[Lifestyle] Padma Lakshmi: ‘Nobody wants to talk about their vagina. But I was so angry’

[BirSaNN]

Iwish I did more on purpose. I wish I could tell you that it was all premeditated and choreographed; it’s not.” Padma Lakshmi is talking to me by video call from her office in New York about what is now the 20th season of Top Chef, which she has been hosting since 2006. It’s like a cross between MasterChef and Bake Off, except with chefs, not regular people. It has this distinctive sense of mischief, sometimes in the prankish tasks, other times just burning off Lakshmi’s quizzical eyebrows.

Glossy, calm, dressed in sea blue, now and again joined by her chihuahua-ish rescue dog, she radiates elegance, and looks as you’d expect a 90s supermodel to look – Lakshmi was known as the world’s first supermodel of Indian descent. But somewhere between the political passion, the self-deprecation and the puckishness, she doesn’t sound the way you’d expect a beautiful person to sound. It must be annoying to be beautiful; it comes with all these preconceptions.

You’ll know already that Lakshmi is quite idiosyncratic if you’ve ever seen Taste the Nation, which she has also been presenting, as well as writing, since 2020. It is about food, technically, but it’s more like a travelogue through society, meeting different migrant communities through their cuisines. It was conceived as a creative, tangential response to the prevailing narratives, the “othering of migrants”, she says, “to forward the agenda of people like Trump”.

If the concept was political, the show is anything but polemic – it all starts and ends with the food. “I process the world through food,” she says. “I can tell you everything I ate and everything I wore almost every day of my life. I remember being a toddler and climbing my grandmother’s pantry, trying to reach for the spices and pickles.”

In 1972, when Lakshmi was four, she moved from south India to the US with her mother. “She was in an arranged marriage with my father, who’s very difficult. It was a very turbulent marriage, to say the least. She divorced even though she knew that she’d be ostracised. It was such a taboo. It was like walking around with the scarlet “A” on your chest.”

Lakshmi, who is now 52, loved growing up in New York: “In any one city block, I would see Latin people, black people, Chinese people, Middle Eastern people… I’m a product of that very liberal, 70s New York life.”

She still spent about a quarter of her time with her grandparents in India, to give her mother – who worked as an oncology nurse for 50 years – a break. “She didn’t want me to lose the culture as well. It was important for her that I speak Tamil, that I eat Indian food, that I understand the religion; we’re pretty secular but we’re practising Hindus.”

She didn’t get to adulthood unscathed. She was raped when she was 16, and never spoke about it to anyone until she wrote an op-ed in the New York Times five years ago. In it, she also disclosed that she’d been molested when she was seven by a relative of her then-stepfather’s. That assault she did mention, with the result that her parents sent her to live with her grandparents for a year, during which time, she wrote in the Times, she internalised the message that: “If you speak up, you will be cast out.”

“It was a very rash decision on my part to write that,” she says now. It was during the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the supreme court, during which Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexual assault when they were at high school in 1982 (two other women, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, also came forward with accusations, Kavanaugh has denied all allegations). Donald Trump sought to undermine the women’s credibility by questioning why, if the assaults were that bad, they hadn’t “immediately filed a police report”. It spurred many women, including Lakshmi, to tweet about assaults and rapes they’d suffered in the past and hadn’t reported.

But “something didn’t sit right with me”, she recalls now. “I tweeted that out in support, but I couldn’t sleep that night. I just thought, what happened to me was really serious. I’m sure that affected my whole life. And it deserved more than a tweet. My younger self deserved more than that.” So she wrote the article, sent it to the Times, “and then I took to my bed for three days – it was literally like having surgery without anaesthesia. I felt super-vulnerable.”

To catapult back to her teenage years: her family had moved to California, and she went to Clarke University in Massachusetts to study theatre arts and American literature. It was during a study year in Madrid, in 1991, that she was first spotted by a modelling agency. When she graduated, she moved to Milan. She was pretty famous in that era, but it’s amazing, looking back, how racist fashion was in the 90s. It was pretty rare to see a woman of colour on the cover of a magazine, and although it was remarked on at the time, there was no expectation of change – it was commented on the way bad weather is commented on; it was just a thing. “I knew that I wasn’t going to get as many covers,” Lakshmi says, “and neither were the black girls or the Latin girls who looked dark. If you were fair-skinned it would be different, because you could pass as white. It was just a given. It’s so insidious and subliminal that you don’t even stop to think about it. We were just happy for whatever work we got.”

Lakshmi also had an 18cm (7in) scar on her arm, the legacy of a car accident when she was 14, which she calls drily “an additional impediment”. These were the days before retouching, and she was very self-conscious about it until Helmut Newton did a groundbreaking shoot in which he didn’t try to camouflage it. “It taught me at a very young age how arbitrary beauty standards are. It didn’t happen overnight, but over time, this thing I was quite shy about, people wanted to make sure they saw on the runway.”

She speaks quite elliptically about the modelling business. “I didn’t have that many bad experiences because I think I could see those people from far off,” she says. “If I got hired by them, I did the job and tried to stay out of their way. The one or two times that I let my guard down, it was not good. You cannot go through modelling or acting or being on television without experiencing a good measure of that.” We’re plainly talking about sexual harassment, which was rife in her heyday, while carefully avoiding the phrase.

She now has a 13-year-old daughter and, she says, “I always tried to give her the language to defend herself, so that she’s got two or three sentences in her pocket. When she went to preschool, right away, I said if anybody touches you, or makes you feel uncomfortable, or makes you touch them, just say ‘no’, really loud. I think most of us are so unaware that we’re kind of shocked that it’s even happening to us.”

link: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/mar/15/padma-lakshmi-nobody-wants-to-talk-about-their-vagina-but-i-was-so-angry