11
Dishing with Padma
Lakshmi finds a new way to connect with fans during quarantine
a few other biographical details: that she began her
time in the public eye as a model, then as Salman
Rushdie’s wife, then as a woman who tasted food on
TV but didn’t cook on it. She struggled to be taken
seriously as a food writer. “I am a brown woman on
TV working in a country where a lot of people don’t
consider me American because of my funny name or
the way I look,” she says. “I spent a lot of my career
trying to fit in, to be what the toothpaste audition
or lingerie catalog wanted. At this point, I’m sick of
trying to make everybody happy.”
As she has been mulling her priorities in
quarantine—“I need to say no to more things”—
leveraging her new connection with fans to advo-
cate for the immigrant experience has risen to the
top of the list. Three years ago, she conceived of a
show in which she would visit immigrant communi-
ties around the U.S., using food as a “Trojan horse”
to examine the politics of immigration. Just about
every network passed on the pitch until, after she’d
already given up on the idea, Hulu bit.
In the first episode of Taste the Nation, premier-
ing on June 19, she travels to El Paso to talk to cooks
who commute from Mexico to Texas every day to
work at a taqueria that is owned by a white Trump
supporter who worries about how building a wall
would affect his business. The show sheds a light on
often unheralded cooks. “Food trends in America,”
she says, “trickle up, not down. The people working
in the best kitchens in America are brown people.”
Restaurants often borrow their ideas and flavors,
and give them little of the credit.
Immigrants are being disproportionately af-
fected by restaurant closures. And even as Lakshmi
champions home cooking by teaching followers
how to make yogurt rice, she is concerned about
that community. A lot of the places Lakshmi vis-
ited on her show, she worries, may not be there by
the end of the year. She is working with the James
Beard Foundation on a program offering relief
grants, but the organization doesn’t have nearly
enough money to fulfill the more than 4,000 ap-
plications they received just in the first few hours
of launching. “It’s like a fire,” she says. “You have
to clean up and rebuild, and hope that at least the
soot has fertilized the ground in some way.” □
‘I am a
brown
woman
on TV in
a country
where
a lot of
people
don’t
consider
me
American.’
PADMA LAKSHMI,
Top Chef host
COURTESY PADMA LAKSHMI
