What does the future of food—and its disappearance—look like in an increasingly precarious world? At the 10th edition of Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, we probed these realities further through curations and workshops.
Foodways are faced with several crises. As global temperatures rise, coastlines shift, and local ecosystems come under threat, we wanted to ask harder questions to probe the futures of food: What is it that we will remember in the decades to come, and what might perish unsuspectingly?
Our curations this year at the Serendipity Arts Festival (SAF) in Panjim, Goa, held from 12 to 21 December 2025—ranging from multi-sensory experiences, workshops, and hands-on sessions—allowed visitors to reflect on food through this lens, as well as the people and landscapes that sustain it.
Four Immersive Workshops
Tracing and Archiving Personal Memories Through Taste by Mukta Patil
This workshop was a guided exploration of how personal food memories can be documented, shaped, and preserved. Participants learnt how to frame questions, gather stories, and structure narratives—drawing from The Locavore’s editorial approach.
Mukta Patil is a writer and Projects Editor at The Locavore, where her work explores the intersections of food, climate, and culture through deeply researched storytelling.
+ Once Upon a Taste: A Children’s Food Futures Workshop Series by Usha Chhabra
This four-part workshop series invited children to explore the stories, memories, and futures hidden in the food we eat.
Children dreamt up fantastical foods of the future, preserved their favourite dishes in a “recipe vault”, brought ingredients to life through puppet theatre, and shared their own food memories in a safe, playful space. Together, these experiences help children see food beyond what’s on their plate—as a bridge between people, time, and care.
Designed for children aged 8–12 years, the workshops balanced creativity and reflection, leaving each child with a handmade ‘Cookbook for Tomorrow’ and a renewed curiosity about where their food—and its stories—come from.
Usha Chhabra is a children’s educator and storyteller known for using narrative, puppetry, and play to open imaginative pathways into Indian culture and everyday life.
+ Embracing Your Future Fish by Dr. Aaron Savio Lobo
This workshop explored how shifting ecologies—warming oceans, invasive species, changing marine landscapes—are altering what fish will define our future diets. The session offered a thoughtful look at adaptation, sustainability, and the evolving identity of coastal food.
Dr. Aaron Savio Lobo is a marine conservation researcher who works on the shifting ecologies of India’s coastal and marine systems, with a focus on how changing oceans shape the future of seafood.
Eat the After by Brown Koji Boy (Prachet Sancheti)
This tasting-led workshop used fermentation to explore what remains after change occurs. Participants sampled experimental ferments that reflect decay, transformation, and the afterlife of flavour.
Prachet Sancheti, founder of Brown Koji Boy, is a fermentation innovator whose experimental work with koji and microbial cultures reimagines flavour and transformation.
From the Team
“Over years of travelling across India, I’d experienced this sense of loss in very real ways—ingredients were becoming harder to find, knowledge was disappearing with people, landscapes were changing, and food traditions were slowly slipping away. Those experiences directly informed my work and eventually led me to launch The Locavore. But I kept wondering how I could transfer that feeling of impending loss to an audience. It couldn’t simply be another conversation about climate data or a static exhibition observed from a distance. People needed to step into that possible future and feel the loss for themselves, which is why it had to take the form of an immersive experience.
My shorthand brief to the team became “Black Mirror meets Indian food in the year 2100.” It sounded almost playful, but what we were imagining felt frighteningly plausible. SAF believed in our vision, and we found the right collaborators in IMMERSE and QTP, who came on board very early on and helped us build this world together. We wanted people to leave unsettled, but not without hope—to recognise what is at risk, and also what we still have the agency to protect.”
—Chef Thomas Zacharias, Founder, The Locavore
In the Media
Explore our curation for SAF 2023 here.
