A vivid memoir of food and family, success and triumph, Like, Loss, and What We Ate traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi’s unlikely route from an immigrant childhood to an elaborate life in front of the camera-a tantalizing mixture of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn

Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she found that how exactly we eat can be an extension of how we love, how exactly we comfort, how we forge a sense of home-and how we taste the world once we approximately Love, Reduction, and WHAT WE SHOULD Ate: A Memoir navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she resided a existence of dislocation that could become habit as a grown-up, never quite in the home in the world. Yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she 1st ate sitting around the cool ground of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India.

Poignant and surprising, Love, Loss, and What We Ate is definitely Lakshmi’s extraordinary accounts of her trip from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and memorable women, to the judges’ table of Best Chef and beyond. It chronicles the brutal devotion from the remarkable individuals who designed her on the way, from her headstrong mom who flouted traditional Indian convention to produce a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather-a amazing engineer with an irrepressible lovely tooth-to the person seemingly wrong on her behalf in every method who became her truest ally. A memoir wealthy with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative meals, it is alive using the scents, tastes, and textures of the lifestyle that spans complicated geographies both inner and external.

Love, Reduction, and WHAT WE SHOULD Ate is an intimate and unexpected tale of food and family-both the ones we are born to and those we create-and their enduring legacies.