Bengaluru-based food, culture and sustainability writer Tansha Vohra remembers the first time she ate an insect. This was in 2018 when after a two-week permaculture design course in Goa aimed to conceive an ecosystem of regenerative ways to grow food, she began working at permaculture designer and grower Peter Fernandes’s garden. One day while in the garden, she recalls being vexed by ant bites. Nearby stood a cacao tree whose fruit she and her friends had been eyeing and on it crawled the same weaver ants that had administered the bites. “The conversation shifted to ‘why don’t we catch and eat them?’ Vohra tells us over a video call. The evening ended with her braving many more bites to harvest and freeze two ant nests. Over the course of the next two months, she made chutneys with ants, dipped them in chocolate, and used them to add sourness to various items, the formic acid in their abdomens lending the sharp flavour. It was also around this time that she started thinking about a research endeavour which ultimately took the shape of The Boochi Project—the title using the Kannada word used to describe crawly things to children.  The project will, as part of the Serendipity Arts Festival’s Food Lab this year, explore how entomophagy or insect-eating might play a role in food systems of the future.

Freezing them and then collecting the insects the formic acid in the ants’ abdomens lending the sharp flavour