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Lakshmi learned to cook with her mother and grandmother and was a vegetarian until well into her teens. Food played an important part in her upbringing, first in Madras, India (now Chennai) and then in New York City. She has often described food as “my way of processing the world”, but didn’t make a career out of it until her mid-30s. She and her mother, a nurse, moved to the US when she was four years old after her parents divorced. She studied theatre arts and American literature at Clark University in Massachusetts and started modelling soon after graduating. A serious car accident when she was a teenager had left a scar on her arm, but photographer Helmut Newton chose to highlight it, catapulting Lakshmi into the limelight and helping her become the first Indian supermodel.

Her success in modelling not only gave her the ability to pay off her student loans – it also allowed her to move to Italy, where she lived for several years and hosted a long-running variety show there called Domenica In. But she kept coming back to food, writing cookbooks Easy Exotic and Tangy,Tart, Hot & Sweet. She also hosted cooking shows like Padma’s Passport, in which she cooked recipes from around the world, and the series Planet Food, a food and travel documentary series, both of which aired before the launch in 2002 of Anthony Bourdain’s acclaimed A Cook’s Tour. In 2016 she published the New York Times best-selling memoir Love, Loss, and What We Ate, in which she talked about her life through food and also opened up about her love life and her divorce from Salman Rushdie, whom she married in 2004.

In that book, Lakshmi said that the relationship ended in part because she had been suffering from endometriosis — a disease in which tissue grows outside the uterus — and that it was a condition that Rushdie didn’t understand. Lakshmi had suffered from the painful condition from the age of 13 but wasn’t diagnosed or able to receive proper care for it until she was 36. After undergoing surgery, the experience led her to create the Endo- metriosis Foundation in 2009, an institution dedicated to research and education about the condition with a research centre at MIT and the Harvard Medical School. “There were people who couldn’t even pronounce endometriosis when we started, so I’m very proud of the gains the foundation has made,” she says. “We’ve been plugging away for a really long time and perhaps #MeToo exposed a lot of these inequalities in our system that affect women, and gender bias and misogyny in health- care is certainly a big one.” In 2019, the foundation helped pass legislation in New York State requiring that sex education also include education about endometriosis for both girls and boys. “A boy that learns about this disease will be a more sensitive and supporting husband, father, colleague, lover,” says Lakshmi. “We’d like to make that a federal law and we’re working towards that.”

Fighting for women’s rights is something that has taken up even more of Lakshmi’s time since rai- sing her 13-year-old daughter, Krishna, whom she had the venture capitalist Adam Dell. She is an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Ambassador for immigrants’ rights and women’s rights, as well as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford came forward to testify that the then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her, Lakshmi wrote an essay for the New York Times in which she said she had been raped when she was 16 years old. “I understand why a woman would wait years to disclose a sexual as- sault,” she wrote. “For years, I did the same thing”.

Aside from all her TV and activism work, which led to her being named in TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people of 2023, Lakshmi’s long list of achievements goes on. She has designed a jewellery line, a collection of culinary products, a capsule collection with MAC Cosmetics and is currently working on another cookbook based on the recipes in Taste the Nation. For Semaine, she has created an ice cream based on a dessert from the Philippines, Halo Halo (which is Tagalog for “mixed”) with New York based independent ice cream maker Bad Habit. “It’s a dessert that takes many forms, I love it because it’s a build-your-own adventure experience and it has a bunch of things,” she says. “Traditionally it has flan, because of the Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, and it also has a lot of tropical fruits because it’s a Philippino dish. Halo Halo is a meditation on temperature and texture, as much as it’s about sweetened flavour.”