‘I wish I did more on purpose. I wish I could tell you that it was all premeditated and choreographed; it’s not.” Padma Lakshmi is talking to me by video call from her office in New York about what is now the 20th season of Top Chef, which she has been hosting since 2006. It’s like a cross between MasterChef and Bake Off, except with chefs, not regular people. It has this distinctive sense of mischief, sometimes in the prankish tasks, other times just burning off Lakshmi’s quizzical eyebrows.
Glossy, calm, dressed in sea blue, now and again joined by her chihuahua-ish rescue dog, she radiates elegance, and looks as you’d expect a 90s supermodel to look – Lakshmi was known as the world’s first supermodel of Indian descent. But somewhere between the political passion, the self-deprecation and the puckishness, she doesn’t sound the way you’d expect a beautiful person to sound. It must be annoying to be beautiful; it comes with all these preconceptions.
You’ll know already that Lakshmi is quite idiosyncratic if you’ve ever seen Taste the Nation, which she has also been presenting, as well as writing, since 2020. It is about food, technically, but it’s more like a travelogue through society, meeting different migrant communities through their cuisines. It was conceived as a creative, tangential response to the prevailing narratives, the “othering of migrants”, she says, “to forward the agenda of people like Trump”.
If the concept was political, the show is anything but polemic – it all starts and ends with the food. “I process the world through food,” she says. “I can tell you everything I ate and everything I wore almost every day of my life. I remember being a toddler and climbing my grandmother’s pantry, trying to reach for the spices and pickles.”
In 1974, when Lakshmi was four, she moved from south India to the US with her mother. “She was in an arranged marriage with my father, who’s very difficult. It was a very turbulent marriage, to say the least. She divorced even though she knew that she’d be ostracised. It was such a taboo. It was like walking around with the scarlet “A” on your chest.”
Lakshmi, who is now 52, loved growing up in New York: “In any one city block, I would see Latin people, black people, Chinese people, Middle Eastern people… I’m a product of that very liberal, 70s New York life.”
She still spent about a quarter of her time with her grandparents in India, to give her mother – who worked as an oncology nurse for 50 years – a break. “She didn’t want me to lose the culture as well. It was important for her that I speak Tamil, that I eat Indian food, that I understand the religion; we’re pretty secular but we’re practising Hindus.”
She didn’t get to adulthood unscathed. She was raped when she was 16, and never spoke about it to anyone until she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times five years ago. In it, she also disclosed that she’d been molested when she was seven by a relative of her then-stepfather’s. That assault she did mention, with the result that her parents sent her to live with her grandparents for a year, during which time, she wrote in the Times, she internalised the message that: “If you speak up, you will be cast out.”
“It was a very rash decision on my part to write that,” she says now. It was during the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court, during which Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexual assault when they were at high school in 1982 (two other women, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, also came forward with accusations, Kavanaugh has denied all allegations). Donald Trump sought to undermine the women’s credibility by questioning why, if the assaults were that bad, they hadn’t “immediately filed a police report”. It spurred many women, including Lakshmi, to tweet about assaults and rapes they’d suffered in the past and hadn’t reported.
But “something didn’t sit right with me”, she recalls now. “I tweeted that out in support, but I couldn’t sleep that night. I just thought, what happened to me was really serious. I’m sure that affected my whole life. And it deserved more than a tweet. My younger self deserved more than that.” So she wrote the article, sent it to the Times, “and then I took to my bed for three days – it was literally like having surgery without anaesthesia. I felt super-vulnerable.”
To catapult back to her teenage years: her family had moved to California, and she went to Clark University in Massachusetts to study theatre arts and American literature. It was during a study semester in Madrid, in 1991, that she was first spotted by a modelling agency. When she graduated, she moved to Milan. She was pretty famous in that era, but it’s amazing, looking back, how racist fashion was in the 90s. It was pretty rare to see a woman of colour on the cover of a magazine, and although it was remarked on at the time, there was no expectation of change – it was commented on the way bad weather is commented on; it was just a thing. “I knew that I wasn’t going to get as many covers,” Lakshmi says, “and neither were the black girls or the Latin girls who looked dark. If you were fair-skinned it would be different, because you could pass as white. It was just a given. It’s so insidious and subliminal that you don’t even stop to think about it. We were just happy for whatever work we got.”
Lakshmi also had an 18cm (7in) scar on her arm, the legacy of a car accident when she was 14, which she calls drily “an additional impediment”. These were the days before retouching, and she was very self-conscious about it until Helmut Newton did a groundbreaking shoot in which he didn’t try to camouflage it. “It taught me at a very young age how arbitrary beauty standards are. It didn’t happen overnight, but over time, this thing I was quite shy about, people wanted to make sure they saw on the runway.”
