This June, beloved chef Lidia Bastianich will be recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Daytime Emmys in Los Angeles.
“I am very honored, very delighted, pleased, satisfied,” Bastianich told Boston Public Radio on Wednesday. The award honors Bastianich’s 25 years of culinary programming on PBS.
She’ll be honored alongside “The Young and the Restless” actor Melody Thomas Scott and producer Edward J. Scott. That fact the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences is recognizing Bastianich alongside these daytime stars speaks to the importance of food, she said.
“It says a lot about … the programs on food and how effective are those in today’s society. How much society really needs and wants and needs to be around the table,” she said.
Bastianich is a believer in the family meal to defuse tensions around current events, from political divisions to views on the wars in Ukraine and Palestine.
“When you sit down and eat, we are almost on an animal level that we are eating, we are taking in,” she said, adding that after relaxing around the table with nourishment and conversations, it’s easier to take in more difficult subjects. “Our heart is … open. We are not resistant to what's coming at us.”
Prior to her 50-year career as a chef, restaurant owner and cookbook author, Bastianich lived in a refugee camp in post-WWII Italy before her family immigrated to the United States.
As a teenager, she worked at a bakery in Astoria, Queens, where she made friends with the owner's son, Christopher Walken. Asked whether the Academy Award winner excelled at his job of stuffing jelly donuts, Bastianich said, “He was good.”
After 20-plus years as a restaurant owner and chef, Bastianich first appeared on PBS in 1993 on Julia Child’s “Master Chef” program. Eventually, producers asked Bastianich if she wanted a show of her own. The rest is public television history.
