all of us as a humanity to go out and harvest wild food sources for our needs. No, it's not possible. Not even I can do it. I buy milk, I buy rice, I buy wheat, I buy bread. It's not possible.
00:35:46
Speaker
And it shouldn't even be described somewhat, because in a way, even just the small input of wild plants, even in the smallness of your backyard, because we all can all be forages in our back end, we can all be forages in our pot plants.
00:36:08
Speaker
Because Sal is coming out of it. And you do not need to have access to acres of land or whatever. You can be, even in the small amount, you get chickweed coming out of your plants.
00:36:25
Speaker
of your pot plants. And that's a beautiful green, fantastic winter green, full of minerals and so forth. It doesn't need to be to replace in the green's grocer. It will never happen that. It's just not feasible for the amount of humans we have in this continent.
00:36:50
Speaker
And so, you know, that's that to understood, but that does not mean that forages, true forages are only the ones that are 100% fully hunted and harvested live, because I don't know any.
00:37:11
Speaker
I don't know anyone who is fully a hundred percent, you know, hunting goddess, you know, just that's, that's not a reality we can leave. Um, same, but we, we still are for just, we still are psychological participants and, and that in itself is important now.
00:37:35
Speaker
That's in terms of foraging, is it sustainable? In terms of what I think is important for me to, for people to understand when they come to my workshop, so for people to understand how to approach foraging is the realization that it's a journey,
00:38:03
Speaker
and that we all are at different stages of this journey. And there is things you learn now, but you will only understand in a decade time. And it's not that they are difficult to understand. You learn them now, you understand what it means now. In 10 years time, you get it. Can you give an example of that?
00:38:31
Speaker
Okay, a couple of examples. One is the word of a beautiful man that I knew, Uncle Don. And we had lots of conversation in the year, I used to come and have coppers. And one of the things stayed with me was years ago is saying, you know, like, understanding
00:38:57
Speaker
how to live on the land, understanding ecologies. And there is, in his words, you white fellows, you need to understand that it's simple. Simple. And you all look for complexities and the different things. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's simple. Simple. It's obvious.
00:39:20
Speaker
You're looking at it. You know what it is. You know it already. And you look at all of these things to just distract and things and you miss what you're looking right in front of your eyes. It's simple. You're looking at it. You can see it, okay?
00:39:36
Speaker
That simple, though, it doesn't mean that it's easy and that it's trivialized, that it's simple, therefore it's primitive, it's infantile. That simple is extremely complex.
00:39:53
Speaker
And once you understand the complexity, you understand how simple it is. It is simple and it's made of complexities. It's complex and yet it's simple.
00:40:10
Speaker
mushroom example, mushroom season, mushroom example. I get all sorts of people come into my workshops and all sorts of level, all sorts of place in the life, all sorts of journeys, okay? There's different people coming to my workshop for totally
Emotional Reflections and Gratitude
00:40:27
Speaker
different reasons, okay? But there's a commonality, particularly for
00:40:34
Speaker
the people that have never done foraging before or at the very least never done mushroom foraging, okay? Because mushroom foraging is kind of accelerating, you know, you're going to the forest as abundance, it's incredible to witness, okay? And there is a very interesting steps the many of these people go through, I see it in the eyes, time and time again.
00:41:04
Speaker
And they don't know about mushrooms. I teach about mushrooms. They go out and look for the mushrooms. And with my knowledge in the years, I just told them, this is what you're looking for. I show them. This is what you're looking for. Put them in the hands. This is what you're looking for, OK? So and go out in the forest with the basket, keen eyes. Oh, I'm a forager. Let's go and find the mushrooms. And they see nothing.
00:41:33
Speaker
You know, they walk and walk and see nothing, and they walk and walk and run the mushrooms run the mushrooms in a bloody hell you know they're saying that's mushroom everywhere. What are the mushrooms, walk and walk and walk until you find your first mushroom it's obvious it's big it's in front of your eyes you nearly step on it.
00:41:51
Speaker
You step on, nearly step on it. Oh, here's the mushroom. Amazing. Oh, that's incredible. Got my mushroom. Woo, woo. Cut it, put it in the basket, you know, and, and walk back. And on the walk back, now that you know what you're looking for, because you've seen it on the forest floor, you've seen the mushroom, you see what it looks like. This is what you're looking for. You walk back and you see all of the mushrooms you didn't see on the way in.
