By late afternoon, when the distractions of the Serendipity Arts Festival 2025 in Panjim, Goa, blur into a low, pleasant hum, a steady gravitational pull begins to form around one work. The destination is What Does Loss Taste Like?—a multisensory installation that resists easy description and refuses passive viewing. It is neither performance nor exhibition in any conventional sense. What unfolds instead is intimate, asking participants to register climate loss through the body.
Conceived by chef Thomas Zacharias of The Locavore, the Mumbai-based restaurant he co-founded and leads, the work unfolds as a quiet journey into an imagined India of 2100—a future shaped by climate collapse, ecological erosion, and technological optimisation. In this world, food still exists, but taste has become functional rather than sensorial. Meals nourish but carry no pleasure. Flavour has been steadily erased. “Taste is the most fragile memory we have,” Zacharias reflects. “You can document recipes, photograph food, record voices—but flavour only survives if someone carries it in their body. Once that chain breaks, it’s gone forever.”
Rather than staging climate change as apocalypse or abstract data, the installation translates it into something more insidious: daily diminishment. Climate science quietly grounds every imagined detail—shrinking yields of wheat and chickpeas, rice harvests made unreliable by erratic monsoons, familiar ingredients turning scarce, then mythical. “Climate loss doesn’t arrive all at once,” Zacharias says. “It arrives meal by meal. One thing disappears, then another. And eventually you don’t even remember what you’re missing.” What you eat today, the installation suggests, is already an endangered archive.
Watching Zacharias work, whether in a kitchen or through this installation, is to watch someone think out loud. One moment he evokes his grandmother’s kitchen in Kerala—coconut oil hissing, curry leaves cracking sharply against heat. The next, he destabilises that same memory through fermentation, smoke, or an unexpected ingredient sourced from another region. “Memory is not static,” he says. “It mutates every time you return to it. I’m interested in that mutation—what stays, what disappears, and why.”
This approach is deeply tied to Zacharias’ long-standing work. The Locavore is known for its rigorous farm-to-table philosophy, direct partnerships with small farmers, and its insistence on seasonal, regional cooking rooted in Indian ecosystems rather than imported culinary frameworks. More than a restaurant, it functions as a research-driven practice—one that foregrounds indigenous ingredients, forgotten grains, and local supply chains, while questioning industrial food systems and culinary homogenisation. “The Locavore was never just about what’s on the plate,” Zacharias explains. “It was about asking where food comes from, who grows it, who loses when systems collapse, and what knowledge disappears along the way.”
That resistance to forgetting flavour, region, culture, sits at the heart of What Does Loss Taste Like? Yet the work resists slipping into nostalgia or moral instruction. There is playfulness threaded through the experience—a refusal to let reverence harden into sentimentality. You leave quieter than you entered, thinking differently about the next plate you will return to. There is no resolution offered. Instead, the question settles slowly, somewhere between the mouth and the chest. What does loss taste like when it finally arrives?