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New Orleans is home to some of the oldest restaurants in the United States, several of which are run by descendents of the original owners, now serving the descendents of the original patrons.
In destroying her restaurants, Hurricane Katrina threatened to destroy the very identity of the city. Her restaurants are repositories of the city’s cultural memory. But as people made their way back to the ruined city, it was apparent that the first and best way to rebuild New Orleans rested with the restaurants.
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Food to the Rescue!
The Restorative Role of Food-Related Organizations
in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Meryl S. Rosofsky, M.D.
MA and Adjunct Professor, Food Studies
Department of Nutrition, Food Studies & Public Health
New York University
24 Fifth Avenue, #423
New York, NY 10011
mrosofsky@aol.com
(212) 260-9978
Abstract
The ravages of Katrina showed us all what it means to miss New Orleans. Now the food community and other leaders, activists, and concerned citizens are showing us what it means to restore New Orleans. Food has always been uniquely defining in New Orleans, a hallmark of identity, source of pride, forger of community, a centerpiece of the tourist economy. Food-related organizations (FROs), no less than individual chefs and restaurants, are playing a vital role in the recovery of post-Katrina New Orleans, not only physically and economically but spiritually and culturally as well. Their activities—be they in school-based organic gardens, museum exhibition halls, Habitat for Humanity feeding stations, or community business development offices—are helping to uplift the community and bridge some of the deep racial and class divides that have long plagued New Orleans.
This paper examines several select FROs, including Seedco Financial’s Restaurant Recovery Initiative, Share Our Strength, Edible Schoolyard NOLA, and Southern Food and Beverage Museum—their mission, activities, impact, and ongoing challenges—to explore specific ways each of them is contributing to, and especially relevant for, the survival and rebuilding of this unique, beleaguered, essential city.
Food to the Rescue!
The Restorative Role of Food-Related Organizations
in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Every place has its history, but what is it about New Orleans that makes it more than just the sum of the events that have happened there? What gives it a meaning and a soul so that it is known throughout the world as a place to revive the spirit? What is it about the spirit of the people who live there that could produce a music, a cuisine, an architecture, a total environment, the mere mention of which can bring a smile to the face of someone who has never even set foot there?
What is the meaning of a place like that, and what is lost if it is lost?
Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters
In few places in the world is food more defining than in New Orleans. Together with its music and architecture, its cuisine—a rich pastiche of Creole, Cajun, Afro-Caribbean, French, Spanish, and other influences—is nearly synonymous with the soul and culture of the city. Providing far more than physical nourishment, the food of New Orleans is a potent marker of identity and forger of community for those who live there, and a symbol and tourism magnet for those who don’t. Here people are uncommonly passionate about their gumbo and muffulettas, their po’boys and étouffées, their stuffed mirliton and jambalayas and communal crawfish boils. Life is ordered by the rhythms of red beans and rice on Mondays, lingering liquid lunches at Galatoire’s in the French Quarter on Fridays, oyster or roast beef po’boys at Mother’s or Parkway anytime. Fancy restaurants like Antoine’s and Commander’s Palace are the stuff of legend, and local but no less world-class places like Café Degas or Brigtsen’s have their devoted followings. Here one can slip into even (or especially) some tucked-away neighborhood restaurant, low-key and unassuming, and, as Tom Piazza marvels in Why New Orleans Matters, “get a meal that you will remember for the rest of your days.”
Few would have thought, back in the summer of 2005, that the days of these restaurants themselves might be numbered. Hindsight is haunting, and we now know that the food, music, architecture, and all else that is life in New Orleans were threatened with extinction when Hurricane Katrina tore into town on August 29th, 2005. The storm itself did not wreak most of the havoc in New Orleans (though other parts of the Gulf Coast were devastated by Katrina’s winds and water); that distinction goes to the breach of the aging levees the city’s inhabitants depended on for their below-sea-level lives, and, just as catastrophically, the government’s tragically delayed and woefully inadequate response. (Who will ever forget the images of misery broadcast from the rooftops of the flooded Lower Ninth and the hellish hot Superdome?)
Now, the city that people used to come to for spiritual renewal is itself in need of spiritual renewal (as Piazza movingly lays out in his book). Two and a half years after Katrina, the city is still contending with a daunting litany of challenges: the trickling and mismanagement of federal funds and insurance money; the absence of cohesive citywide plans for neighborhood development; the continued dire shortage of schools and hospitals and housing; ongoing corruption scandals on the part of local and state politicians; eroding wetlands (instrumental in protecting from future storm surges); a diminished population (~270,000 as of the two-year anniversary in August 2007, down ~60% from pre-storm levels); declining jobs. These issues are compounded by an alarming and still rising crime rate, especially in sections like Central City, where homicides have become commonplace. Serious mental health problems are (understandably) rampant, with depression rates more than doubled two-plus years out and suicide increased threefold at the one-year anniversary and still tragically elevated as the stresses of rebuilding mount rather than recede.
