Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Lakshmi’s ‘Taste the Nation’ returns with holiday specials
In the first season of “Taste the Nation,” Padma Lakshmi tasked herself with visiting immigrant communities across the country, explaining their entire trajectories from country of origin to the United States, and how they and their food adapted to their new home — in 30 minutes or less.
It’s a hugely ambitious premise that succeeded more often than not, in large part thanks to Lakshmi’s confident, compassionate brand of hosting. Whether stirring a pot, kneading dough or just chatting pleasant nonsense in a new friend’s kitchen, she’s perfectly congenial and more than a little mischievous. In these segments, Lakshmi demonstrates how much she has learned from perfecting her “Top Chef ” poise over the years, and just how good she is at letting the people she’s interviewing feel like they’re part of a real, human conversation.
In a set of four new “Taste the Nation” holiday specials, now on Hulu, Lakshmi further develops and hones her approach to the series’s overarching premise. She visits New York City’s Lower East Side for Hanukkah, Cape Cod for Thanksgiving, Miami for Cuban Christmas (Buenanoche) and Los Angeles’ Koreatown for Lunar New Year.
While she seems even more comfortable in these home visits than ever, Lakshmi’s explanatory voiceover remains a distractingly didactic reminder of the tricky balancing act she’s trying to achieve.
Focusing on a single holiday frees “Taste the Nation” of the overarching need to describe an entire immigrant community’s experience in vanishingly little time. Instead, the show can just get more specific about how a community commemorates a holiday, and the ways in which traditions evolve — whether by choice or circumstance — to fit a new shape in a new country.
Throughout the specials, Lakshmi explores how Hanukkah became a sort of necessary counterpart to commercialized Christmas, how Lunar New Year knits Korean American families together and how Buenanoche connects Cuban exiles to their Cuban American descendants with a shared sense of national pride.
The best episode shines the spotlight on the Wampanoag Nation, whose ancestors bore the brunt of colonial wrath during the first supposedly idyllic “Thanksgiving.” In “Truth and the Turkey Tale,” Lakshmi speaks with Wampanoag fishermen, historians and chefs who consider this holiday to be a catastrophic turning point in history, when white settlers took what they wanted and rewrote the narrative to make it seem like they were doing Native Americans a favor. The episode ends with Lakshmi eating a dinner of ingredients that may look familiar to the Anglo Norman Rockwell vision of Thanksgiving, but were in fact stolen from the Wampanoag land and rebranded for white comfort and profit.
Many of the meals Lakshmi eats on this show are nostalgic, but the Wampanoag one is downright defiant, a reclamation of traditions warped beyond recognition. It’s “Taste the Nation” at its best and most insightful, allowing marginalized people to not just share their fraught history with viewers, but force them to confront their own parts in perpetuating it.
Unlike the first season, there is no attempt here to say that breaking bread will fix these wrongs: only a solemn acknowledgment that the wrongs exist, and will continue to exist, as long as this supposed melting pot of a country refuses to acknowledge them with the depth and lucidity they deserve.
Where to watch: Now streaming on Hulu