This post originally appeared on Complex.com
About halfway through the premiere episode of Padma Lakshmi’s Taste the Nation, the multi-hyphenate chef, host, and food personality teams with San Antonio Chef Rico Torres to make some food. It’s pretty standard for these types of food travelogues—you’ll get a moment in which the host joins with a local chef to indulge in some of the area’s specific flavors. Yet what immediately struck me about the scene was the execution of it; each individual ingredient of the larger dish was broken out and specifically highlighted in order to provide a chance for it to shine. It’s a quick, yet extremely insightful, microcosm of what Taste the Nation does so well: A focused look at all the disparate elements that make up what we all know as “American food.”
The Hulu series (I’ve seen three of the show’s ten episodes, all of which dropped on June 18) is inherently focused on the immigrant experience and how that’s shaped the culture of food in this country. As an immigrant herself, Lakshmi is uniquely situated to take a look at the intersection of these elements and how they ripple out into their respective communities and into the country at large.
Naturally, this comes with an exploration of social issues as well. The premiere episode is focused on El Paso and opens in striking fashion, as Padma is frequently interrupted by the sound of Border Patrol helicopters flying overhead while the crew attempts to film. A quick glance at her social presence and you’ll know Padma has been extremely vocal in her advocacy, which makes her well-suited to foster dialogues about sensitive political issues like we see in the premiere. She’s able to engage in these dialogues in a deeply empathic way, which sets the show up well for when Padma turns her gaze inward; Taste the Nation’s third episode explores the host’s own deeply personal connection to her childhood in Queens and how American and Indian heritage intermix with one another. The result is a deeply affecting episode and an immediate series standout.
It’s cliche to say food is the thing that often brings us all together, but Taste the Nation proves this axiom true time and time again. The series, as it turns out, is extraordinarily well-suited to this specific moment in our country’s history because of how thoroughly it explores our past and how it informs the present. Not unlike that cooking cutaway, sometimes it’s best to just take a step back and break things down into their individual ingredients so you can better understand the larger whole.