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1 Jock Zonfrillo and Patricia Marrfurra
McTaggart from the Nauiyu Community,
Daly River. 2 Orana’s Magpie Goose.
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The story of Indigenous food culture
Australia’s Indigenous culture goes back at least 60,000 years, and food is a central element of that continuous
story. Now a Scotsman from Adelaide is looking to make sure we don’t lose that connection for ever.
In 2017 Adelaide chef and restaurateur Jock
Zonfrillo got some good news. The South
Australian Government decided to fund his
not-for-profit Orana Foundation to the tune
of $1.25 million, marking a decisive moment
for the Scottish born chef who has been a
passionate advocate for Indigenous food
culture since he arrived in Australia.
Zonfrillo is best known for his widely praised
high end restaurant Orana, which melds
Indigenous ingredients and cooking methods
with high end dining in a way that has won
over both diners and critics. Up until the
government decided to chip in, the Orana
Foundation, which fosters the research,
cultivation and production of native foods,
was supported entirely by the restaurant.
With the government backing, the Orana
Foundation is aiming to create an open-
source database to share information about
native foods, as well as set up a research
and development facility, to be known as the
Australian Food Culture Enterprise, which
will analyse ingredients along the lines
of nutritional information and traditional
cooking methods as well as looking at
how they might be used in contemporary
cooking. To assist in this mammoth task
the Foundation has partnered with the
University of Adelaide, South Australian
Museum and Adelaide Botanic Gardens.
“It’s a really complex situation here in
Australia,” Zonfrillo says. “If you break it all
down into bite sized chunks you are looking
at a culture that has been baking bread
40,000 years before the pyramids were built.
That’s extraordinary. That’s something not
just worth exploring, but also preserving,
nurturing and investigating.”
Zonfrillo is aiming to catalogue 1000
ingredients over the next 12 months, with
the restaurant already donating its 500-odd
data base of ingredients. Beyond that he is
also putting serious work into turning some
of these ingredients, such as Geraldton wax,
into viable products in the retail space and
in the process establishing new commercial
business opportunities in Aboriginal
communities. As he says, it is about restoring
leadership and business acumen skills with
on-the-job business training.
“We have spent a lot of time looking at
projects that we ren’t successful as we
certainly don’t want to make the same
mistakes,” he says. “But we are coming at
it from a different perspective, one of food
and culture. There are so many aspects
to the foundation that make an ingredient
scalable and it’s not just the ingredient itself,
it comes down to relationships, respect and
knowledge sharing.”
www.cimmagazine.com Convention & Incentive Marketing, Issue 6, 2017 21