Surmounting these challenges remains no easy task. But fortunately New Orleans counts among her natural resources great resolve, resilience, and yes, her restaurants. Almost from the beginning, restaurants have played a key role in the recovery, not only economic and physical but spiritual and psychological as well. Star chefs like John Besh and Paul Prudhomme have been at the vanguard of this culinary Reconstruction. Besh, a former Marine and award-winning chef of Restaurant August, made his way back to the suffering city a mere three days after the storm to feed Guardsmen, police, and other emergency workers. (He has since reopened August and Besh Steakhouse and launched Luke and La Provence, and has become a public ambassador for the city, his television appearances on the Food Network and the Today show helping to keep New Orleans on the national radar screen.) Scott Boswell, chef of Stella! in the French Quarter, improvised outdoor grilled hamburgers to feed National Guard troops barely three weeks after Katrina hit, dishing out hope along with sustenance. When full-service places like Herbsaint (Donald Link and Susan Spicer) and Upperline (JoAnn Clevenger) started reopening in the weeks and months after the storm, locals wept with relief and gratitude, as much for the spirit of community and semblance of normalcy as for the cherished foods and flavors. “‘I’m biased,’” New Orleans gourmand Brobson Lutz is quoted by restaurant critic Craig LaBan as saying, “‘but I think the food did more to bring us out of the depths of depression than anything else.’”
The farmers’ markets, too, most notably the Crescent City Farmers Market, where fishers and farmers come from far-flung parishes to sell their shrimp, okra, and satsumas to the city’s chefs and home cooks, are playing a central role in the revitalization of the economy and the community. “The town-square atmosphere of our markets and their inclusiveness,” writes Dar Wolnik in her beautiful essay in the tributary collection Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, “cement their future in a city that expects food to save its soul.”
In addition to the chefs, restaurants, and markets, there are a number of less celebrated but no less vital food-related organizations (what I am terming FROs) that are contributing to the psychological, cultural, and economic recovery of New Orleans. Here I examine several select FROs— their mission, activities, impact, and ongoing challenges—to explore specific ways each of them is contributing to, and especially relevant for, the survival and rebuilding of this unique, beleaguered, essential city. The FROs I focus on are Seedco Financial Services’ Restaurant Recovery Initiative, Share Our Strength, Edible Schoolyard New Orleans, and the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. On a 5-day visit to New Orleans in March 2008, I interviewed directors and staff from these organizations and learned firsthand and from their websites and other sources about their evolution and activities.
Because food is so central not only to the physical and economic health of New Orleans but also to the very identity, spirit and culture of the city and its people, these FROs, I argue, play a vital role in the recovery and renewal of post-Katrina New Orleans.
While a detailed comparative analysis of the FROs’ constituents and stakeholders (e.g. poor largely black schoolchildren vs. moneyed largely white tourists and local elites; stitched-together mom-and-pop po’boy shops vs. white-tablecloth restaurant icons) is beyond the scope of this paper, I hope the stories will also shed light on some of the roiling racial and class issues that plagued New Orleans long before the storm but that were laid bare and magnified by it, for indeed food— access to it, celebration of it, identification with it— both exemplifies and bridges these deep divides.
I. Seedco Financial Services’ Restaurant Recovery Initiative
“Keeping Mom and Pop Businesses on the Map”
I went to Dooky Chase
To get me something to eat
The waitress looked at me and said
‘Ray you sure look beat,’
Now it’s early in the morning
And I ain’t got nothing but the
blues….
Ray Charles
Early In The Morning Blues
“‘It was mom and pop businesses that made New Orleans the way it was, and some of them are gone[….] Others, like me, are in danger of not coming back,’” said Kevin Bachemin, a third-generation butcher and owner of Bachemin’s Meat market in the Seventh Ward, two years after Katrina hit. Since 1969 his family’s spicy Creole sausages have been a mainstay of local dishes like gumbo and red beans and rice. Today, the future of this institution remains uncertain, the shop shuttered while Mr. Bachemin considers whether, with soaring insurance costs and in a neighborhood whose population remains greatly diminished since the storm, he can afford to reopen.
