Three years after he founded it, Chef Thomas Zacharias’s project The Locavore is reshaping how India eats, grows, and remembers its food, one meal at a time; he talks about his vision behind the long-term movement
The year was 2014. On a humid evening in Majuli — the world’s largest river island in Assam — Thomas Zacharias sat cross-legged on the bamboo floor of a Mishing stilt house (chang ghar). A pot of pork stuffed into bamboo hollows simmered slowly over the fire while his host poured apong, a rice beer brewed in the backyard. The Kerala-born chef, then heading Mumbai’s celebrated restaurant The Bombay Canteen and on a journey to explore India’s indigenous cuisines, was struck by an epiphany: after years of perfecting his craft, he realised he knew surprisingly little about the culinary heritage of the country he called home.
That moment, says the Mumbai-based chef, “cracked something open in me.” It would eventually lead to his departure from the high-wire world of fine dining and into an altogether different arena, a grassroots food movement called The Locavore, launched in 2022 with the ambition of transforming how India eats, grows, and thinks about food. “The Locavore has never been just about food,” Zacharias says. “It’s about memory, connection, and possibility.”
From Michelin-star restaurant to Mishing kitchens
Having been trained at the Culinary Institute of America, Zacharias started his journey as a chef in 2009 at New York’s three-Michelin-star restaurant, Le Bernardin, and returned to India in 2014, to helm one of Mumbai’s most inventive restaurants, The Bombay Canteen, as Executive Chef. The days were governed by mise en place lists, precision plating, and the urgency of nightly service. But behind the kitchen pass, questions gathered. Where did the ingredients really come from? Who grew them? What did they lose or protect in the process?
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So before taking charge at The Bombay Canteen, he set off alone, crisscrossing 18 Indian states on a journey with no set itinerary. He cooked with home chefs, wandered through markets, and learned names of vegetables and grains he’d never heard before. He watched as recipes carried grief, celebration, migration, and as small farms carried the weight of climate fragility and exploitative supply chains. “I began to question my role as a chef,” he says. “Was I replicating the same extractive patterns, just with prettier plating?”
The Local Food Club (LFC) organises potlucks — free, themed, and open to anyone — are held on the first Sunday of each month. LFC Bengaluru at Pure & Sure in May 2025/ Photo: Shruti Agarwal
By the time he moved on from The Bombay Canteen in 2020, Zacharias was thinking beyond kitchens and menus. He wanted to build something that would stand the test of time. That quest resulted in The Locavore, a platform that champions local and seasonal food through storytelling, events, and other initiatives. The name, a portmanteau of ‘local’ and ‘vorare’ (Latin for ‘to devour’), was coined in 2005 by American chef Jessica Prentice and other Bay Area residents. A locavore, therefore, is a person who consciously makes an effort to eat locally produced food.
The ‘locavore’ movement encourages the consumption of food grown, raised, and harvested within a local radius, typically defined as 100 miles. It advocates a return to seasonal eating and the direct support of local economies and farmers. This stands in direct contrast to the globalised food system, where products can travel thousands of miles before reaching a consumer. By sourcing food locally, locavores aim to reduce their carbon footprint by minimising ‘food miles,’ the distance food is transported from farm to plate.
Sustainability as a cultural act
The Locavore’s stated vision spans a century, an audacious timeline in a profession built on the adrenaline of the present. “A 100-year vision demands a shift from urgency to stewardship,” Zacharias explains. “Restaurants thrive on immediacy. But systemic change needs patience, trust, and empathy.” He partners with producers and organisations that foster deep, ongoing relationships with farmers, foragers and grassroots collectives.
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The Local Food Club, a volunteer-led network spanning over 28 cities, brings citizens together over monthly themed potlucks. “When you commit to a 100-year horizon, your questions change,” he says. “It’s not just about improving experiences; it’s about reimagining entire systems.”
In global conversations, sustainability often comes dressed in carbon metrics and certification stamps. For The Locavore, it is as much about history, politics and identity as it is about the environment. “In India, food has never been just about nutrition,” Zacharias says. “It’s entangled with caste, land, labour and emotion.”
Women harvest Sirarakhong Chilli Hill Wild, a unique variety grown in the remote village of Sirarakhong in Manipur by the Tangkhul Naga community.
One early project featured Forest Post, a social enterprise in Thrissur run by indigenous women who produce fern pickle and shatavari in honey, among other products. “It wasn’t just about the products,” he recalls. “It was about their model — shared ownership, ecological reciprocity — where livelihoods and forest conservation are inseparable.”
