Written by Tanisha Cardozo || Team Allycaral
Goa’s culinary heritage is steadily thinning under the pressures of tourism, urbanisation and changing lifestyles, according to experts presenting their work at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2025. While the erosion may appear gradual, its signs are increasingly visible — from drying salt pans and fading neighbourhood aromas to the quiet disappearance of everyday food knowledge from modern kitchens.
This year’s culinary section brings together four curators — Thomas Zacharias, Prahlad Sukhtankar, Odette Mascarenhas, and the Edible Issues duo of Anushka Murthy and Elizabeth Yorke — who collectively turn the festival into a living archive of what Goa still remembers, and what it risks forgetting.
Chef Prahlad Sukhtankar’s project, Salt, confronts one of Goa’s most tangible losses. Once home to more than 75 salt pans, the state today has barely five main areas of salt production, he says, pointing to generational shifts and land-use changes that are erasing a craft central to Goa’s khazan landscapes. Expanding the lens nationally, Sukhtankar notes that while India once had around 130 indigenous salts, only 30 to 35 are available today, with his team able to source just 18 varieties for the exhibition. Goa’s marine salts, he explains, stand apart for their brininess and the unmistakable scent of the sea — a sensory quality inland salts cannot replicate.
While salt traces what is disappearing from the land, Edible Issues’ Smell Rooms captures what is vanishing from the air. Murthy and Yorke attempt what may be Goa’s first olfactory archive of food heritage, mapping the state through scents that once shaped everyday life. Asking residents what has changed over the past decade, Yorke says many spoke of how fish frying once announced itself across neighbourhoods, making it easy to tell who was cooking what. In today’s air-conditioned homes and sanitised kitchens, those smells are fading, turning scent into memory — one that now needs preservation.
For chef Thomas Zacharias and The Locavore, the focus shifts to imagining the future through absence. His installation asks what India might taste like in the year 2100, when food traditions and agricultural diversity thin out further. Collaborating with Immerse and Quasar Thakore Padmasee, the project reflects on loss at both the farm and cultural levels, questioning how much flavour and knowledge can disappear before it is noticed.
Odette Mascarenhas turns attention inward, excavating Goa’s pre-chilli culinary history across five communities — Hindu artisans, Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, Muslim families, Christian kitchens and Indo-Russo homes. By cooking Goan food without chillies, she reconstructs what the cuisine looked like before Portuguese influence, while also highlighting how everyday home-cooked dishes are steadily disappearing from public spaces as tourism and urban tastes reshape the state’s food narrative.
Together, the four curators transform Serendipity’s culinary showcase into a powerful ledger of loss and possibility — documenting what Goa stands to lose, while quietly asking whether it is still willing to listen, remember and reclaim its edible past.
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