00:42:23
Speaker
you actually know what you're looking at. Okay, it's not that they were not there, it just, you didn't get it.
00:42:32
Speaker
you just didn't know the color, the hump under the pine needles, or then the quirkiness and things. So what's that? Oh, that's what it is. The glittering or something that make you aware that stand there, just there, there's a mushroom. Oh, far out. There's several. Yeah. And so in that
00:43:01
Speaker
And that process is actually quite interesting. You know, we can talk about from a point of view of biology, you know, something actually happened to your retina. They call it pattern recognition. You know, your ability to see a particular shape, color, whatever in the forest is, you know, it's something actually, they've proven something happened in your retina and you look on a particular color and when you go back, you can actually see it because you know what you're looking at.
00:43:29
Speaker
It's a bit like Westwally. You can't find anything, and until you find one, you can see all of the others, because you know what you're looking for.
00:43:40
Speaker
that pattern recognitions the ability to see mushrooms in the forest floor and that's something quite primordial on people and something that sits down in your guts is something that once you had the experience or you as an animal self
00:44:03
Speaker
walking in an ecology, finding food, no gatekeepers, yeah just you, animal self, ecology, food.
00:44:13
Speaker
And it does something primordial, exhilarating. You just harvest your first mushroom. You see two, three, four mushrooms everywhere. It becomes kind of like a fever, yeah? And transform people into these uber foragers that fill their box and they still, the box is already full and put the mushroom in their hat, you know? And they just come back. They've got the full box already. Oh, one more, one more, one more.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's an exhilarating step. I've seen it happen so many times. And so this is not me doing that. This is the forest.
00:44:57
Speaker
doing it to them. I just create the premises, the setup, then the preliminary knowledge for this shift to happen, and then the forest will teach you. And then the forest will allow that spark in your guts to happen. That connection with the world that you, the connection with, you know,
00:45:25
Speaker
deep time, rewilding, call it whatever you want. The fact that all of a sudden, you are, it dawns on you. Far out. The forest is so generous. Thank you, forest. Yeah? And then, in day in itself, I didn't do that. They don't themselves. Or rather, the forest.
00:45:54
Speaker
did it. And it's only one step. There's more. Allow for more learnings. Open up. Open up. I'm getting shivers because you can step into the forest or step into your backyard and greet it and say hello for
00:46:14
Speaker
days and days and months and years and it might be 10 years before you hear it say hello back that of course you're part of this of course everything's in conversation but you have to keep going out there and greeting it and
00:46:29
Speaker
remaining open to that response and that can take a very long time. It's about intent. If you want to hear it, you hear it. And it's not even a word. It's not even a sound. And it's not even, yeah, it's not even a sound. It's visual, it's energetic, it's all together. You know, you just get out.
00:46:55
Speaker
and you get it. So yes, plants is an ecology incentive and there is ways to learn it. It's simple. You've got another, I don't know how many other languages, but
00:47:12
Speaker
I do know you've got Piedmontese, your traditional mother tongue that probably affords you a different perspective altogether. You've already referenced words that there is no translation for, and you have spoken about the word weeds not really carrying the same energy of reprimand and hatefulness in your mother tongue. So is there anything you can illuminate around the way that you see the world
00:47:38
Speaker
in other languages, in other ways that maybe myself as a purely English speaker might not.
00:47:49
Speaker
I'd like to... First of all, a little window. I grew up in Piedmontese. Piedmontese is my local language when I grew up in northwestern Italy, in the region of Piedmont. It's a protocol language. It has similar common roots with French.
00:48:16
Speaker
It sits down in common with Languedoc and other languages in that region. It's a language of the place.
00:48:30
Speaker
and in itself that is something to reflect on. So the language of a place is the language that grew out of the relationship between humans and place. It's not a language that
00:48:49
Speaker
was imposed on the place, like in my case Italian or here in Australian English. It's not being imposed coming from elsewhere as a communication tool, but it's a language that grew out of the relationship, intimate relationship of the people with the place. To that end, when I was
00:49:14
Speaker
a living and working in my in the dairy farm when I grew up in the small village and the local pimenti's peasants they had names for all locations all around because you know they work inside you know that's the field that's there and that's the
00:49:33
Speaker
you know the pastures or whatever so that's the river that's the the dishes for the water you know so the working relationship the things every single place uh had a specific name in language and um like untuya uh lafinda raska um uh things that uh labarua uh you know so you know
00:49:58
Speaker
places like that. And these words grew out of that particular place. Okay, so there were words growing out of the place. I'm talking about, you know, every 300 meters, there was a different name.
