Seven Valleys Wild Food Festival -Wild Talks at the Union Theatre

Saturday 21 February | 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Location: Union Theatre, Lithgow

Wild Talks is an afternoon of ideas, stories and conversation exploring wild food, culture, creativity and our relationship with the natural world. Hosted by forager, author and educator Diego Bonetto, the program brings together diverse voices whose work sits at the intersection of land, ecology, and food systems.

Presented as a curated series of talks, conversations and Q&A sessions, Wild Talks invites audiences to listen, reflect and engage with big ideas shaping how we live, eat and connect to place. Running from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm at the Union Theatre in Lithgow, this indoor event offers a thoughtful, immersive experience that sets the tone for the festival’s evening street celebrations, grounding the weekend in ideas, context and connection.

This event is free to attend, but we ask that you please RSVP here. Please RSVP for the whole event even if you will attend only one or some of the talk sessions.

Speakers

Introduction by Diego Bonetto – Eat Weeds, they’re free.

Diego Bonetto is an artist, forager, author, keen naturalist and award-winning cultural worker based in NSW.

His work enables convivial conversations around belonging, sustainability and agency. Bonetto offers an alternative for people to re-engage with their neighbourhoods, streets and footpaths through edible adventures. Bonetto regularly offers workshops, foraging tours and events that reframe environmental identity and stewardship. He collaborates extensively with chefs, journalists, academics, craft workers, herbalists, brewers, educators, environmentalists and landowners, providing insights into edible and medicinal wild plants in Australia while fostering culturally aware interpretations of the landscape.

Diego will also be at the main event on Main Street.

1pm – Corey Grech – Salt and Pepperberry.

Corey Grech is the sole owner of Native Botanical Brewery a family owned and run Native Food business that celebrates First Nation food in beverages, packages herbs and spices as well as infused roasted coffees, Corey is a Gamillarray, Wonnarua and Wayan man that has been in the Bush food industry for over 20 years.

His talk, titled Salt & Pepperberry is a First Nations lens on the Australian Bush Food Industry and the core issues facing us all.

Corey will also be at the main event on Main Street with the Native Botanical Brewery stall.

2pm – Gabriel Gutnik – Forest Floor to Fine Dining

Gabriel Gutnik is the founder of Ziggy’s Wildfoods, an award-winning Australian producer working at the intersection of wild foraging, fermentation and contemporary cuisine. His work transforms native and wild-harvested ingredients into high-value condiments and flavour systems used by leading restaurants, bars and hospitality groups in Australia and abroad. Gabriel’s practice blends deep respect for landscape and seasonality with rigorous technique, long fermentation and modern flavour thinking.

His talk Forest Floor to Fine Dining explores the journey of wild ingredients: from overlooked plants, fungi and flowers gathered from forests & coastlines, to refined  high-value products trusted by top-tier kitchens and venues. Gabriel shares how wild foods can move beyond novelty or rusticity, and instead become precise, dependable, and commercially viable components of modern cuisine.

Through real-world examples from foraging, fermentation, and product development, this talk unpacks how time, technique, restraint and intention turn raw wild inputs into polished flavour. It’s a conversation about value – cultural, ecological, and economic – and how respecting origin while embracing craft allows the wild to earn its place on the most discerning menus.

Gabriel will also be at the main event on Main Street with the Ziggy’s Wildfoods Stall.

3pm – Nikki Bennetts – How to use the State Forest for fishing, hunting and mushroom harvesting

Nikki Bennetts is Forestry Corporation’s Community Programs Coordinator, Northern Softwoods Area.

4pm – Ilaria Vanni – The Salad Bar at the End of Your Street: How to Read Your Neighbourhood Through Plants

Here is another point of view: foraging is not really about food. It is about learning to read the city and understand your neighbourhood. When you start noticing edible plants, everything shifts. That weedy patch by the railway becomes a salad bar. The tree dropping fruit reveals itself as a guava. Suddenly your neighbourhood is not concrete, brick and glass but a living ecology you are part of.

I learned to forage as a child in Italy by eating spontaneous salad greens, then relearned properly from my aunty and carried this knowledge to Australia. Here, I walked with forager Diego Bonetto, learned from First Nations knowledge keepers about connecting with Country through plants, and swapped stories with plant growers and friends. This kind of knowledge changes how you move through the city. You slow down, notice seasons, and develop care and attention. When you know a place through its plants, you belong there differently. This is how urban foraging creates a sense of place and makes neighbourhoods, one plant encounter at a time.

Ilaria Vanni is a researcher and writer at the Climate, Society and Environment Research Centre (C-SERC) at the University of Technology Sydney. She works on cities and the environment, focusing on how to connect people to local ecologies. Her recent book Neighbourhood Ecologies (Palgrave 2025, with Alexandra Crosby) examines socioecological stewardship in urban spaces.