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.
Love, Loss, and What We Ate is an intimate and unexpected story of
food and family--both the ones we are born to and the ones we
create--and their enduring legacies.
