Why did I love this book?
For me, food is a gateway to this moment, to radical gratitude (I can trace one piece of food to all those who touched and grew it, the elements of the earth that ripened it), and above all, connection. Growing up in a South Asian immigrant home that felt like it was displaced in the deep American south, we held on to food the way you hold on for safety. It connected us back to our ancestors and our stories.
In this memoir, Padma Lakshmi shows us how food was not only her anchor but also her path to forging a life of meaning and, ultimately, unthinkable success.
Her retracing of this geography reveals so much of her biography that it will leave you wondering how your favorite childhood dish may just be the link to learning more about who you are.
1 author picked Love, Loss, and What We Ate as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph, Love, Loss, and What We Ate traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi's unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera-a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl's Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron's Heartburn Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home-and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a…