00:50:19
Speaker
you know, so we're talking about that level of psychogeography, that level of language geography. Yeah, so extremely complex and in dispersed. Okay, so that's that language from a place carries
00:50:44
Speaker
the place in itself, okay? I'm trying very hard to learn Wiradjuri language, like what I am right now. I'm not doing very well, you know, but you know, I'm trying, I'm trying. Because that's the language of place, of here, okay? And okay, so that's that.
00:51:09
Speaker
that parenthesis. Communicating in different languages allows you to use different decoding or different thinking processes so much that there is concept that can only be understood
00:51:29
Speaker
within a language framework, because that language framework would have the terms to define the concept. When translated is still missing things. And that specific set of understanding is related to where the language belongs, where the language is relevant.
00:51:54
Speaker
you know, coming back to language being the voice of place. A classic example is the Inuit who have 50 plus words for snow. Why? Because there's snow everywhere, you know, and why would you, we need any more names for snow but snow because that's all
00:52:17
Speaker
we have kind of thing you understand so there's a relevance and then and a usefulness for this concept to be articulated or not okay so speaking different language allows you to reflect on complex from a different perspective with different tools to unpack that concept and
00:52:43
Speaker
you see the benefit is not, I don't know, but that is a reality. And I remember growing up learning Italians and there were plenty of things you cannot be translated in Italians and then learning English and there were plenty of people who cannot be translated in English. Plenty of things cannot be translated in English. There's an approximation which kind of
00:53:07
Speaker
doesn't give it really pay respect to the actual concept. Classic example, the concept of weeds in English. Weeds in English is derogative, is a qualitative judgment on a species that grew up by themselves, qualitative judging came from a species that see value on it or not, or rather a species that
00:53:33
Speaker
have an opinion of what you grow or not in that things. If it's not what I plant, it dies a weed. It doesn't even matter what plant it is. If I didn't plant, it is a weed. Yeah.
00:53:47
Speaker
The example I use is the rose bush in the middle of a cornfield is a weed. A corn plant in the middle of a rose garden is a weed. It's not what it is. It's what you think should belong there. And it's qualitative judgment based on our opinions of what the ecology should do.
00:54:06
Speaker
So that weed is very restrictive, it's derogative, it can be anything, it's just what you don't like. To the level of weeding out, the place can be used metaphorically in various contexts.
00:54:22
Speaker
and just taking away the unwanted. And say, well, the words we use in Italian is erbaccia, which is similar to the Pimenti's arbas. Then the line is called girosui, in the language, tarasako in Italian. And so, you know, it's not arbas, it's girosui.
00:54:49
Speaker
So it's not, it doesn't have a generic name of based on qualitative judgment, it's got a name in itself. And, you know, your D, nettle, is
00:55:03
Speaker
Ortea is not a weed. Or whatever. There's a much more language related to botany. There's a much more complex botanical literacy where I grew up, in the context I grew up. Over here, we just tend to blanket everything, the useful and the weeds.
00:55:25
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. And I appreciate being able to ask you really divergent lateral questions because I know you've thought deeply about a lot of subjects. So I apologize for taking us off the specific foraging path, but I also have a lot of faith that I can with you because I recognize that you are many, many
00:55:47
Speaker
many things, you know, amongst them, artist and lover of language. And of course we are, yeah, and I just love the breadth. It's simple, yet it's complex. Perfect, yes. But Diego, there are two really specific things I'd love to ask you about before we have to part ways today, and I'm sorry to bring it from this beautiful ephemeral.
00:56:11
Speaker
space back into the realm of kind of, you know, rigidity. But I don't want to miss the opportunity to hear your perspectives on a couple of really specific things. So the first one is we are in this incredible season of abundance, at least in our hemisphere and our climate zones. It is just
00:56:31
Speaker
a feast of forageables and the garden is abundant and nature is in its last flush of generosity before bunkering down for winter.
00:56:42
Speaker
I'd love to hear what you have to say to people about noble, reverential, ethical foraging at any time really, but especially as folks might be thinking of heading out to fill their baskets with mushrooms, with fungi. What is the way to respectfully engage in modern foraging? I would like to start by saying
00:57:09
Speaker
Please learn from your mistakes or please learn from your interactions. Please become aware of your impact.