She speaks quite elliptically about the modelling business. “I didn’t have that many bad experiences because I think I could see those people from far off,” she says. “If I got hired by them, I did the job and tried to stay out of their way. The one or two times that I let my guard down, it was not good. You cannot go through modelling or acting or being on television without experiencing a good measure of that.” We’re plainly talking about sexual harassment, which was rife in her heyday, while carefully avoiding the phrase.
She now has a 13-year-old daughter and, she says, “I always tried to give her the language to defend herself, so that she’s got two or three sentences in her pocket. When she went to preschool, right away, I said if anybody touches you, or makes you feel uncomfortable, or makes you touch them, just say ‘no’, really loud. I think most of us are so unaware that we’re kind of shocked that it’s even happening to us.”
By the end of the 90s, she was back in New York. She started a relationship with Salman Rushdie in 1999, and the pair were paparazzi catnip. She was beautiful, he was a renowned intellect, a decade into the fatwa hanging over him. They tended to be portrayed as a modern-day Marilyn Monroe/Arthur Miller, with the same sexist tropes reheated: how could she be intelligent, when clearly he was? She won’t discuss Rushdie now, I guess on the “if you’ve nothing nice to say, say nothing” principle. But in her memoir of 2016, Love, Loss and What We Ate, she says quite a few things, including discussing the impact she believes endometriosis had on her marriage.
During this whole period – indeed, since she was 13 years old – Lakshmi had been suffering from the condition, which went undiagnosed for 23 years. “Every month, being in bed for a week, trying everything, and nothing helping. My body turned against me. I’d see college roommates, friends of mine, pop two ibuprofen and go back to basketball practice. I thought, ‘What is wrong with me, that I cannot handle one of the most basic parts of being female?’” She is still livid that it took so long to get diagnosed, that she lost so much of her life to the condition – “so many exams, work assignments, first or second dates, family occasions that I just went missing for because I couldn’t participate” – and that corresponding male disorders are so much better researched and resourced. “If I had erectile dysfunction, there would be many drugs for me. But for endometriosis, not one. I’m pretty sure that if you have erectile dysfunction, you can still make it into the office. Whereas being in so much pain you can’t move out of a foetal position …”
Getting diagnosed in 2006 and having surgery was a turning point; she instantly got a quarter of her time back, wrote her second recipe book, Tangy, Tart, Hot and Sweet and divorced Rushdie the next year. No shade on the guy who, of course, has troubles of his own, but he was reportedly unsympathetic about her illness, and called her a “bad investment”.
Arguably more important, though, was that this set her on an activism path. She co-founded the Endometriosis Foundation of America with her gynaecologist, Tamer Seckin, in 2009. “I found my own voice. Through the advocacy, I was able to learn to talk about some very difficult topics; big, personal topics. Nobody wants to stand in front of a room and talk about their vagina. But I was so angry about what had happened to me.”
In 2010, she had her daughter with Adam Dell, a venture capitalist. “I personally think it was my good karma for starting the foundation that I got pregnant,” she says. “It was such a lovely surprise. I was told I’d never be able to get pregnant, because I’ve had one fallopian tube removed; on the other side, I’ve had half an ovary removed. So I really don’t know how that happened. I’m very grateful for that.”
Now she campaigns for the American Civil Liberties Union, for migrant rights, she’s a UNDP Goodwill Ambassador, a vehement supporter of reproductive rights: “The country became incredibly polarised and is still polarised to this day, on every issue. It’s not just economics. It’s also the woman’s right to choose. It’s also gun control. It’s also voting rights, it’s all of these things that come in a package. The same people who will tell me that I’m not allowed to decide what happens to my body will tell me that I’m not allowed to ask them to wear a mask in an elevator. It seems almost dystopian sometimes.”
Yet she angles towards the sun and keeps on storytelling. The new season of Taste the Nation features a town in Massachusetts that was “a crack hub and a mess in the 80s and 90s, it was gang-infested, nobody wanted to live there” until Cambodian migrants moved in and revitalised it. It also follows four generations of Afghan refugees in Washington DC: “You see how much of what happened to that country and its people is tied to American foreign policy, going back to Nixon.”
But before that, the latest Top Chef drops, with frantic professionals tearing their hair out over coulis to comic effect, no one closer to the joke than Lakshmi herself. “At the end of the day, it’s just television, right? Chefs get so passionate and so meticulous, but it’s a very temporary thing; eventually this plate of food that you fuss over is going to be consumed and it’s going to be in the toilet. So it’s best to have a sense of humour about it.”
Her career is a balance of light and shade, a subtle, imaginative answer to the question of how to contest the bigotry that is so prevalent in the current discourse. You start with a burrito, meet the guy who made it and see where you land.
• This article was amended on 17 March 2023 to clarify that Lakshmi moved from India to the US in 1974, not 1972 as an earlier version said.
The new season of Top Chef is on Hayu now, with new episodes every Friday. Season two of Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi will be available from 5 May on Disney+
