On the long trek towards Elopa Plateau in Arunachal Pradesh’s Lower Dibang Valley, Thomas Zacharias began by doing what a chef might instinctively do: taking notes. As Idu Mishmi community guides Iho Mitapo, Eha Tacho, and Eja Pulu pointed out plants and fruits along the forest trail, he tried to remember their names and uses. There were brishi, a small red fruit growing near the roots of a tree; alinu, the heart of the fishtail palm, eaten as a survival food; akudu, or wood-ear mushrooms; and an extraordinary variety of edible leaves and stems. Then he began noticing patterns in the language itself. -mbo meant tree, -na meant leaf and -shi meant fruit.
“A few hours into the walk, I realised I wasn’t really being taught a list of ingredients,” Zacharias says. “I was being taught, in a very small way, how to read the forest.”
That distinction sits at the heart of Chef on the Road’s journey through the Elopa–Etugu Community Eco-Cultural Preserve (EECEP), a 75-square-kilometre landscape collectively governed by around 80 households from four Idu Mishmi clans. The journey moves between village kitchens, forests, rivers and camps, following a food system in which what is eaten cannot be separated from where it comes from, who gathers it and what the community has decided to leave alone. The preserve was established in 2022 through a Gram Sabha resolution to protect ancestral land, restore degraded ecosystems and ensure cultural knowledge continues across generations.
Entering A Food Culture On Its Own Terms
For Zacharias, that meant arriving not as someone bringing culinary expertise into an unfamiliar food culture, but as someone entering another system of knowledge. “I’d hesitate to frame it as me going there to ‘share my knowledge’,” he says. “I was very conscious that I was entering somebody else’s landscape and food culture, where the people around me understood the ingredients, seasons and forest far better than I ever could.”
His first lessons came in Kebali, where community elder, cook, farmer and forager Nani Heli Elapra opened up the everyday Idu Mishmi kitchen. Other encounters expanded the picture: community rangers taught him to recognise animal trails, plants and fungi, and understand customary rules around hunting and gathering; Chilli Thapo demonstrated how pa, a starter made from rice and forest herbs, is used to ferment yuchi, the local rice wine.
The kitchen, in other words, began in the forest. After arriving in Roing, the group moved to Kebali for a farm-to-table meal, spending time on farms, forest edges and in village homes before cooking with Elapra over a traditional hearth. The following day, they entered EECEP on foot, beginning along the dry riverbed of Ishi-Afra and climbing towards Elopa Plateau. Guides identified wild greens, herbs, fruits, fungi, roots and spices, explaining how they are recognised, gathered and prepared.
Knowing What The Forest Can Spare
The more Zacharias learnt about what could be gathered, the more important the things that could not be taken became.
One concept that stayed with him was mishu: animals such as gibbons and certain other species that cannot be hunted or troubled. In this food culture, knowledge is not simply the ability to identify something edible; it includes an understanding of limits.
“It reminded me that food knowledge isn’t only about knowing what you can eat,” he says. “It is also about knowing what you choose not to take.”
That principle is particularly significant in a landscape where food, conservation and customary law overlap. Within EECEP, commercial extraction, hunting and destructive practices are prohibited, with rules collectively enforced for community members and outsiders. The preserve is not presented as untouched wilderness, but as a landscape under active community stewardship.
Beyond The Idea Of An Untouched Northeast
The journey also made Zacharias question a familiar romantic notion of the Northeast as an “untouched wilderness”. His experience was specifically with the Idu Mishmi community in the Lower Dibang Valley, and he is careful not to generalise from it to the entire state. The landscape had already experienced logging, deforestation, hunting and resource-extraction pressures, alongside increasing development and dam projects. EECEP itself is a response to the need for active protection.
At the same time, he found little evidence for another familiar divide: the assumption that traditional knowledge and scientific research necessarily stand apart. Within EECEP, community members and researchers work with camera traps, wildlife studies and biodiversity documentation alongside generations of knowledge about the forest. “What I saw was much more interesting,” Zacharias says. “Customary knowledge exists alongside contemporary conservation research.”
The food, too, looked different from the familiar shorthand often used to describe Arunachal’s cuisine. Meat, chillies, bamboo shoots and fermentation are part of the picture, but the forest walks revealed a broader everyday food landscape of leaves, stems, fruits, fungi, palms, herbs and spices.