The Locavore’s editorial arm treats recipes as living knowledge. The Wild Food Project in Palghar, Maharashtra, for example, documented monsoon edibles with local elders, then invited chefs to create contemporary recipes, all reviewed and approved by the community before publication. “Preservation and reinvention can coexist,” he says. “But only when practised with transparency and mutual respect.”
India’s complexity on plate
In India, every dish, from crab rasam in Tamil Nadu to pisyu loon in Uttarakhand, is layered with caste, migration, gendered labour and survival. “The risk is in flattening this into a single narrative,” Zacharias says. “We try to hold space for complexity, not simplify it.”
That means partnering with organisations such as North East Slow Food and Agrobiodiversity Society (NESFAS) and SPS Community Media, the media arm of Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS), a grassroots initiative for water and livelihood security. These institutions have decades of engagement with indigenous food systems.
This also means subjecting every story to community review and clear authorship credit. “We’re the first to admit we don’t always get it right,” he says. “But we stay open to critique. This work has to be done with integrity, or it’s meaningless.”
Producers as partners
The Locavore’s Producer Partnership Programme uncovers challenges often hidden from consumers. Small-scale farmers and food collectives — growing drought-resilient millets, fermenting bamboo shoots, harvesting wild honey — remain locked out of mainstream markets due to outdated packaging laws, lack of digital access and underfunded cooperatives. “They were the ones safeguarding biodiversity and sustainable practices,” Zacharias says. “Yet they had no platform.”
The Locavore offers its partners design help, longform storytelling and direct connections to buyers. At the 2023 Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, every dish at The Locavore Stall used ingredients from these partners, from Moplah shrimp biryani with heirloom rice to mahua granola atop smoothie bowls. “We evaluate producers beyond labels,” he says. “Many don’t hold certifications but practise sustainability in deeper ways than a label can capture.”
Potlucks as food democracy
If the partnerships with producers address the supply side of food systems, the Local Food Club shifts the culture of consumption. Held on the first Sunday of each month, these potlucks are free, themed, and open to anyone — a deliberate counter to the exclusivity of high-end food events. “Everyone has a story — and a dish — to bring to the table,” Zacharias says.
In Kochi, a participant’s cheera thoran (spinach stir-fry) sparked memories of cooking with a grandmother. In Chennai, jackfruit seed thogayal (chutney) revived a childhood flavour. In Mumbai, a simple bowl of varan bhaat (lentil stew and rice) became a story of healing during illness. And in Bhubaneswar, a potluck turned into a seed exchange. “Food democracy isn’t a theory,” he says. “It’s what happens when 30 strangers bring dishes from home and leave feeling nourished.”
Talui garlic farmer Nganunglei Zeinorin (centre) with her friends at Talui Village in Manipur’s Ukhrul district.
As part of the decentralised model, each city runs at its own pace; hosts rotate and venues range from bookstores to backyards. “Yes, it’s messy,” Zacharias says. “Meals are uneven, people drop off at the last minute. But what we lose in polish, we gain in ownership.” And in a time when “community” is often a marketing buzzword, ownership may be the real innovation.
A plate as a portal to the world
For the Global North, Zacharias argues, the lesson is clear: sustainability isn’t new, and it doesn’t look the same everywhere. In India, it lives in seed-saving rituals, root-to-stem cooking, and seasonal fasting. “What’s needed is a shift in posture,” he says. “Listen without needing to label. Support without trying to lead. Honour knowledge that’s lived, not just documented.”
These models, he warns, cannot be decontextualised. Grain diversity in a Tamil Nadu village exists alongside caste realities; to copy the practice without the context is to strip it of meaning. The Locavore’s biggest opportunity, Zacharias believes, lies in reshaping how people relate to food, not as consumers, but as participants in a living system. “We’re not building a top-down solution,” he says. “We’re building a movement that’s participatory and deeply rooted.”
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He adds that Locavore’s Millet Revival series with Rainmatter Foundation has sparked awareness around water-smart crops, farmer dignity and diet diversity. “Through WhatsApp buyer groups, we’re hoping to nurture micro-economies that bypass industrial channels and connect consumers to ethical producers. And our solidarity fundraisers with Mazdoor Kitchen, Khaana Chahiye Foundation, and Tamarind Tree School show that food can also be a tool for redistribution and justice.”
The Locavore’s true intervention is emotional: “We’re making the work of food systems change meaningful, accessible, and joyful,” says Zacharias. “Projects like ‘Longing for Home’ have shown how food memory can illuminate migration, grief, and resilience. Local Food Club meetups across India surface personal stories of displacement, caste and climate stress through the lens of a shared meal.”
His hope is simple, if expansive: that people everywhere begin to see food “not just as something to consume, but as something to care for.” Because, in the end, as he puts it, “what’s local is never small. It’s where the global begins.”