00:57:28
Speaker
because by becoming aware of your impact, you can adjust that. Rather than tell people, you should not do this, you should do this, you should do that, I would like to tell a responsibleized people, act as a caretaker. Be aware of your impact. It directly benefits you.
00:57:56
Speaker
because if you go in a specific place and you have 20 dandelions and you pull out 20 dandelions, the year after you go back there, there's none left. So you would know it yourself that maybe you were a bit harsh. Yes, what's important in that is
00:58:22
Speaker
to become aware and to be humble enough to accept the feedback. Be humble in nature. Accept the feedback. Yeah, so ethical foraging. There is different things can withstand different interactions.
00:58:45
Speaker
like, you know, mushroom season, let's talk about mushrooms. At times there is people who talk about, oh, everyone's learning about mushrooms, we're going to run out to mushroom, we're going to pick them all out, kind of thing. And that's kind of not true.
00:59:05
Speaker
Yeah, so I understand where that comes from. I respect that sentiment of want to safeguard ecologies, leave the mushrooms to the animals. Yeah, there's not many animals eating mushrooms. Not the one I teach anyhow, pine mushrooms, slugs, plenty, but animals, not many.
00:59:26
Speaker
But to that, so different ecology, different organism can be interacted in different way. Example, Dandelions was saying before, you pull them by the root. All 20 of them, the deer after, you're lucky if you get one or two of the baby ones.
00:59:49
Speaker
leftover from the seeds. Okay, so you kind of compromise the colony. Okay, so that's a direct impact doesn't take long to witness. Okay, great. Now, the mushrooms, there is an abundance of mushrooms, you go out and you harvest the good looking ones, you know, you just leave the rotting ones, okay. And that is not going to compromise the organism because the mushrooms
01:00:21
Speaker
the fruiting body of the organism underground and the fruit and the sporophores the sporing body of the organism underground is a strategy to spread spores okay they come up they look what they look because they open up sit down the spores and the spores are the you know inverted comma the seed of the organism it's not
01:00:54
Speaker
by harvesting the mushrooms, you effectively fulfilling your biological contract with the species, okay? So the fungi, the mycelia underground, create the sporing body so that the spores can travel. But you, mammal, picking up the spores, pull things and taking it away and spread it around, you helping the organism.
01:01:14
Speaker
Correct, but let me get away with that.
01:01:22
Speaker
Spores are only a backup plant for the organism because fungus, mycelia, keep growing regardless of spores. They keep growing all the time. They keep proliferating and growing. Spores are a backup organism in case of disruption like fire, flood, extreme dry weather for years.
01:01:50
Speaker
I don't know, so there's this pause, it's a backup organism, the tough, the long lasting, the organism can sprout again. So there is being studies, for example, in Switzerland, 25 years long research project in Switzerland, they love the mushrooms, they harvest something like three to 400 species. And they done the studies looking at how
01:02:19
Speaker
foraging mushroom affects the plurality and quantity of fungi species in a particular ecology and they find out that doesn't really affect. What does affect the mushroom is the stomping, okay? Walking in the forest and stomping everything, this wrap room of environment, okay? So like you go there with the dirt bike and or whatever or when you're going harvest pines, you know that harvesting
01:02:49
Speaker
process with big huff moving machineries disrupt the fungi, okay, and it takes years before it fruits again. So that's, this disruption affects the fungus harvesting the mushroom not so much, okay, so it depends. How do you know? Be humble enough to learn, be humble enough to
01:03:16
Speaker
become aware of the feedback. Go back to the same place over and over again, year after year, decade after decade. After decades, you're still learning. You're still piecing it together. It's a slow process. It doesn't mean that you start from nothing. We already carry an incredible amount of knowledge. We are an animal, okay?
01:03:44
Speaker
So just to be clear with one another, we are part of this ecology, we are part of the biome, so we are part of it, okay? So there is an incredible amount of knowledge you own already, it's probably deep inside unsophisticated or
01:04:07
Speaker
at times clouded away by assumption. So be humble enough to go over the assumption, to question yourself, to welcome feedback, and that would make you an ethical forager. Well said. Thanks Diego.
01:04:33
Speaker
So my final question is one that sounds very whiny and I am annoyed at myself in advance for even asking this question because I don't think it has an answer but I'm so curious to ask people like you for a perspective on resilience when there's not enough food on the shelves. What happens if our industrialized food systems collapse?