Small, family-owned businesses have long contributed distinctive character to New Orleans neighborhoods. These mom-and-pop businesses, with limited financial resources, have had an especially hard time rebounding from Katrina. Nearly half of small businesses are bringing in 75% or less revenue than before Katrina, fewer competitors not making up for even fewer customers. Insurance rates have doubled and tripled in recent months, threatening the livelihood of many small business owners, including restaurateurs and small food retailers, who are also facing severe labor shortages, costly repairs, a reduced customer base, skyrocketing electric and fuel bills, rising rents (up 40% since the storm , with 56% of rental property destroyed ), and other challenges since Katrina. Particularly hard hit have been minority-owned businesses, among them food shops and restaurants that quite literally flavored the local culture.
Enter Seedco Financial Services, a nonprofit community development organization that provides affordable financing and technical assistance to small businesses and anchor projects in low-income and economically distressed areas. Seedco lent their expertise to the economic recovery of Lower Manhattan following 9/11, providing loans, grants, employee wage subsidies, and job placement and retention services to hundreds of small businesses and dislocated workers. Seedco Financial Services has been working in Louisiana for over fifteen years on various economic development projects. In April 2006 they launched their New Orleans operations, based at Xavier University of Louisiana, to aid small businesses impacted by Katrina.
Two food-related programs are at the heart of Seedco’s multi-pronged economic recovery strategy in New Orleans. One of these programs is providing tailored loans and financial packages to hard-hit small businesses in the Vietnamese-American community, primarily in the fishing and shrimp industries. Seedco Financial has earmarked $1 million for their Vietnamese-American Community Initiative, to support the recovery of this once-vital community in New Orleans East that had been supplying fish and shrimp for local consumption and export for a quarter century when Katrina ravaged their boats, equipment, processing plants, and homes.
Their other main food-focused project is the Restaurant Recovery Initiative, in conjunction with Share Our Strength (whose Hinges of Hope activities are described below) and Deutsche Bank. “We understood very quickly that restaurants were extremely important to the economy of Louisiana,” explains Robin Barnes, senior vice president of Seedco Financial. Prior to the storm, restaurants and the food industry were the second largest employer in Louisiana. But economic contribution was only the first filter for Seedco. “These are sectors that are important to the identity of the state and the city,” says Barnes. “The culture—Mardi Gras, the festivals, the restaurants—is not just for the tourists. It’s why people live here. It’s why they’re lost elsewhere.”
The mission of the Restaurant Recovery Initiative is to provide “comprehensive aid to these businesses that were once a thriving part of the local economy and that are now languishing…. [We are] currently in the process of identifying a group of 15 small, mostly African American owned-restaurants, with whom we will develop recovery plans of combined financial and technical assistance. We will also work with the broader restaurant community to develop restaurant worker recruitment, housing and retention strategies.”
Indeed, a shortage of workers is one of the most pressing challenges facing restaurateurs in New Orleans these days. Without affordable housing to return to, would-be staff (and customers) remain scattered in places like Houston, Baton Rouge, and other outposts of the Katrina diaspora. Leah Chase, beloved 85-year-old grandmother of Creole cuisine, has been unable to reopen her restaurant Dooky Chase’s for sit-down service due to a shortage of service and neighborhood customers (though she has recently reopened for takeout and private catered events). This iconic restaurant, in the historic black neighborhood of Treme, the oldest settlement of free people of color in the South, was founded by Ms. Chase’s in-laws in 1941 (it is named for her husband, Edgar “Dooky” Chase II) and has been her home since she became chef there in the 1950s. Here people of color could dine with fine service and real china during the dark and not-so-distant days of segregation. Dooky Chase’s fed Martin Luther King, Jr. and hosted SNCC meetings during the turbulent days of the civil rights movement, and more recently was a stop for Barack Obama on the presidential campaign trail.
Now, this culinary and cultural institution is in need: “I want to reopen, but I can’t get help. People aren’t back,” says Leah Chase. “I think they’ll come back, but we don’t have the schools, the hospitals. Families with children can’t come back if there’s no schools for them. My husband has asthma, and I worry all the time where would we go if something happens.” Seedco organized a recruitment drive for Dooky Chase’s last August, and it “failed miserably,” according to Robin Barnes. “130 people showed up, and only 7 interviewed to serve. They all want to be in the kitchen with Leah Chase.” That kind of turnout is great, but doesn’t solve the critical shortage of front-of-house staff. More successful have been Seedco’s efforts to create a new business plan for the restaurant, and the moral support they’ve provided. “This woman’s been a godsend, you have no idea,” a grateful, ever-gracious Ms. Chase told me one morning at the Crescent City Farmers Market, gesturing to Seedco’s Ms. Barnes.
