Apple pie is not American. So says Indian immigrant Padma Lakshmi, a former model who is promoting a new CBS cooking show while she campaigns for more migration.
“Apple pie isn’t American: not the crust, not the filling, not the spices,” Lakshmi told a credulous New York Times reporter Monday, two weeks before Americans begin cooking their Thanksgiving meals.
Lakshmi was also dismissive about Americans’ food, such as turkey, corn, cranberries, and blueberries: “If we just ate what was native to the United States, we’d be living on desert packrat and ramps,” she said, referring to a desert-living rodent and wild garlic.
Lakshmi, who was accepted into the United States when she arrived with her mother at age five, admitted her transactional attitude towards Americans, saying, “I love this country for what it gave me and my mom.”
Indian immigrant Padma Lakshmi maintains apple pie “isn’t American: not the crust, not the filling, not the spices.” (Patrick Fore/Unsplash)
Americans and the United States would be helpless without immigrants like her, the Indian migrant insisted: “If you take away the immigrants, the country — the food system, the tech arena, Wall Street and medicine — will all come to a standstill.”
Lakshmi’s claim about “tech” is a reference to the widespread claim by Indians that India’s H-1B workers are vital to the United States’ technological infrastructure. The claim is increasingly rejected by American professionals.
Still, many migrants from ancient cultures resent the wealth, power, and history of ordinary Americans. The resentment exists because ordinary Americans’ accomplishments during their first 249 years far outshine the grandiose claims made by elite Indians and Chinese who can trace their origins back four thousand years.
The resentment is rising as more migrants in the United States demand higher status, promote their home-country food, and push their pre-modern ethnic, caste, and clan claims. These political campaigns are often backed up by lobbying from business groups and foreign governments.
Some migrants, and many of their children, choose to assimilate into Americans’ society, often by embracing American-style names or Christianity.
Lakshmi’s contempt for ordinary Americans also echoes the social caste system in India, where so-called “Brahmins” claim elite status and refused to even eat the food cooked by supposedly inferior Indians dubbed “Shudras” or “Dalits.”
“The Brahmin denied the right to swarga [a heaven-like afterlife] to all Shudras and Dalits irrespective of their wealth and political power here on this earth,” according to a 2020 article by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, an Indian writer who opposes the Indian caste system. He continued:
This is the final philosophical stroke that a Brahmin used against all food producers, housebuilders, cattle grazers and other artisans or total ecosystem makers, which even ensured the very Brahmin’s survival, who prospered without ever involving in production. It is a cruel, merciless spiritual ideology that the Brahmin evolved.
The Brahmin aversion to lower castes also forced the creation of a new caste of cooks — “Maharajas” — just for Brahmin families, according to a 2025 article in India’s English-language Economic Times newspaper:
When scammers today target a food business, they plant a bone in a vegetarian dish and try to blackmail on that basis. In 19th century Calcutta, their equivalent was bhoj pandeys, feast spoilers, who would threaten to come to a big community feast, like a wedding, and spread rumours that the food was made by low-caste cooks. Those who ate it would feel the need for [Hindu] purification, while the hosts would lose community status.
This story, quoted in Swapna M Banerjee’s book Men, Women & Domestics — from an original account in Mahandranath Dutta’s Kolikatar Puratan — explains how Brahmin cooks got a boost. They had long existed in temples and royal courts, thanks to the logic of caste hierarchies: If food made by lower castes was seen as impure, the safest option was having a cook from the highest caste.
As a young model, Laksmi was embraced by Americans. But she has decided to return the welcome by rejecting the voters who backed President Donald Trump since 2016, according to the article:
She has lived in the United States for 50 of her 55 years, and is a naturalized citizen. But during the first Trump administration, she suddenly felt like an outsider again. In 2017, she began working with the American Civil Liberties Union as an advocate for immigrants’ rights.
Lakshmi shared her contempt for Americans as she touted her new cooking show for broadcast via CBS in the 2025/26 season:
I was looking for something to do in my creative life that would incorporate the crash education I had gotten from immigrants in different parts of our country. I didn’t want to do a lifestyle show, which is what all the networks wanted. I wasn’t interested in trying to make something that’s fuzzy at the edges. I want it to be real, I want to dress like I really dress and talk like I really talk. Why is it that male chefs get to be swashbuckling on TV, and I have to be at home in the kitchen?
The CBS show is titled “America’s Culinary Cup,” and is likely based on the very understated and polite British TV hit, “Great British Bake Off.”:
I got to be in charge, and I had a crew of 350 people, and I made it about the principles of good cooking, not about challenges. All the chefs are professionals, and they are teaching real restaurant skills, in a serious kitchen that looks like a three-Michelin-star kitchen. And we are giving away a million dollars. People come out of the woodwork to get a chance at that!
The 2025 winner of the 2025 British Bake Off competition was Scotswoman Jasmine Mitchell, BBC News reported “I hope that in winning Bake Off I have made my friends, family and Scotland proud,” Mitchell said. “I miss being in Scotland a lot, I grew up in Edinburgh and it’s a big part of my heritage.”CBS
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