01:05:00
Speaker
in the event of social upheaval, systemic breakdown, how do you see these skills feeding us? And can they? What do you think is important that we take for granted, like food?
01:05:16
Speaker
Thank you for your question. So I'm going to answer that in two parts, one part direct answer and one part kind of framing what I do in the light of such a question. So my answer is, first of all, the systemic fragility
01:05:43
Speaker
that you talk about the fact that, you know, we live in a brittle society.
01:05:50
Speaker
it cracks every way, okay? It implies that the actual system that might or might not come apart are systems that, first of all, are system that are very new, okay? So we rely on a whole bunch of things. How can we do without this bunch of things? A hundred years ago, there never were.
01:06:20
Speaker
There never was international distribution. There never was electricity. There never was running water or, you know, flashing toilets. So, you know, we just kind of, it's not, oh, what's going to happen? Everything is going to collapse. You know, 100 years ago, it was fine.
01:06:45
Speaker
So, you know, that's, yeah, that. Just put it out there, you know. So, there's that. So, there is just kind of a reset and kind of a drawback to a system rest reliant on these inputs.
01:07:02
Speaker
these external inputs that made us dependent and at the same times professed themselves as essential. And there's a whole bunch of things that we see as essential that could be disputed as sensibility.
01:07:21
Speaker
Um, you know, you live in a tiny house. I can see it from your videos, you know, that day in itself, you know, there's a whole bunch of things to say about that. You know, the need of space, but regardless does that. And, um, so the skill that I teach, um, are skills that mean they're ancient skills foraging. People have a name for it these days, foraging. A hundred years ago, they didn't call it foraging.
01:07:49
Speaker
They called it, here's the bag, get out of here, come back with food. That's what they called it. And no one fought much of it. Oh, I'm foraging mushrooms. Now is actually one of the other jobs you need to do together to go and get the eggs from the chicken.
01:08:07
Speaker
Yeah. So while you're there, get something in the lines kind of thing. And so there's that. So demystifying, foraging, and demystifying and also anchoring back to an older self, you know, foraging what the skills that I teach are skills that we all had up to three generations ago, three generations ago,
01:08:33
Speaker
Our grandmothers, your grandmother would not need me, a funny guy with a funny accent to tell her what she can eat out of the backyard. Doesn't matter where you're from. This was common knowledge all over the world.
01:08:47
Speaker
And then we let it go, you know, industrial agriculture, supermarkets, all of that. We just became uncool to pick wits in the car, in the park. But anyhow, so that's foraging. We've been practicing foraging things forever, okay? Evolutionary, whether you believe in evolution or creationisms, I can speak to both by evolutionary,
01:09:15
Speaker
We are the evolutionary result of whatever resources we found around us. Okay? So, you know, before, speaking before, when we were a single-cell organism, we are whatever came out of whatever resources we managed to extract nutrients from around us.
01:09:38
Speaker
And we are the evolution of results to maximize the way to extract nutrients around us. So we actually grow bigger and more efficient. You know, and up to relatively recently evolutionary, we were a very small player and actually quite in danger of dying out.
01:10:00
Speaker
at some point in bottlenecks of evolution, okay? So, before we were fishes, before we were monkeys, before we were humans, okay? Before internet. So, you know, we've been practicing zinc foraging since forever, and then we stopped three generations ago. So that's, so you understand this girl we're talking about, we've been doing this a long time, a long, long time.
01:10:27
Speaker
before we can speak, before we could walk, before we had brains. Reacquainting yourself with foraging skills is just a matter of just allowing yourself to learn, allowing yourself to get out and bask in the abundance of nature,
01:10:48
Speaker
Foraging skills is actually an excellent skill to get back these days because automatically you walk out to wherever you are, walk out on the door and you see food everywhere. And that in itself is amazing, particularly at this time of environmental anxiety, societal anxiety, you know, whatever, economic anxiety, all of these things to just the knowledge, the fact
01:11:18
Speaker
the knowledge of the fact that you walk out of your door, there is food and medicine right there, it does amazing, okay? It just settles down quite a lot of things. Whatever that comes, here comes the zombie, I eat weeds. You carry on zombie. Yeah. Say that as well.
01:11:43
Speaker
And following on, following on from that, I place my teaching in abundance. Often enough, when there is conversation of survival of, you know, I mean, self-sufficiency also touching this and that, you know, there's this idea of, as a species, we need to get ready for system collapse and all of that.
