Victualis dinner to showcase native ingredients at Queenies in Kingston

The National Indigenous Culinary Institute chief executive has teamed up with Ngunnawal man Richie Allan and the team at Queenies restaurant in Kingston to create a menu showcasing native ingredients for Victualis, a dinner focusing on sustainable food later this month.

Lovett, a Yuin man from the New South Wales South Coast, will work as cultural consultant along with Mr Allan to ensure the menu is authentic and culturally appropriate to the local region.

"We have a whole ecosystem of foods that are edible that we've been using for thousands of years and should really be the backbone of Australian cuisine," Lovett says.

"We need to be able to source local foods, from local growers, local Aboriginal business and local knowledge holders to be able to use those traditional foods in the right way, understanding where it comes from, and what the traditional practices are."

While the menu isn't finalised, the kitchen is looking at working with briny fresh oysters from Merimbula, lean kangaroo, spicy bush pepper, native herbs and other foods traditionally used in the Canberra area.

"A big part of the event is focusing on local foods and local growers. We don't want to be designing a menu item around things that are completely out of this area," Lovett says.

Sourcing these ingredients will be a challenge. Foraging in national parks is not permitted, and growing native foods in commercial quantities comes with its own challenges.

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"A lot of agriculture focuses on non-native foods and hoofed animals, it's hard to get access to land to grow native foods," Lovett says.

"Some of our native foods take a long time to grow. We're talking about full grown trees that [Indigenous people] will source leaves from or use in lots of different ways, we might access the resin or the bark, and lots of trees based on our cultural practices have different uses.

"[Indigenous people] have cultural practices which dictate what we eat, when we eat and how we eat."

While growing native ingredients is a $100 million industry in Australia, only three per cent is run by Aboriginal-owned businesses. Lovett is pushing for government action to address this problem.

"It's our knowledge, it's our culture. We should be significantly over represented in this, but we're not. And a big part of that is we don't have the land and we don't have the financial investment," he says.

"We don't have the intergenerational wealth that so many other people have, mostly because what was ours was taken, and we didn't have access to continue to do what we used to do. And now we're having cultural misappropriation with our food knowledge."

Victualis will be held on September 28, 6pm at Queenies in Kingston. RSVP via michael.claessens@rdaact.org.au. Amy Carrad from the ANU School of Regulation and Global Governance will be speaking at the dinner.

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