Rodney Dunn grew up on a farm in rural New South Wales. During his chef apprenticeship he worked under Tetsuya Wakuda at esteemed Sydney restaurant Tetsuya's, before moving into food media. He has since developed recipes for most of Australia's food magazines and worked as food researcher for the Better Homes and Gardens television program. In 2004 he joined Australian Gourmet Traveller as food editor, and continued in the role of contributing food editor for the next 11 years.

In a quest for flavour that only the simple life could bring, Rodney and his family left Sydney in 2007 to begin The Agrarian Kitchen in Tasmania, a farm-based cooking school in the Derwent Valley that allows Rodney to indulge his passion for all things food by growing fruit and vegetables, raising pigs, milking goats and keeping honey bees.

And of course to share this bounty with his students in the form of cooking experiences, including butchery, smoking, wood-fired cookery, baking and preserving. Rodney has a deep love of cookbooks as is evident in his 800-plus strong library. In 2013 Rodney published his first cookbook, The Agrarian Kitchen.