A Cuisine Shaped By Season And Preservation
Idu Mishmi cooking uses fermentation, smoking, drying and preservation techniques shaped by a humid, forested environment and the need to carry food across seasons. Rice wines, like yuchi, are fermented using pa, a starter made from rice and locally gathered herbs. What you get by squeezing and straining the fermented rice, is the yutuhi, a lighter, cloudy liquid, with the yu aachi being the spent rice mixed with water and consumed as a thin gruel.
Cooking is similarly collective and practical. Food is prepared in homes and forest camps, often over fire, using simple tools such as bamboo tongs and leaves for wrapping and steaming. Ingredients such as king chilli, fiddlehead ferns, banana flower and wild spices are incorporated according to season and availability.
Zacharias did cook during the journey, but this became an exchange rather than an exercise in imposing his own culinary vocabulary. One evening, drawing on what he had been seeing and eating, he made roasted pumpkin and pork belly with chillies and athana, a local herb, then wrapped it in pumpkin leaves and cooked it over charcoal.
“It borrowed from some of the techniques and ingredients I had been learning about, but was still very much my own interpretation,” he says. The local hosts enjoyed the dish. For him, that was the more natural form of exchange: listening first, cooking alongside people, and allowing his own instincts to enter into that interaction.
Learning From Rivers, Forests And The Ways Food Is Gathered
The same principle extended beyond the kitchen. After descending from Elopa, the group learnt traditional fishing methods at a nearby stream, understanding not just how fish were caught but the relationship between food, seasonality and freshwater ecosystems. At Chembosa Camp, they were introduced to traditional rodent traps and the knowledge behind them before spending time by the river and cooking together.
By then, the journey had begun to shift Zacharias’s understanding of what culinary research could mean.
“Travel has probably been the single biggest influence on my professional life,” he says. Chef on the Road began in 2013 as a way to explore regional Indian cuisine and find inspiration as a cook. Over time, his questions changed. He became less interested in simply asking what someone was cooking and more interested in why a dish existed there in the first place.
When A Recipe Becomes A Larger Story
That shift has followed him throughout his professional life, from moving away from predominantly European cooking and helping to open The Bombay Canteen in 2014 to stepping away from full-time restaurant life in 2020 and eventually starting The Locavore in 2022.
“Once you see food where it comes from, a recipe becomes the end point of a much larger story—soil, water, season, labour, migration, markets, caste, belief, ecology, memory,” he says.
The Arunachal journey made that larger story particularly visible. Food was tied not only to the forest but to language and memory. During the trek, the names of plants began to reveal relationships with the landscape. Later, Zacharias heard about Taju Taye, an initiative through which stories from elders are being recorded and turned into storybooks for younger generations.
“If you lose the forest, you lose food knowledge,” he says. “But if you lose the language and stories, you can also lose the knowledge of how to understand and live within that forest.”
Perhaps that is why his most lasting takeaway from the trip was not a particular ingredient or technique, but restraint.
“I don’t think the takeaway for me is that I now need to reproduce these techniques elsewhere,” he says. Instead, the experience has changed the questions he asks before working with an ingredient: “Where did this come from? Who produced or gathered it? Is it seasonal? What knowledge sits behind it? And sometimes, should we be using it at all?”
The Final Lesson Of Knowing When Not To Take
For a chef whose travels have taken him through communities, farms, forests, markets and kitchens across more than 25 states over 12 years, that may be the most significant lesson. He recalls another journey through Jawhar in Maharashtra during the monsoon, when rice conservationist Sunil Bhoye introduced him to wild greens that appeared after the first rains. Once again, identifying plants revealed a larger system of knowledge about seasons, landscape, health and survival, built over generations.
In Arunachal, the lesson began with a list of unfamiliar names on a forest trail. By the end of the journey, the list mattered less than the relationships between them: tree, leaf, fruit; food and season; kitchen and forest; what is gathered and what is deliberately left behind.
The forest, he realised, was never simply a pantry. It was a system to be read—and one in which knowing when not to take something could be as important as knowing how to cook it.
With inputs and photographs from Thomas Zacharias
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