“It feels very surreal: I was in Sports Illustrated and the TIME 100 — two very different ends of the spectrum.”
It’s hard not to envy Padma Lakshmi. She’s an accomplished writer, the author of several books and columns, with an undeniable charisma that’s made her a mainstay across 20 seasons (and counting) of the reality television hit Top Chef. She’s also, famously, one of the most beautiful people on the planet. For a long time now, Lakshmi has inhabited rarefied air, as a bona fide celeb respected for her work on TV, her robust culinary knowledge, and her advocacy work with the ACLU.
But this moment in the long arc of her career feels different, she tells us in a new interview. She’s now in her second season as the creator and host of Taste the Nation, her fascinating Hulu show that explores the immigrant experience through different dishes, from pasteles in Puerto Rico to ube in the Bay Area. Last month, she was named one of the TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the world’s most influential people, and absolutely stunned in her debut for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.
“It feels like it’s all happening at once,” she says. “I’ve never had a moment in my career or my life like this.”
On getting the call from Sports Illustrated, she says, “Obviously, when I was a model in my 20s, I had hoped that something like this would come along.” But Lakshmi opened up about why she’s glad (and a “little squeamish”) about getting her shot at SI three decades later.
She also got candid about confronting all this success at 52 (and both the thrill and exhaustion that comes with it), her hopes for a third season of Taste the Nation, and why she views the show as an extension of her activism.
“I believe in immigration as a very strong force in this country. Obviously, I’m bringing my own perspective to it. I’m an immigrant, so it’s no secret where my politics lie,” Lakshmi tells us. “I hope that just showing individuals going about their lives and not talking in generalities, and letting them tell their own stories will open the minds of people who don’t necessarily vote as I do.”
Katie Couric Media: I’m curious, is there anything you took away from creating season one of Taste the Nation that informed how you approached the second season?
We learned that sometimes it’s not good to have too many stories, because it’s just a half-hour show. So we’ve tried to really focus our energies on stories that fit into the thesis of each episode, while also trying to address some facet of the immigration puzzle. It was important to craft a narrative within one episode because our brains think in terms of stories, even though it’s a docuseries, and then to also build an arc across the season.
Are there parts of the U.S. or immigrant groups you haven’t covered yet that you wish you could have — or hope to if there’s another season?
Well, I really do hope there’s another season. I mean, nothing would make me happier. This has been the most rewarding point in my professional life so far. But yes, there are so many. I would love to visit a Vietnamese community and a Laotian community. We haven’t done Ethiopians, we haven’t done Somalis. There are a lot of Central American communities I’d like to feature in the Central Valley in California. It’s all very interesting to me.
How do you think your experience hosting Top Chef has influenced your vision of Taste the Nation?
Top Chef has taught me how important it is to be inclusive about food and to have diverse palates and perspectives in the food at a table. That was a big motivation for creating Taste the Nation in the first place. Also, having traveled with Top Chef to all these American cities over the course of 19 seasons allowed me to spend time in those communities for weeks and to get to know these places in a way I wouldn’t have as a tourist. Like the Cambodian episode in Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, I never would have known that there was this incredible community there. And having traveled to Chicago, Houston, Charleston, all these different cities where I got to meet local chefs.
One of our participants, in the Gullah Geechee episode in season one, is BJ Dennis, who is a wonderful chef and became a dear friend of mine while I was filming Top Chef. I knew I wanted to go back to Charleston to explore that community more deeply. And it was the same in Houston. I met Ope Amosu, one of the chefs we had do a quickfire challenge in the city, and I knew I wanted to do a story on Nigerian Americans. He was my first call after we got greenlit to do the second season.
You’ve mentioned that you hope Taste the Nation also appeals to people who don’t share your perspective on immigration and how it enriches us as a country. That seems like a hard line to walk given the show’s theme. How do you accomplish that?
I created this show based on my work with the ACLU to provide evidence as to why I vote the way that I do and why I believe in immigration as a very strong force in this country.
We’ve become so polarized in this country that we’ve stopped listening to each other. There were always people who were conservative and people who were liberal, but we still went out to dinner together, still played golf, or took our children to the same parks. I think we can still do that, but we’ve just become so separated. The show was really created for people who think that immigrants are just a drain on our economy.
We’ve got to ask about the Sports Illustrated shoot. Can you tell us how that all came together?
I got a call one day. My agent said, “Sports Illustrated is inviting you to do a pictorial for their swimsuit edition. And I just couldn’t believe it. Obviously, it’s one of the totems when you’re a young model. It’s one of the two or three big things that can really change your career, like getting the cover of Vogue. But I never got the call until now. I’m glad that it happened now. I was a little freaked out by it; I’ve had a baby, I’m 52, and I wasn’t a young mother, so I wouldn’t say my body completely bounced back. But it was a nice challenge to have.
I think that I feel much more womanly now than I did in my 20s and much more comfortable with my own physical appearance — even though it was better then, you know? And also with my sensuality as a woman, because I am more of a woman now. In our youth-obsessed culture, we tend to disregard women after a particular age. But actually, that can be a liberating moment for a woman, that can be when they’re at their prime in many aspects. I’m excited that Martha is on the cover. I think that’s beautiful, and she looks great.
People are completely blown away by your SI shoot. How have you felt about the response?
It’s nice and it also makes me a little squeamish. I mean, it’s very flattering, but I also started out as a model and for a long time a lot of what people knew about me was just the way that I looked. And I’ve worked very hard to take the focus away from that through my work as a writer, through my advocacy, and through the shows that I have been a part of. So it feels very surreal because on the one hand, I was in Sports Illustrated but on the other, I was in TIME 100 — two very different ends of the spectrum.
It’s all happening at once. I’ve never had a moment in my career or my life like this. I’ve been very lucky to have been on TV for a long time, even before Top Chef, but it’s a bit daunting for me because I don’t think it’s a level of activity that I can maintain if I’m being honest.
You’ve definitely got a ton on your plate, but would you ever want to do a show or a book that’s outside of the food landscape?
I would love to. I fell into my career in food by accident. Before that, I was just a writer, I had a column in Harper’s Bazaar and I had a syndicated column in The New York Times, in which I did write about food but also film and fashion. And I was also auditioning as an actor. I’m lucky in that I’ve been able to make a living out of what naturally interests me. That’s a real blessing, and I do hope that I can continue to do that.
I would like to step out of food, just to explore. But right now, to be honest, I just want to do a really good job on Taste the Nation, both the [forthcoming cookbook with recipes from the show] that I have percolating, as well as hopefully getting another season of the show. I would love to take Taste the Nation international. There’s more migration than ever before in our history and I think it’s so interesting whenever two cultures commingle. It produces so many beautiful things — art, literature, music, food, all of it. I’d love to take a trip to Berlin and see what Turkish food is like there, or what Thai food is like in Australia. Beyond that, I have my production company and we’ve got two or three projects that are in development — one is a TV show and the other’s a film. Neither are documentaries or food-related; they’re both scripted, so we’ll see what happens with that.