In the days of segregation, Leah Chase wanted to have “an upscale restaurant for her community that was equal to the restaurants in the French Quarter.” Now, in the post-Katrina environment, the restaurants of the French Quarter face many of the same difficulties as restaurants in historically black neighborhoods (though, to be sure, minority-owned restaurants typically have had less access to capital all along, and it was predominantly, though not exclusively, black neighborhoods like the Lower Ninth that suffered the greatest flooding, damage, and tragic loss of life in Katrina, and that rely mostly on local residents—who’ve been slow to return— rather than tourists as their customer base).
“Restaurants in the French Quarter have been suffering dramatically because of a shortage of workers,” observes Barnes. “There’s plenty of business—they can’t even seat everyone. Over at [famed New Orleans restaurateur Dickie Brennan’s] Bourbon House, people are waiting out front and half the restaurant is not open, because there’s no one to wait tables, and they’re not willing to compromise service.”
Seedco Financial has also helped local food purveyors and restaurateurs adapt their business models and find new sources of revenue to survive in the changed environment. Loretta Harrison started selling her pralines in 1980 at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival (popularly known as “Jazz Fest”). Soon she began selling “Loretta’s Authentic Pralines” from a kiosk in the historic French Market of the French Quarter. When the market closed after Katrina, she moved her business to North Rampart in the Marigny. This residential neighborhood lacked the foot traffic of the Quarter, but was teeming with relief workers and cleanup crews. Ms. Harrison started offering lunch to feed the workers in the area. “There are construction workers all over the place now. They need affordable places to eat,” says Barnes. With guidance from Seedco, Loretta also began expanding her retail product line to include king cakes (a classic Mardi Gras tradition, decorated with purple, green, and gold sugar), pastries, and sweet Creole tomato jelly.
By working to save these small, local food shops and restaurants, Seedco is helping to ward off the much-feared Disneyfication of post-Katrina New Orleans and safeguard the cherished food traditions that define so much of life here. “Restaurants become a focal part of the community, where marriage proposals are made, political campaigns planned, business deals made. Food places are where you congregate,” notes Barnes. After a catastrophe like 9/11 or Katrina, “it’s a pain if your drugstore isn’t open. You lose your drycleaner, it’s inconvenient. But it’s more devastating if you lose your favorite restaurant. For those who have the courage to come back, it makes everyone comfortable to drive by Dooky Chase’s and see Mrs. Chase is there. It’s comforting to see your institutions coming back.”
II. Share Our Strength
“Reviving restaurants, restoring lives and spirits”
The first funder of the Restaurant Recovery Initiative was Share Our Strength (SOS), a hunger relief organization founded in 1984 on the premise that everyone has a strength to share to help those in need and create sustainable ways to end hunger. Partnering with chefs, restaurateurs, foodservice professionals, and corporate and community
supporters, Share Our Strength is pursuing its goal of ending childhood hunger in America through fundraising (such as Share Our Strength’s Taste of the Nation culinary benefit and the Great American Bake Sale campaign), education, and innovative corporate and nonprofit partnerships.
While not an emergency response organization per se, in December 2005 Share Our Strength mobilized its restaurant industry partners in a nationwide dine-out program, Restaurants for Relief, to support hurricane relief efforts across the Gulf Coast region. Raising more than $1.2 million that first year, Share Our Strength was able to provide critical support to “schools, community kitchens, feeding programs, farmers’ markets, and FEMA trailer parks.” On August 29, 2006, the one-year anniversary of Katrina, Share Our Strength repeated this event. At that time, fewer than half of New Orleans metropolitan area restaurants had reopened. Restaurants for Relief offered “a message of hope and support from the entire American hospitality community to their colleagues on the Gulf Coast that the people and businesses in Louisiana and Mississippi are a national treasure that will be restored.”
Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse, Palace Café, and Bourbon House in New Orleans were among the hundreds of restaurants across the country that participated. “‘Obviously August 29 is going to be a day of reflection here in New Orleans,’” Dickie Brennan said. “‘Sharing a meal together with family and friends is part of the healing process.’”
With the success of the first Restaurants for Relief fundraiser, Share Our Strength organizers were faced with figuring out how to grant the money out responsibly. “We knew we needed to get the hospitality industry back for the city to survive,” said Ashley Graham, director of Share Our Strength’s Louisiana office. New Orleans culinary luminaries like Frank Brigtsen, Susan Spicer, and Leah Chase had all been longtime supporters of Share Our Strength. Now was an opportunity to support them, and to leverage their expertise on behalf of lesser-known restaurants that were struggling too. Share Our Strength decided to aid restaurant workers—cooks, dishwashers, busboys, waiters—as a good way to give back. They provided subsidies for housing, transportation grants to get dispersed workers back to New Orleans, and other forms of support. “We were willing to go off mission so things could get done,” says Graham. Off mission but very much on track.
