Padma Lakshmi's Mission

From top  model to Top Chef Padma Lakshmi is known for her beauty as well as for her cooking. Yet she is also a fervent supporter of human right and women's rights along with being an ambassador for American Civil Liberties Union. her new show is about food but it's so much more.

Tejal Rao wrote about this remarkable person in yesterday's New York Times Food section. Ms. Lakshmi has a new food oriented series on Hulu, Taste The Nation. she is no stranger to TV, having been the host and executive producer on the wildly popular Top Chef. This show is different. There's no competition.  It's simply a show celebrating the food cultures of Indigenous peoples, immigrant communities and the descendants of the enslaved. Unlike the white male  food and travel hosts before her  Ms. Lakshmi is keenly aware she is a guest in the homes she visits. The food may be delicious but she doesn't fetishize the dishes she's served. It's not really taste the nation, a word play on CBS's long running Sunday morning show, it's more a way to dig into history and understand how specific communities as they live now.Not many food shows explore how the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 shaped restaurant culture.

Like other food and travel shows there are delicious foods to try. There is hot gumbo soothed down with okra, , fire grilled kebabs, beef simmered in a coconut rich curry and puffy corn tortillas wrapped around beans and scrambled eggs. Yet unlike those other food and travel shows there is a definite edge. Ms. Lakshmi stop in front of a shuttered Iranian travel agency noting how a travel ban has thrown people's lives into a disturbance. (this was done before the pandemic: between summer and fall 2019). when she eats  the Indigenous fry bread in Phoenix, her companion clarifies its' origins, from the genocide of the natives to their displacement on reservations. Another episode centers around the Gullah Geechee community of coastal Carolinas whose West African enslaved ancestors cultivated the rice fields and whose forced labor built the region's economy. Their food culture was hard won and now it's being threatened by climate change. Then there's the first episode which is takes place in El Paso. She's looking for the history of the burrito but also talks about how workers have to cross the border from Mexico for their jobs.

Taste The Nation is the food show that goes beyond food. It shows the reality of America's culinary history and the politics behind it. It is definitely a show to watch and digest.