Padma Lakshmi’s New Food Show Is a Trojan Horse

In the series’s most striking episodes, Lakshmi looks at communities whose traditions and history tend not to be included in kitschy celebrations of culinary Americana. One features the Gullah Geechee people of the southern coast, described by Lakshmi as among “the most beautiful cultures you may have never heard of,” whose ancestors were enslaved and transported to America to turn swampland into rice fields. With the culinary historian Michael Twitty, Lakshmi makes red rice, a meal whose varying components traditionally came from whatever happened to be available. At this point in history, the dish has been so broadly incorporated into southern cooking that even Martha Stewart has a recipe for it. But as Lakshmi and Twitty prepare it, the context they provide adds fraught symbolism: the wealth of the early American economy built on the blood and forced labor of enslaved people. It’s this quality, the particular “dichotomy of the splendor and the suffering,” Lakshmi argues, that truly defines American cuisine as a whole.

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Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives the show isn’t. Still, for all the comparisons it has garnered to adventuristic travelogues like Parts Unknown, Taste the Nation kept reminding me of Guy Fieri’s long-running Food Network series, an unabashedly populist celebration of “real” American food. Fieri, with his cherry-red hot rods and his unique bowling-shirt chic, is the antithesis of a food snob, as enamored of a deep fryer as he is of a farm-to-table joint. His conception of American cuisine has always been an inclusive one. Bosnian refugees, Jamaican matriarchs, British purveyors of pub fare—all are welcome in Flavortown. But while Fieri makes acceptance seem easy, Lakshmi exposes the overlooked battles that have defined the making of the American melting pot. She documents how Indigenous food traditions were lost when Native Americans were forcibly removed from their land and given government-supplied commodity foods that made them sick. She considers questions of food sovereignty, colonization, and trauma. She does all this with a kind of educated breeziness, and speech peppered with colloquial “dudes” and “mans” that resists heaviness, but respects viewers’ ability to figure things out for themselves.

At the end of the El Paso episode, Lakshmi interviews Maynard Haddad, a second-generation Syrian American entrepreneur who owns the H&H Car Wash and Coffee Shop, a Tex-Mex restaurant. Haddad employs a number of Mexican cooks who cross the border every day to get to work. He also voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and expresses no reservations about doing so, although he’s irked by how much harder his chefs’ commutes have become. Lakshmi doesn’t press him on the disconnect. She wanted, she told Eater, to document his point of view, not try to manipulate it. She’s been criticized for this unwillingness to hold to account someone with views that directly threaten his staff’s lives and livelihoods, and for her faintly platitudinous conclusion that food might be able to unite people divided by much more than physical borders. But the episode has already exposed the conflict at the heart of American cooking, the inequity of a culture that gets to selectively take and absorb whatever it wants without having to offer anything significant in return. Haddad can profit from Mexican food and the labor of migrant workers while directly betraying those same employees because that’s exactly what American cuisine has always done.

Sophie Gilbert is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.