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 child, she lived a life of
dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in
the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained
the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her
grandmother’s kitchen in South India.
Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is
Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble
kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’
table of Top Chef and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion
of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her
headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a
life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with
an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every
way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose
and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents,
tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both
internal and external.
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