01:12:10
Speaker
And all of this conversation, I understand where they come from, but they have an underlying narrative of scarcity and competition, okay? And what I tried to teach sits in abundance. There is abundance everywhere. You just need to see it. And in itself, I kind of alleviate
01:12:41
Speaker
anxiety, to some respect. Growing your own food, it's incredible, isn't it? You establish this relationship with your vegetable patch. You love it, you know, and whatever you get out of it, you cherish it. Every single leaf, you know, and it doesn't have a matter of the monetary value of whatever you're eating. It's that relationship between growing food and feeding yourself.
01:13:08
Speaker
that is so fulfilling and appeasing and you know just um it empowers you and makes you happy and then maybe there is something to reflect in that too and whether that is driven by ecological of societal anxiety or not still is a good thing you know doesn't matter if what is your driving things
01:13:38
Speaker
grow your own food, and while you're there, have a look at the dandelions that grows amongst your own food. You don't need to grow that, it grows itself, chickweed, it grows itself. That's great. Thank you, thank you.
01:13:50
Speaker
Oh Diego, my cheeks are cramping from the magnitude of my smile and my eyes are also exhibiting this kind of strange wetness. I'm feeling really emotional and also exhilarated and so delighted by being in conversation with you.
01:14:09
Speaker
Just finally, your book, Eat Weeds, was such a success and is such a success and so many of us cherish it. I'm wondering what you have in the works. It was a long process. That book took 20 years to write.
01:14:24
Speaker
And it took a COVID to write, actually. It was 20 years in the making, and it took a COVID to write. And put a lot in that book, me, and also the people I work with, these beautiful images by Helen Argy.
01:14:46
Speaker
drawings by Mira Wells, recipes from Mani, Mani Fox, you know, this beautiful love in that book that comes from several people. This is people I've been working with for years, okay, so it was in a way, I mean, although by my name, this is a celebration of relationships that's been going, conversations have been going for many, many years. Some of these images, the images in that book, I don't know,
01:15:12
Speaker
10, 12, 15 years old kind of thing, so way before the book was thought of. Some of the drawings just as March 2012 was that, yeah, 10 years old. There you have it, 2011, yeah.
01:15:29
Speaker
Long-standing relationships, respected and paid respect. What's in the book and what's in the work? I don't know. The publisher asked me if I want to write something else.
01:15:45
Speaker
I'm thinking about it. I'm so grateful that you're in the world, Diego, and that we can have this conversation on such a beautiful morning in such a glorious season. And I just cherish your work and this connection. Thank you. Thank you, Katie. I love your broadcast. Thank you so much for your work in spreading good words out there. And we're all part of the ecology.
01:16:13
Speaker
We all partner in ecology, we all complex and we all have something to offer.
01:16:22
Speaker
That was the wonderful, warm, wise, and weedy Diego Bonetto. I've linked the conversation we had a few years ago on the Future Studying podcast in the show notes too, if you're curious to compare and contrast. I've been receiving some really inspiring and uplifting messages from listeners that I'd love to acknowledge on air, also because sometimes it's hard to get back to you all and public displays of gratitude are, I hope, a small consolation.
01:16:52
Speaker
Mayer and Frankie sent me a hilarious two-headed video message saying that they loved last week's episode with Tristan Ghouli. Manu got in touch to say that Resculience kept her company, fed her delirious mind with fodder over multiple international flights. Jesse sent me a bloody incredible email pondering the midway point, welcoming more podcast guests who can speak to those first
01:17:18
Speaker
ginger, tentative steps away from the system. I really hate you, Jesse, and I'll see who I can tee up. Ash, Rob Johns, your uncannily well-timed watering of my wilted podcasting soul is unsurprising, given your knack for gardening. And of course, Resculiances, epic patrons on Patreon who are helping me produce this podcast independently without having to play it safe, polish off my weird edges, and pander to vested interests.
01:17:48
Speaker
Shoutouts to my new Patreons, Kat and Robin, thank you so much, and Christine and Danny who've signed up as free members, which is also a cool option if you just want to be notified about my behind-the-scenes posts. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash reskillience
01:18:06
Speaker
for about the same price per month as a slice of carrot cake or a can of wild-caught sardines. And it really makes a difference to the sustainability of the show because at this stage it's my full-time unpaid passion project. You can also simply give Resculiant five stars on Spotify or leave a sweet review on iTunes. Thank you so much for listening and have a Resculiant week.