In her decade-plus of food journalism, Priya Krishna has worked to make Indian cuisine more accessible to home cooks while telling the stories of unsung food laborers. At a recent Radcliffe event, Krishna sat down with the scholar Durba Mitra to talk about family, improvisation, authenticity, and “the America we live in today,” where we rely on human labor for greater access to a variety of cuisines while shopping for groceries at Walmart. This program coincides with an exhibition in the Schlesinger Library, Cooking Up Change: Women’s Agency and Community Building Through Cookbooks, featuring selections from the Library’s renowned collection of cookbooks, which include the papers of Julia Child, Grace Zia Chu, Zarela Martinez, and Madhur Jaffrey, about whom Krishna and Mitra had much to say. Released on September 24, 2026. Episode Transcript Guests Priya Krishna is a food reporter, video host, and former restaurant critic at The New York Times as well as the best-selling author of the cookbooks Priya’s Kitchen Adventures: A Cookbook for Kids (Harvest, 2024) and Indian-ish (Harvest, 2019). She hosts On the Job, a New York Times online series that looks at labor in the food industry, and has appeared as a judge on MasterChef. Durba Mitra is the Stanley Kelley, Jr., Visiting Professor for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University. Her scholarship brings together feminist studies, sexuality studies, and global intellectual history. She is the author of The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026) and Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020). She was a Carol K. Pforzheimer Assistant Professor and a 2018–2019 fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where she also served as interim faculty director of the Schlesinger Library. Related Content Priya Krishna On the Job by NYT Cooking Cooking and Culture: A Conversation with Priya Krishna Credits Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial manager at HRI, where she edits Radcliffe Magazine. Kevin Grady is the multimedia producer at HRI. Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI. Bill McCurdy is the A/V support technician at HRI. Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI. Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI. Special thanks to Cabin 3 Media for their invaluable contributions to the editing of this podcast episode. The Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture Series was established through the generosity of Kim G. Davis AB ’76, MBA ’78, and Judith N. Davis, longtime friends and champions of Harvard Radcliffe Institute. This annual lecture series invites leading figures from across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences to share their expertise, ideas, and diverse perspectives with the Harvard community and the broader public.
