A life shared through food
Padma Lakshmi does a lot of living in ‘Love, Loss, and What We Ate’
“Since I can remember, people have asked me the same question,” Padma Lakshmi writes in Love, Loss, and What
We Ate (Ecco, 336 pp., out of four). “How do I eat so much and stay slim? The answer is simple: a lot of hard work.”
That explanation comes near the end of Lakshmi’s appealing new memoir, and by that point it is unnecessary. Throughout the book, the Indian-born model, cookbook author and Top Chef host makes it clear that, in spite of her beauty, little has come to her without effort.
If male attention is a predictable exception, it also has proved something of a double-edged sword. Love, Loss begins with an account of Lakshmi’s courtship by and marriage (2004-2007) to the celebrated writer Salman Rushdie, and the dissolution of their relationship. Lakshmi recalls being swept off her feet but also guilt-ridden, as Rushdie was married to another woman when they met, and also intimidated by his intellectual prowess and his great success in a field that intrigued her.
The couple’s split is preceded — and spurred on, as Lakshmi tells it — by her struggle with endometriosis. The condition was diagnosed in her 30s, after causing her decades of pain, and Lakshmi, now 45, is unsparing in her description of both the physical symptoms and their effect on marital intimacy. These episodes set the tone for
Love, Loss, revealing Lakshmi as both aspirational and prone to insecurity, and not one to stint on detail. She recalls her struggles to fit in as a child shuttling between India and New York, and later as a teen whose ethnicity puzzles California neighbors, and a young model with an arm left scarred in a car accident. There are other men, among them venture capitalist Adam Dell, the father of Lakshmi’s daughter, Krishna, 6; and the late businessman Teddy Forstmann, whom Lakshmi remembers for his tenderness toward her and Krishna.
But the most vividly and endearingly portrayed characters we meet in Love, Loss are Lakshmi’s relatives, from the nurturing, resilient mother who forged a new life in the USA to the grandfather who was steeped in conservative tradition but valued the well-being of his family, including the women, above all.
Food, inextricably woven into so many of Lakshmi’s memories — recipes are periodically inserted, for delicacies ranging from chaatpati chutney to “egg in a hole” — is particularly central in these recollections. “Cooking was the domain not of girls, but of women,” Lakshmi tells us; and the savoring of meals and snacks can be described as evocatively as the preparation.
Her flashes of self-doubt extend to the culinary realm. “I had more than a touch of imposter syndrome” while getting acclimated to Top Chef, Lakshmi admits. By the time her memoir wraps, though, she has grown more comfortable in her own skin — even as her weight has fluctuated a bit.
“We all are meant to be different sizes at different times in our lives,” she observes.
Now there’s some comfort food for thought.