Pajiba Logo
film / tv / celeb / substack / news / social media / pajiba love / about / cbr
film / tv / politics / news / celeb

Pajiba 10 For Your Consideration: Padma Lakshmi

By Seth Freilich | Celebrity | December 20, 2021

padma-food-booze.jpeg
Header Image Source: Getty

Everyone has a list of the famous people they’d like to sit down and have dinner with, right? Padma Lakshmi is very high on my list. Because look, this isn’t complicated.

Padma hosts (and exec produces) one of the best reality competition shows on TV. If you don’t watch Top Chef, you should. And if you do, you know that she is as valuable and central to that show as judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons, to the point that it almost feels reductive and disrespectful to refer to Padma as the “host,” as if it suggests that she is only the host.

Like many who become famous in the cooking world, Padma also has her own food/travel show, Hulu’s Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi. Rather than being just another “here’s the food of the world,” Padma brought a very specific intent and point of view to her show, focusing specifically on the import and influence of immigrants on what we all consider “American food.”

This isn’t a surprise, given that Padma has long been an outspoken advocate for immigration rights and reform (among many other things):

Still not convinced that Padma should be a Pajiba 10 shoo-in? How about the fact that she is a published children’s author (in addition to a number of cookbooks and adult fare), again writing a book with specific intent to help the world. (And with the acknowledgment that social media is a very self-selective lens, by all impressions she appears to be an outstanding mother to her daughter.)

She’s a goddamned delight, isn’t she?

She also asks the important questions:

Padma knows good food, and knows how to make good food, and I’m desperately waiting for her to post the recipe to this green apple and mint chutney because god damn:

Speaking of “god damn,” she’s also very aware of the fact that she’s a snack.

Snack eating a snack, indeed. Y’all, seriously … how dare she? She looks better as she ages while some of us (me, I’m talking about me) just look increasingly like an old tree. Look at this woman who is as physically beautiful as she seems to be in all other aspects of her life and just give me one reason you aren’t going to do the right thing and vote her into the Pajiba 10.


read next

Why Are We So Fascinated By the Rumours About Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood?