Currently in its 15th season, ‘Top Chef’ is the symbolic icing on Padma Lakshmi’s cake of food expertise. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her role as host and judge on ‘Top Chef’, which won an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Show. She is an internationally renowned actress, food expert and model and The New York Times bestselling author as well as the recipient of the 2016 NECO Ellis Island Medal of Honour.
Padma, who was born in India and grew up in America, found her groove as a food expert early on in her career. She’d graduated from Clark University with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and American Literature, but it was modelling that set her on the road to stardom. Credited as India’s first supermodel, she began as a fashion model in Europe and the US, before getting into her first love – food. She has since hosted two successful cookery shows and wrote the best-selling ‘Easy Exotic’ (which won the ‘Best First Book’ award at the 1999 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards), followed with the second cookbook, ‘Tangy, Tart, Hot & Sweet’. And then came her food memoir ‘Love, Loss and What We Ate’ and ‘The Encyclopaedia of Spices & Herbs’. She has also written articles for ‘Vogue’, ‘Gourmet’ and ‘Harper’s Bazaar’, in addition to a syndicated column on fashion and food for The New York Times. About her acting and her writing, she’d said: ‘I write cookbooks and I’m an actress – two things that aren’t always compatible, at least for the waistline.’
Also to her credit is ‘Padma’s Passport’, for the Food Network, where she cooked cuisines from around the world. She has hosted ‘Planet Food’, a documentary series on the Food Network and co-hosted ‘Domenica In’, Italy’s top-rated morning news programme.
Padma also co-founded the Endometriosis Foundation of America alongside world-renowned Gynaecological Surgeon Tamer Seckin, MD. She has since launched the first interdisciplinary research facility in the country for Gynepathology – a joint project between Harvard Medical School and MIT; her efforts were recently recognised on the floor of the New York State Senate. Besides, the organisation’s ENPOWR programme has educated over 15,000 students about endometriosis in high schools across the state of New York.
Endowed with a flair for business, she is involved in multiple companies and has a home décor line, ‘The Padma Collection’. She also created ‘Padma’s Easy Exotic’, a collection of culinary products ranging from frozen organic foods, fine teas, and natural spice blends, to food related goods.
To her, food is an epitome of her life, from her childhood to her present stardom in the world of fashion and food. As she maintains, ‘From the simple stringing together of lemon garlands for the goddess Durga, to dividing the prasadam or blessed foods for the children first, I came to associate food not only with feminity, but also with purity and divinity.’ ♦