One moving and creative way Share Our Strength has engaged a broader network to join the cause has been through its Hinges of Hope Tours. SOS founder and executive director Bill Shore, a visionary proponent of the power of bearing witness, believes that “if business leaders are exposed to needy people, they will discover a natural impulse to help.” The experiential Hinges of Hope tours bring delegations of corporate executives, chefs and restaurateurs, journalists, and others to areas of extreme poverty. “But instead of despair, we see people and places that are swinging toward hope,” Graham says. In this way, Hinges of Hope “works to create understanding and action, educates participants about solutions, and deepens participants’ engagement with Share Our Strength and the communities we visit.” In December 2005 Share Our Strength conducted its first Hinges of Hope tour in Louisiana, focusing on people and organizations leading the relief and recovery efforts in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. (Restaurateur and strong SOS supporter Danny Meyer sent 20 people from his Union Square Hospitality Group in New Your City on a Hinges of Hope Louisiana tour, an impressive display of commitment that will no doubt have a profound ripple effect.)
One eloquent Hinges of Hope leader has been chef Frank Brigtsen. "‘Our food and our music is what defines us,’” Brigtsen told participants on a March 2006 Hinges of Hope tour. "‘That's who we are, and that is what makes us different. New Orleans and Louisiana have given to the world red beans and rice, pralines, remoulade, seafood gumbo, jazz, rhythm and blues--these are unique things to our culture. Restaurants help reaffirm our identity. We give people a couple of hours of joy.’” Now, in the aftermath Katrina, he finds that “‘We [in the restaurant industry] feel our importance to the community. Our work is vital—it is necessary to restore people’s spirits. Because we are not rebuilding buildings here, we are restoring lives.’”
III. Edible Schoolyard New Orleans
“Renewing New Orleans One Okra Plant and One Child at a Time”
“I love digging in the dirt with the fork. It’s fun,” says Regina Cash, an 8th-grader at the Samuel J. Green Charter School in New Orleans. “I feel like I’m doing something good.” The chance to have fun and do good are not things to take for granted in a school where 75% of the
320 students (98% of whom are African-American) come from single-parent homes and 98% qualify for federal free or reduced lunch programs (served in a cafeteria that Share Our Strength helped rebuild after Katrina). Thanks to the nascent Edible Schoolyard New Orleans program, Regina and her classmates, many of them living in poverty before Katrina struck and facing even greater uncertainty and chaos since the storm, are experiencing a measure of peace and satisfaction that comes from tending, harvesting, and eating plants from their new schoolyard garden.
Started in the fall of 2006, one year after Katrina hit, Edible Schoolyard New Orleans (ESY NOLA) is the first and to date only sanctioned replication of the seminal Edible Schoolyard started in 1994 by Alice Waters at the Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, California. The mission of ESY NOLA is “to create and sustain an expansive organic garden on the New Orleans public school campus of Samuel J. Green Charter School. The Edible Schoolyard… involves students in all aspects of farming the garden—along with preparing, serving and eating the food—as a means of awakening their senses and encouraging awareness and appreciation of the transformative values of nourishment, community, and stewardship of the land.” For visionary Green Charter Principal Dr. Tony Recasner, “we’re not just an Edible Schoolyard, we’re an Edible School,” with organic gardening and fresh seasonal cooking woven throughout the curriculum and the culture. Weekly classes, meet-the-farmer events, holiday celebrations, and seasonal festivals for students and families highlight local crops (pecans, soybeans, citrus, watermelon, strawberries) and food traditions (jambalaya, barbecue). The end of the winter citrus season was marked this year in true New Orleans fashion by a “satsuma second line,” followed by a festive hello to welcome spring’s strawberries. Students participate in gardening and cooking lessons keyed to their grade level (K-8) around core subjects like science, math, and social studies. Kindergarteners come around with a compost bucket collecting banana peels and other organic garbage (“It feels really good to turn trash into treasure,” an older student writes in the weekly handwritten newsletter Edibles). The 2nd graders are learning about the water cycle and gravity; the 3rd-graders had a recent visit from a wetlands expert (the rear of the garden features a small wetlands area, complete with bulrush, blueberry bushes, frogs and turtles) and now know about the importance of saving this endangered habitat.
The Edible Garden is slowly coming to life on what had been a dismal, scrappy concrete expanse ringed with barbed wire fencing. Today the Garden comprises carefully tended beds planted with lettuces, carrots, mustard greens, okra, broccoli, peas, herbs, strawberries, and other crops, depending on the season; garden walkways and arbors; and an outdoor kitchen area. A grape trellis (erected the day before my visit in March by the 2nd-graders) will one day be covered by Cynthiana, the premier red wine grape of the South (all but wiped out by Prohibition), and the cheekily-named white Blanc du Bois grape vines. “It’s a chance for the kids to learn about fermentation!” says garden teacher Eric Kugler with a warm grin. Future plans include a citrus orchard; a thickly planted jungle area with ginger, bananas, papaya, and bamboo; and an Outdoor Classroom with a green roof, funded by the Emeril Lagasse Foundation. “People will be freaking out when we have creeping fig and bougainvillea and a jungle out here!” says Kugler.
