Padma Lakshmi invites you to Taste The Nation
Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Thursday, June 18. All times are Eastern.
Top pick
Taste The Nation With Padma Lakshmi (Hulu, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): “It’s no wonder that the best American food shows are those that whisk hosts off to other countries. It’s there, not in the States, that they can actually investigate the culinary traditions that form the amorphous patchwork of American cuisine, which is defined primarily by how it’s adopted the recipes and techniques of other cultures… Taste The Nation, a new food travel show from Hulu, directly engages with this notion, asking point-blank just what, exactly, American food is. By focusing specifically on the immigrant groups that have seen their native dishes appropriated, as well as the ways in which they seek to preserve those original traditions, it inches toward an answer more complex than ‘fast food.’ Episodes dig into the evolutions of Japanese cuisine in Honolulu, Persian fare in Los Angeles, and burritos in the border city of El Paso, and while some old traditions are seeing a back-to-basics resurgence in the U.S., others, like those of the Gullah Geechee in Charleston, South Carolina, are working to keep them alive in their own communities.” Click here to read the rest of Randall Colburn’s pre-air review.
