“Cooking makes me feel whole,” chef Zach Green tells 9Honey Kitchen, explaining his return to the cooking career he’d started at 17 after a personal tragedy. But it also also helped him to forge a stronger connection to his Indigenous Australian culture by using Indigenous ingredients. He’s passionate about Indigenous ingredients, but he’s even more driven to spread an awareness and appreciation of Indigenous culture through food. For Zach, a greater knowledge of our unique produce must be coupled with an understanding of the stories behind the food, because these stories are also a way for us to understand the pressures that native food production in Australia faces. It’s not as simple as encouraging people to eat more kangaroo, saltbush or the iconic witchetty grub.

While interest in Indigenous foods grew throughout the 1980s and 90s, there was a certain amount of fatigue around the topic by the early 2000s, and it has only been in the last handful of years that there’s been a renewed excitement about their potential. According to founder of Outback Chef, Jude Mayall, this interest has been spearheaded by a new generation of chefs who champion a connection to Indigenous culture…

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