The hope is that “through the Edible Schoolyard experience, students learn responsibility and respect for the natural world, and that hard work and collective efforts through teamwork yield real benefits in the garden, kitchen, school and in life.” As garden teacher Denise Richter, a 2006 NYU Gallatin graduate in environmental and urban studies and community development, reflects, “A lot of these kids haven’t been given any opportunity before to care, to nurture, to be respectful. A lot of them move around a lot, they have no stability. After Katrina, this is the new normal. This garden offers them a stable, peaceful, safe place.”
Plans are underway to complement the Edible Garden with an Edible Kitchen, a hands-on teaching venue where students will learn how to cook meals using ingredients from the school garden and local farmers’ markets. Early on, the creators of ESY NOLA realized that “cooking, eating, and sharing food together are… essential ingredients necessary to build the Edible Schoolyard program, and to rebuild the larger school community after Katrina.” For now, cooking classes take place in a makeshift classroom space, and in the Outdoor Kitchen. Chef April Neujean, who joined ESY NOLA in August 2007 from New York City, loves turning the kids on to the uniqueness of their own food culture. “This is the only place in the country where every day you eat your history,” she says. “As an outsider, I can celebrate and help them see what’s different and special about their foods, the yaka mein, étoufée, crawfish boils, po’boys. We have Carnival, Mardi Gras, second lines. They don’t realize these things aren’t anywhere else.”
Recently, students took the initiative to form a Friday Cooking Club, where they celebrate and cook their own family recipes, gathering oral histories from family members and writing essays about what the recipes mean to them. “These kids come from single-parent families with huge food access issues, so people are turning to fast foods, convenience foods,” Chef April notes. The cooking tradition, she says, resides with the older generation, “the grandmas,” and the recipes aren’t written down, so this is a way to preserve and continue these traditions. “There’s so much pride and emotion associated with food, being able to shed light on that is excellent,” April says.
In addition to celebrating New Orleans’ food through Creole cooking classes and indigenous recipes, the kids are exposed to foods and traditions from other cultures. “There’s a lack of diversity here, especially in our school,” says April. “There’s very little concept of other cultures and foods; it’s very different from Berkeley.” As part of the “We are the world/We eat the world” Edible Electives project, students learn where different foods come from, how it reaches them, why other cultures eat the foods they do, where other countries are on the map. Turkish dolmas and Vietnamese spring rolls, made with cabbage and other vegetables from the Edible Garden, were recent hits. As Alice Waters advocates, “’If they grow it and prepare it, they will eat it—and most times, they will love it too.’”
The cooking component of the program has also helped ESY NOLA establish itself as an inclusive and culturally appropriate initiative. “We were worried we’d be seen as importing this elitist, high-brow gourmet organic thing,” says Program Director Donna Cavato. “But actually it’s been well-received. We emphasize that this is the old-fashioned way of doing things, cooking from scratch.” Kids have started requesting recipes to share with parents and grandparents, and even ask for seeds to start their own gardens at home.
The ESY NOLA organizers were right to worry that the Berkeley model might not translate so successfully to New Orleans. “Our kids are high poverty, multi-generational poverty. They don’t have stable families, houses, incomes. Food insecurity is a huge issue, exacerbated by Katrina,” both Cavato and Neujean observe. A public school system that was failing before Katrina was shut down altogether after the storm. “I think we have more issues and challenges than they face in Berkeley. But we adhere to the same philosophies and principles.”
If the experience in Berkeley is any indicator, this approach should pay long-term dividends for the children in New Orleans. According to a study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School, “‘After one year, students at King [Middle School in Berkeley], compared with a control group at a similar middle school, showed improvement in behavior and fewer emotional problems. They were savvier about ecology, and their overall grade point averages improved.’”
If anything, the program at ESY NOLA is even more integrated into the curriculum and the community than that in Berkeley. The students here cook for school-based holiday celebrations and special events like the Edible Barbecue. Families, friends and neighbors attend the monthly Open Garden Saturdays where they can participate in building the garden and the community. Chef April prepares fresh healthy snacks for all the garden classes, and is consulting with the school’s third-party cafeteria company and policymakers to promote improved quality, nutrition, and local sourcing of school meals, with support from the nonprofit Market Umbrella (which runs the Crescent City Farmers Market).
