“How do you convey who you really are in a place where nobody understands you?” Lakshmi asks in one episode. adoption in the 19th century even as Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred immigrants from China for decades. In an episode dedicated to chop suey, a dish almost totally removed from authentic Chinese cooking, she explores its enthusiastic U.S. In Milwaukee, she examines how the seemingly effortless absorption of hot dogs and lager as American staples belies an uneasy history of German immigration to the United States. This knife-edge dance between adoption and rejection comes to define Taste the Nation, as Lakshmi considers what a particular dish or place reveals about immigration, assimilation, and the hunger for home. “Who,” she ponders, “doesn’t love a taco?”
At the end of the El Paso episode, Lakshmi idly mulls why shared tastes can’t bring people together in a more substantial way.
“It’s all ‘Don’t be scared of us,’” is how the comedian Ali Wong characterizes Americanized Chinese food to Lakshmi as the pair eat their way through San Francisco’s Chinatown. Perhaps because a country founded on the violent displacement of Native Americans will always expect violence from successive new arrivals, wave after wave of immigrants has tried to use food as a pacifying, neutralizing force. But what becomes clear through the series’s 10 episodes is how distinctly American cuisine encapsulates a paradox, in which dishes made by immigrants are quickly appropriated as national staples while the people who make them are rejected over generations. She landed on food as a way to become more intimately acquainted with some of the communities she wanted to investigate. After the 2016 election, she told Eater, Lakshmi was working with the American Civil Liberties Union and had decided to research a project on immigration, as an immigrant who was offended by the rhetoric coming out of the White House. Initially, Taste the Nation wasn’t even supposed to be about food. Read: Uncovering the roots of Caribbean cooking
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What she’s offering instead is one of the most fascinating food series to emerge in recent years: a ruthless indictment of how a nation’s cultural heritage has been constructed out of the people and traditions that it has consistently and brutally rejected.
Lakshmi’s flirtatious manner, her unquenchable glamour, allow her to Trojan-horse Taste the Nation’s true intentions for viewers who might be expecting a vaguely patriotic travelogue through America’s most iconic meals. On camera, she’s engagingly ribald, describing a razor clam as “phallic, elephantine” and good-naturedly scarfing down stadium food in a triptych of shots that radiate an absurd sensuality.
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Lakshmi has been a graceful, gamine presence on American TV screens for almost 15 years now, so familiar from her Top Chef duties that the significance of Taste the Nation feels almost underplayed. “A burrito,” Lakshmi observes, “is tradition wrapped in colonization.” And, in a city where the hum of helicopters surveying the border adds ambient foreboding to every interaction, burritos also represent the essence of American food: cuisine from one culture cloaked in the imposed ingredients of another (in this case, wheat flour). It can also signify a mother’s love, a whole meal swaddled in a pillowy tortilla and tucked into a child’s pocket before the day begins. The dish, another interviewee tells Lakshmi, is pure practical convenience: It’s quick to assemble and eat on the way to work. At the Jalisco Cafe, a chef griddling oozy eggs with beans on a stovetop tells her that the perfect burrito comes down to an attention to detail. In the first episode of Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu show, Taste the Nation, the food writer and longtime Top Chef host travels to El Paso, Texas, where she attempts to isolate all the different ingredients in one of America’s favorite dishes. Where things get complicated is in all the manifold ways it sustains us. Food, at its essence, is sustenance that much is simple.
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