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Padma Lakshmi

Padma Lakshmi Books

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“She raised her hand, bony fingers spread. “Don’t worry. She is supposed to cry. Her life will never be the same. You can’t give her everything.” I realized what Rajima meant. Until that moment, I had been almost exclusively providing everything Krishna could want or need. I was her sole succor and haven. But her needs were changing. She would now need sustenance from the earth, from Mother Nature, from the world, or at least Whole Foods. She would need more than what I could give her from my own body. We”

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Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“It’s funny to me that most of the cooking in the world is done by women, and yet when you look at modern Western cuisine, it’s largely based on what a few dead Frenchmen have opined to be the correct way of doing things. It’s funny how these old European men used a label like “mother sauce” when there were no women to be found anywhere near those old professional kitchens. Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.”

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Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“food has played a central role not only in my professional but also in my emotional life, in all of my dealings with loved ones and most of all in my relationship to myself and my body. I am what feeds me. And how I feed myself at any given moment says a lot about what I’m going through or what I need. I don’t believe I am alone. Yes, we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts. Like most people and many women, I think about what to eat all the time. I am constantly plotting my next meal, planning how and what I will shop for, and ever hatching new plans to avoid the foods I know will undermine my well-being. Foods are like men: some are good, some are bad, and some are okay only in small doses. But most should be tried at least once.”

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Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“A ruffly strip of well-seethed bacon delivers a clean crack that in Japan is called kari kari, as opposed to shaki shaki (a gushy bite, as of an apple right off the tree), saku saku (a fracture cushioned by richness, as found in buttery cookies and chicharrón--- pork skins dropped in hot oil, where they expand like clouds), gari gari (a hard crunch, like ice, that taxes the jaw), bari bari (the kind of delicate shattering epitomized by a rice cracker), and pari pari (the even more evanescent shattering achieved by the sheerest-cut potato chips).”

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Book:The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024
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“In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn't fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It's like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience.”

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Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.”

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Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food. This, of course, was in stark contrast to what was considered womanly or desirable in the West, especially when I started modeling. To look good in Western clothes you had to be extremely thin. Prior to this, I never thought about my weight except to think it wasn’t ever enough. Then, with modeling, I started depending on my looks to feed myself (though my profession didn’t allow me to actually eat very much). When I started hosting food shows, my career went from fashion to food, from not eating to really eating a lot, to put it mildly. Only this time the opposing demands of having to eat all this food and still look good by Western standards of beauty were off the charts. This tug-of-war was something I would struggle with for most of a decade.”

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Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“Once in a while we burned a wok trying to make our churan, and Jima, Bhanu, or another matriarch would banish us from the kitchen. “You should’ve told us,” they’d say. “We would’ve helped you.” You’re not getting it, Neela and I thought. This is our party and you’re not invited. To this day, the elder women of my household in Chennai still regard Neela or me with suspicion whenever we enter the kitchen to make anything other than tea. No matter that I host a cooking show or that Neela has raised two healthy daughters who clearly haven’t starved or been disfigured by a kitchen accident.”

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Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“But because divorce was so unheard of in middle-class Indian society, people looked at divorcées with a sort of incredulous shock and wonder, as if they were somehow criminals. They were ostracized from everyday life because of an invisible scarlet D hovering over them. Meanwhile, Second Wave feminism in the United States was changing attitudes about how women were treated in the workplace and in society, and how unmarried women were perceived in particular. Women were challenging age-old notions of their place in the world. Western media was full of unafraid, smart American women who published magazines, were marching in DC, and were generally making a lot of noise. No such phenomenon had reached our Indian shores. I’m sure my mother had read about the ERA movement, Roe v. Wade, and bra burnings. She, too, wanted the freedom to earn a living in a country where she wouldn’t be a pariah because of her marital status. We could have a fighting chance at surviving independently in the United States, versus being dependent on her father or a future husband in India. Conservative as he was, my grandfather K. C. Krishnamurti, or “Tha-Tha,” as I called him in Tamil, had encouraged her to leave my father after he witnessed how she had been treated. He respected women and loved his daughter and it must have broken his heart to see the situation she had married into. He, too, wanted us to have a second chance at happiness. America, devoid of an obvious caste system and outright misogyny, seemed to value hard work and the use of one’s mind; even a woman could succeed there. My grandfather was a closet feminist.”

FeminismImmigrationWoman S Rights
Book:Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir
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“Miami, which has already aired, has this wonderful blend of Caribbean culture and Latin American culture and Southern American culture (talking about fried chicken). All those combine to make for a very very interesting array of ingredients, restaurants, and the chefs that come there. It also has great seafood, not to mention the glorious citrus that's there. And all those things inform what you do - and they should.”

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Author:Padma Lakshmi
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