While no one would ever wish for a Hurricane Katrina as a catalyst to change, many people in New Orleans these days speak of the “silver lining” of Katrina. To Edible Schoolyard’s Donna Cavato, the “silver lining” is the chance to reinvent a long-broken public school system. For the children of Green Charter School, who lost so much in Katrina and fell so far behind, trading in barbed wire for grape arbors is a step in the right direction. Talk about turning “trash into treasure.”
IV. The Southern Food and Beverage Museum
“Healing the Spirits of the City One Meal—and Exhibit—at a Time”
In May 2004, plans were underway for the Southern Food and Beverage Museum’s inaugural exhibit, “A Toast of New Orleans,” chronicling the unique cocktail and beverage culture of the city. In an interview at the time (15 months before Katrina), the museum’s senior curator Elizabeth Pearce, eerily if unwittingly foreshadowing events to come, spoke about the historical context of classic New Orleans drinks: “’The Hurricane [a popular rum-based New Orleans cocktail] didn’t fall from the sky,’ she said. ‘It was created under a certain set of circumstances.’”
The museum itself is now being created under a certain set of circumstances. The brainchild of Liz Williams, energetic and philanthropic former CEO of the University of New Orleans Foundation who helped create the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the National D-Day Museum , the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB) was founded as a nonprofit organization “dedicated to the discovery, understanding and celebration of the culture of food and drink in the South.” In July 2005 the museum was finalizing a deal on a permanent home in Algiers Point, in a warehouse at Blaine Kern’s Mardi Gras World. That same month SoFAB opened its second exhibit, “Tout Sweet,” in temporary space for what was to be a 6-month show.
Six weeks later Katrina hit. The space that was to become the Museum’s permanent quarters, spared the flooding that engulfed 80% of the city, was used as a staging ground for the National Guard. Pearce sought refuge first in London then in Oxford, Mississippi. Williams evacuated to Mississippi with her husband. That experience really drove home for both women the meaning and importance of what the museum was trying to do. “It was a great comfort for people in the diaspora in Houston and Chicago to eat local food,” Williams recalls. “We had an 800 number set up in conjunction with the Southern Foodways Alliance, and we’d get these calls from people saying ‘I’m in Ann Arbor, and I can’t find chicory (or filé, or Camellia red beans). What am I going to do?’”
Katrina also highlighted the value and meaning of cookbooks. Thousands of New Orleanians lost treasured volumes to water damage and mold, and were desperate to replace favorite recipes and cookbooks, many out of print by 2005. “We realized how important cookbooks are,” Williams says. “Before it was more abstract. Now we see [collecting and archiving] cookbooks as absolutely essential. These cookbooks themselves are artifacts, a little time capsule of a place and time.” In addition to serving as a repository for a growing Southern cookbook collection, SoFAB has just reissued Red Beans and Rice-ly Yours: Recipes from New Orleans that Louis Armstrong Loved, featuring recipes for such dishes as Chicken Gumbo with Andouille Sausage and Oysters; Shrimp Remoulade; and Bread Pudding with Rum Sauce.
Perhaps most of all, Katrina showed how utterly indispensable New Orleans restaurants are to her people—for comfort, for identity, for community. “After Katrina, the restaurants that were struggling to be open were filled all the time,” Williams recalls. “Restaurants really took that role of the ‘great good place.’ People wanted to be around each other, and their kitchens weren’t functional, so there was a practical reason, too.”
Mere months after the storm, SoFAB mounted an exhibit called “Restaurant Restorative,” on the healing role of NOLA’s restaurants in the aftermath of Katrina, which debuted at the James Beard Awards in New York City in May 2006. In the introduction to this collection of photographs, murals and text, curator Pearce writes about NOLA’s restaurants as “repositories of the city’s cultural memory.” She goes on to describe how, “as people made their way back to the ruined city, the first and best way to rebuild New Orleans rested with the restaurants.” One photograph shows a portly Paul Prudhomme, of the renowned Cajun restaurant K-Paul’s, in front of the trailer village he created to house his employees when FEMA failed to come through. A caption elsewhere quotes Betsy McDaniel of Betsy’s Pancake House:
“We had to rebuild the whole place, and you know we were praying to [St. Joseph]. I think that’s the only reason I could get this place open again; St. Joseph wanted to get me off of his back.”
Also on display is a promotion for Ralph Brennan’s Bacco in the French Quarter, advertising “3 Appetizers + 1 Glass of Wine $25” or the “Post Katrina Special: 3 Glasses of Wine + 1 Appetizer $25.”
