Diego Bonetto

Diego Bonetto (born 1969) is an Italo-Australian expert forager, cultural practitioner, environmental educator, artist, and speaker. He specializes in community activation through art and education, highlighting the usefulness of wild plants within ecologies. He is a key foraging leader in Australia, re-educating communities on the viability and benefits of harvesting and using wild food and medicine, with a focus on introduced species, ‘weeds’.

The act of foraging is undergoing a revival through pioneers like Steve Brill and Leda Meredith in New York, Green Deane and Pascal Baudar in California, Rob Greenfield in Florida, Alexis Nikole Nelson in Ohio, and John Wright in Dorset, UK. This practice is much celebrated by top chefs like Rene Redzepi of NOMA, Denmark.

Early life and education

Bonetto was born in Northern Italy and grew up on a dairy farm. He is the last generation in his family who speaks his mother tongue Piedmontese. He learned the ancient craft of gathering wild food and medicine from the fields and woods while caring for resources from his mother Lucia. In the mid-90s, he moved to Australia and, in 2003, completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Western Sydney University. He was awarded the Hellen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2008. Bonetto spent many years working in orchards and garden centers. From an early age, he had extensive botanical knowledge, and as part of his performance art class, he had the opportunity to produce films, contribute to festivals, and present his unique artworks to reconnect communities with plants. He also founded a platform to address the misuse and waste of ‘weeds’ by land managers.

Career

Bonetto started his professional career in 2000 as a co-director at SquatSpace, working with the company for twenty years. His art practice encompasses collaborative, socially engaged projects like the Green Bans Art Walk and the Redfern/Waterloo Tour of Beauty to environmental campaigns like the Weedy Connection, celebrating and fostering a culturally aware interpretation of the landscape.

In 2013, Bonetto collaborated with numerous developers, web producers, foragers, and horticulturalists and contributed as a founding partner to create Wild Food Map, a plant community that mapped wild food sources worldwide to identify public domain food and medicinal plants living in the landscape, now discontinued.

In 2018, Bonetto created a marketplace for wild produce, Wildfood Store, where he served as a founding director. It was a viable forager’s network involving farmers and chefs to provide an avenue for up-cycling byproducts of agricultural practices, weeds. He was also a founding partner of Big Fag Press, Sydney’s artist-run printing collective established in 2004.

Bonetto co-founded the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation in 2016 to bring together writers and artists interested in bringing cultural change to the world. He has been serving as an environmental educator in Wild Stories since 2006 and offers urban foraging workshops by collaborating with chefs, herbalists, environmentalists, and cultural workers to promote cultural understanding.

Bonetto has made appearances on academic forums like the 2007 UTS Conference on Cosmopolitan Civil Societies, University of Technology Sydney, and scientific forums like the Weeds Society of Victoria Annual Seminar, the proceedings of which are published in the Plant Protection Quarterly. He was cast in a cultural and society documentary named The Weedy One, in which he opened up about his struggles.

His work has been acknowledged by media, including two Gardening Australia segments and articles in Collective Hub, Marie Claire, GQ Australia, Lonely Planet, SMH, ABC Radio, and SBS Radio and TV. Some of his exhibitions and commissions have been included in Foodfight (a C3West commission in partnership with the MCA and Liverpool Council, Sydney, 2016), The Rocks Windmill (workshops and public sculpture, 2013), Wild Stories (two years of workshops and a solo show, Casula Powerhouse Art Centre, 2012) and State of the Arts (group exhibition, Italian Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2011). In 2017-18, Bonetto offered over 150 workshops and events, personally interacted with over 3000 people, and also appeared on podcasts. His most popular course is the mushroom foraging workshop.

Bonetto is the author of the best-selling book Eat Weeds, a field guide to foraging. It was released in 2022 by Thames&Hudson. Eat Weeds is also available in the USA and UK.

Bonetto regularly collaborates with chefs, distillers, councils, schools, and community groups, facilitating the use and understanding of readily available, often problematic wild resources.