Dinner Club: Planting the Seed

Dinner Club: Planting the Seed A two-part series on food, ethnobotany, and the people who carry plants across time

Presented by UMSU Events with UMSU Burnley and Soil and Plant Society

Plants don't exist separate from us. They shape our lives, how we gather, and how we understand the places we come from. They've also been carried, modified, named, and transformed by human hands across thousands of years and thousands of kilometres. Every food we eat is a product of that relationship.

In this first of two sessions, we gather around broccoli and Warrigal Greens, two plants with very different stories of human contact, to explore ethnobotany, artificial selection, and the mobility of food and people. What does it mean to cultivate a plant? To name it? To eat it? And what does it mean when plants, land, and the knowledge around them get caught up in colonisation and economic horticulture?

We start in the soil, planting together, with hands in the ground. Then we talk, eat, and sit with the question of what it means to see plants not as separate from us, but as part of us.

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The guest speakers:

Ian Adams is a Master of Urban Horticulture student and UMSU Campus Coordinator at Burnley. Before joining UniMelb, Ian was a high school science and humanities teacher, and then a primary school kitchen garden teacher. Along with other students, Ian has helped start a kitchen garden at Burnley that is delivering fresh local produce to Union Mart at Parkville – focussing on delicious foods from many different cultures around the world. Let him know if there is something you’d like to see grown in Melbourne!

Jakobi is a Bachelor of Science student in Plant Science with plans to pursue postgraduate study in ethnobotany. A Djab Wurrung and Dhauwurd Wurrung man, he works as a First Peoples Learning Officer at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, where he shares cultural connections across people, plants and landscapes, and supports First Peoples engagement and projects.

At the University of Melbourne, he serves as a MITS Science Demonstrator and MISEP Facilitator, promoting STEM engagement and education for First Peoples secondary students. He also volunteers at the University of Melbourne Herbarium, contributing to the curation of specimens, and is Education Officer for the Soil and Plant Society.

Jakobi is a co-founder of Petrichor Collaborative, a landscape architecture and research practice centred on First Peoples place-based storytelling and biocultural knowledge. He is passionate about connecting people with plants and using storytelling to foster reciprocal custodianship of Country.

Gregory Lorenzutti is a dancer, photographer and urban farmer currently undertaking a PhD with the VCA Dance Faculty. His practice moves between contemporary and Brazilian dance, performance photography and embodied movement practices, all grounded in an ongoing dialogue between the body, creativity and the natural world.

This session is supported by Seed and Plant Society (SAPS). SAPS is a University of Melbourne student society connecting people with plants and soil — through field trips, workshops, gardening, and expert talks — to build ecological literacy, wellbeing, and food sovereignty advocacy.

Session Two goes further: bush foods, Indigenous seasonality, storytelling, custodianship, and the layered knowledge systems that have sustained food cultures on this continent for millennia.

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