What Does Loss Taste Like? is an immersive, multisensory installation by Chef Thomas Zacharias and The Locavore, in collaboration with IMMERSE and QTP, that explores the slow disappearance of taste, memory, and biodiversity in a rapidly shifting foodscape.
What Does Loss Taste Like? is an immersive, multisensory installation by Chef Thomas Zacharias and The Locavore, in collaboration with IMMERSE and QTP, that explores the slow disappearance of taste, memory, and biodiversity in a rapidly shifting foodscape.
The experience unfolds across five interconnected rooms—each anchored in a once-familiar space now altered by climate collapse, cultural amnesia, and technological takeover.
Each vignette draws from ethnographic insight and lived experience, grounded in communities already navigating food loss, ecological disruption, and displacement.
It draws from what eating in India has always meant—an act of memory and belonging—and how these anchors are loosening in today’s world. The family kitchen grows quieter. Markets are vanishing, and with them vanish skills once considered essential. On our land, the losses are starker. Floods, droughts, and rising heat strip fields of familiar crops. Small farms, the backbone of Indian agriculture, become unviable. Nearly half of India’s traditional rice varieties have already disappeared. Mango, kokum, banana, brinjal—once abundant—are being pushed to the margins or into extinction. Farmers are forced into uniform, engineered harvests that may feed but do not nourish.
Inside our bodies, changes are underway too. Processed foods dominate most of our diets, filling us with calories but leaving us hollow. This immersive experience is not a prediction, but a possibility—one that grows closer each day.
An Experience that Unfolds Across Seven Spaces
01 The Time Capsule
Before entering the first space, visitors filled out an Ancestry Card that prompted them to recall family dishes, inherited kitchen knowledge and food traditions they hoped would survive. Beyond a black curtain, a narrow corridor carried them through a cascade of news reports—from crop failures and heatwaves to rising sea levels and vanishing foods. As the timeline accelerated from the present to 2100, the familiar became frighteningly plausible.
02 The Advertorial Waiting Room
In a gleaming waiting room, advertisements sold seed, soil, water, and air as engineered products—patented, licensed, and available upon subscription. The language was relentlessly cheerful, presenting technological control and corporate convenience as solutions to ecological collapse. Beneath the optimism lay a world in which nature was no longer freely accessible.
03 The Food Archive
Here, visitors met the Descendant: a food archivist from 2100 trying to reconstruct taste from damaged records of the past. Familiar foods such as rice, mango, kokum, coffee, and feni appeared behind protective cases, preserved and catalogued like museum relics alongside their synthetic replacements. Through the Descendant’s questions, visitors became witnesses to—and keepers of—the food knowledge this future had lost.
04 The Festive Table
Ten digital banana leaves glowed across a long dining table as visitors put on headsets that appeared to track and archive their emotional responses. They tasted gelatinous cubes containing faint traces of mango, kokum, and sambar—nutritionally sufficient yet stripped of texture, context, and care. Questions about family, celebration, and memory revealed everything a meal carries beyond sustenance.
05 The Plant Pods
Plants survived here on life support, their roots entangled in pipes and their growth regulated by technology. Among them, an Elder tended a small patch of soil and offered visitors seeds to plant with their bare hands. The encounter placed technological efficiency in direct tension with touch, inherited knowledge, and the unruly intelligence of living ecosystems.
06 The Tree of Life
Beneath a monumental, leafless Tree of Life, the Elder invited visitors to remember a world of fruiting trees, birds, backyards, shared meals, and food grown slowly. The Elder challenged the Descendant’s faith in algorithms and asked the group to sit, listen and imagine a different future. When the Descendant finally removed her smart glasses and tasted a tear running down her cheek, a memory returned: that of salt.
07 The Passage of Hope
A film featuring Chef Thomas Zacharias reminded visitors that they had now returned to 2025—and that the future they had witnessed was not inevitable. Stories of organisations and communities already protecting seeds, biodiversity, food knowledge, and livelihoods offered tangible ways forward. Visitors were invited to answer one final question on a postcard: What would you like to save in 2025?
Explore the Gallery
Postcards From Visitors
How We Transformed the Space
Developed over nine months, What Does Loss Taste Like? evolved through sustained collaboration between The Locavore, IMMERSE, and QTP. Years of conversations with farmers, fishers, cooks, and food communities informed an elaborate research process mapping how climate change, biodiversity loss, technology, and changing food cultures might reshape India by 2100. At SAF, these ideas became an intricate world built through performance, food, set design, sound, light, and technology—and recalibrated each day throughout its eight-day run.
This installation was curated by Chef Thomas Zacharias and The Locavore, in collaboration with IMMERSE and QTP, for the Serendipity Arts Festival (2025)
If you would like us to curate similar experiences for you, reach out to us on connect@thelocavore.in.
Explore our full curation for SAF 2025.
