The future of food is ants, beetle larvae and mealworms

Last week, Tansha Vohra tasted rhinoceros beetle larvae for the very first time in her life. “These are beetles found frequently in compost bins, but we found these larvae growing inside some rotting coconut tree bark at my mentors, Rosie and Peter Fernandes’ permaculture-based garden in Assagao,” says the 32-year-old founder of the Boochi Project. “All its life, all this insect has eaten is coconut bark. We wanted to taste the insect itself, so Peter went by his instincts. We fried it with a quarter teaspoon of beef fat, salt, and pepper. It tasted like bacon—and I cannot describe how good it was!” 

Vohra is enthusing about this unusual gastronomic exploration from the site of her workshop at the Serendipity Arts Festival 2024 in Panjim, Goa—where the Boochi Project was incubated in 2021, and to where it returns now as part of the Food Lab’s deep dive into the future of food. Vohra’s exploration of what it means to decolonise the practice of eating insects began at this same garden in 2018, when the Bengaluru-born communications grad packed up her bags and moved from Mumbai to Goa. Specifically, one sunny afternoon when, instead of getting to the raw cacao fruit she’d never tasted, she ended up, on the advice of some friends, harvesting an ant nest growing on the tree and made a chutney out of it. 

“It was exquisite—exactly my flavour profile, super sour, super tangy,” Vohra recalls. Immediately, her interest was piqued, and with a bit of basic research, she was able to find communities in Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Odisha, Karnataka, and Goa that ate insects. “Typically, these were indigenous or Dalit communities,” she says. “In some way, it was instantly this idea that these were groups of people whose food and culture was not aspirational. No one’s actually celebrating these food cultures, we’re just extracting what we want and leaving them behind. That made me feel like there was something deeper going on here.”

To dig deeper into the wild world of entomophagy (the practice of eating insects), Vohra did her Master’s in food anthropology at SOAS in London, while simultaneously expanding her research into the cultures of insect-eating in India by gathering recipes and holding cookouts. What she has unearthed so far has been endlessly surprising. “The only two states that I haven’t come across an example of insect consumption yet are Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh,” she observes. “They were frying and dipping locusts in honey in Delhi during the Mughal era. In Karnataka, there are communities that still eat red ants. In the Northeast, they eat the World Cup beetle—named so because it comes up once every four years around the time of the FIFA World Cup.” 

This thrust on entomophagy as a critical aspect of the future of food—with respect to climate change, disaster management, and an impending food deficit borne of overpopulation—has been gathering momentum at least since 2012, when the UNFAO released a “magnum opus” on edible insects. Vohra explains, “Insects are the most carbon-efficient form of protein that we’ve come across—and that’s not all they can offer. Unlike chicken and cows, which need vast amounts of horizontal land, insects can be grown and farmed vertically. You can feed them organic kitchen waste for the most part and they use the least amount of water for the same amount of protein.” Restaurants like Noma in Copenhagen listed a grasshopper miso recipe in their book of ferments back in 2018; this year, the Singapore Food Agency officially approved 16 edible insects as safe for human consumption. 

But Vohra’s own real interest, other than “creating flavour bombs in the kitchen”, is the anthropological aspect—at the intersection of where caste and colonisation meet. “In my initial research, I encountered many people who’d tell me, in many different languages and different ways: ‘Hum gande logon ka ganda khaana nahin khaayenge.’” (“We will not eat dirty people’s dirty food.”) “I was like who is gande log and what is ganda khaana? Where does that disgust come from—is it evolutionary or sociological? Is it culturally learnt? And is it possible for us to move from disgust to delight?” 

It’s why at her workshop at the Serendipity Arts Festival, titled ‘Imagining Insects—rethinking taste, disgust and delight’, Vohra is pairing up visitors to discuss a food that disgusts them and another that delights them, and finally, inviting them to taste weaver ant chutney and the crickets and mealworms that she’ll dip into chocolate. “Maybe we can begin to pull from that—is it the texture, the taste, the scent, the sight? What is shaping these factors? And perhaps we can begin to acknowledge that we are all on this spectrum.” 

But how does she intend to navigate all this in a land where vegetarianism is glorified, even if not the dominant ground reality? “I don’t think everyone has to start eating every single insect,” she clarifies. “I have in fact met ento-vegans who are okay to eat insects for protein because that’s very difficult to come by in that diet. But I think whoever is willing, let’s just start there.” 

“The minute we start to destigmatise it, the moment we start to get over these taboos imposed by caste and colonisation, and broaden our palates and minds, we can start coming up with a lot of different solutions to address feed for our pets, deforestation, malnourishment, and so much more,” says Vohra. Her own intention is to put out a compendium of edible-insect recipes gathered from across India, and perhaps even bottle recipes like weaver ant koji paste. “My only hope is that we don’t do this in a Fear Factor, exoticised kind of way—that we accept that there is cultural relevance, heritage, science, ecology, conservation that ties into this process. Maybe then, finally, we will be able to learn to think along the lines of ‘Don’t yuck my yum’.”  

The Serendipity Arts Festival is on till December 22 in Goa