Now, in a sign that the recovery is well and truly underway, SoFAB can turn its attention to building its permanent collections, programs, archives, website, blog, and other trappings of a full-fledged institution. One of the “silver linings” of Katrina was, for SoFAB, securing a prime, previously unattainable location for the museum, in the Riverwalk Marketplace. Ribbon-cutting is slated for June 7th, 2008. At its opening, the museum will feature permanent exhibits on New Orleans and Louisiana foodways, and temporary exhibits on White House menus and postcards collected by Jessica Harris featuring Africans and African-Americans with food. An exhibit on the history of grits will follow in the fall.
“We’re one of the first new organizations to open and move forward after Katrina,” Liz Williams notes with pride. “Most institutions like us would’ve packed up their tent…. The idea of starting a new institution in a city that’s been so devastated is a sign of hope.” Just as SoFAB’s “Restaurant Restorative” exhibit clearly illustrates how restaurants are helping to heal “the spirits of the city and its citizens one meal at a time.” the Southern Food and Beverage Museum itself is helping to lift spirits and feed souls one exhibit at a time.
Conclusion
Food has always been uniquely defining in New Orleans, a hallmark of identity, source of pride, forger of community, a centerpiece of the tourist economy. Given how deeply rooted and fiercely beloved the city’s food traditions are, it makes great sense that food is a lynchpin of the city’s renewal. As we have seen, food-related organizations, no less than individual chefs and restaurants, are playing a vital role in the recovery of post-Katrina New Orleans, not only physically and economically but spiritually and culturally as well. Their activities—be they in school-based gardens, museum exhibition halls, Habitat for Humanity feeding stations, or community business development offices—are helping to uplift the community and restore the city’s rich cultural heritage. They are also helping to bridge some of the deep racial and class divides that have long plagued this city.
Certainly, it will take more than grassroots efforts and individual organizations to repair the broken systems that marginalized the poor of New Orleans before the storm and utterly failed them when it came. But in the meantime, the efforts of these FROs are helping to raise and channel funds, re-establish food systems, tackle housing and worker shortages, build community, and preserve and celebrate indigenous food traditions and culture that give meaning and character to this indispensable city, for poor and affluent, local and visitor alike. Thanks to them and countless other dedicated individuals and institutions, New Orleans is slowly coming back, and as more than a theme park version of her former self.
Of course, tremendous challenges remain, and these FROs—Seedco, Share Our Strength, Edible Schoolyard New Orleans, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, along with many others—will have their work cut out for years to come. But in a city where food has long defined its soul, it is both fitting and promising that food is now helping to save its soul. And it is a soul well worth saving. As 19th-century journalist Lafcadio Hearn wrote in this dispatch from New Orleans to a friend in Cincinnati in 1879:
Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under a lava flood of taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become only a study for archaeologists. Its condition is so bad that when I write about it, as I intend to do soon, nobody will believe I am telling the truth.
But it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes, than to own the whole state of Ohio.
The ravages of Katrina showed us all what it means to miss New Orleans. Now the food community and other leaders, activists, and concerned citizens are showing us what it means to restore New Orleans. As Christine Carroll, visionary founder of CulinaryCorps (another NOLA-focused FRO), says, “With all the unique capabilities of that city and of those citizens, there will be a solution, and it will be a creative one, not a boring government boilerplate solution. All this cross-pollination will make it happen, and it will be something really cool and really New Orleans.” Here’s to people like Christine, who are lovingly crafting that solution, one meal, one okra plant, one restaurant at a time.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges and salutes the dedicated directors and staff from these various FROs who so generously shared their time, insights, and Southern hospitality: Elizabeth Pearce and Liz Williams of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum; Christine Carroll of CulinaryCorps; Donna Cavato, April Neujean, Denise Richter, and Eric Kugler of Edible Schoolyard NOLA; Robin Barnes of Seedco; and Ashley Graham of Share Our Strength. In addition, the author would like to thank Professor Amy Bentley and fellow Food Studies colleagues at NYU for their constructive comments in the development of this project.
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Author’s Bio
Meryl Rosofsky, M.D. recently completed her Masters degree in Food Studies at New York University’s Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, where she is now an Adjunct Professor.
Meryl has published articles in a variety of scientific journals and food and culture publications. She is a contributor to The Organic Wine Journal, Gastronomica, Edible East End, the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food & Drink in America, among others. She organizes annual food and wine tours in Italy through her company Siena Food Tours, and leads culinary walking tours in New York City for the Institute of Culinary Education. In addition to her pursuits in the world of food, Meryl (a Harvard-trained physician with a background in neuropsychology) is Managing Director of Siena Partners, a strategic and organizational consulting firm specializing in healthcare and the life sciences.
Contact information: 24 Fifth Avenue, #423, New York, NY 10011 USA (mrosofsky@aol.com).
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