The best thing you can do for someone is make them a beautiful plate of food. How else can you invade someone’s body without actually touching them?

Lakshmi frames cooking as an unusually intimate form of care: feeding someone is both nurturing and powerfully personal because it crosses the boundary between outside and inside. The “beautiful plate” emphasizes intention, aesthetics, and generosity—food as a gift rather than mere fuel. Her provocative phrasing (“invade someone’s body”) underscores how eating makes the recipient physically incorporate another person’s choices, labor, and taste, creating vulnerability and trust. The line also hints at hospitality’s social force: a meal can persuade, comfort, seduce, or reconcile without physical contact, making cuisine a medium of emotional and bodily connection.