Food’s Impact on Re-Building New Orleans

In an odd sort of way, Hurricane Katrina helped to make New Orleans an incredible laboratory not only for understanding the role and importance of a city’s food system but for recognizing the importance of food as an essential tool for community building.

Two thousand homes were lost in the storm and over 66,000 lots were left vacant or blighted (compared to 19,000 before Katrina).  There were no grocery stores, food vendors or gardens.  Fishers were lost, their boats wrecked and farmers had no crops, said Poppy Tooker, culinary activist, local food preservationist, founder of Slow Food New Orleans and a Times-Picayune “Hero of the Storm.” 

The city looked as though it had been through a nuclear explosion.  Everything was brown and gray and there was no green to be seen.  But a few restaurants remained open.

“That was a beacon of hope,” she said at the 14th Annual Community Food Security Coalition Conference held in New Orleans recently.

The food distribution system had collapsed, she said, however, it provided the opportunity to start all over again with a clean slate.

A month after the storm Tooker talked with regional farmers and vendors about supplying fresh food to restaurant chefs rather than rely only on national food distributors.  

Gradually, little cafes opened.  Some chefs used coolers for refrigerators.  Café registers put the farmer’s name on an envelope in order to pay for their food products. 

Then, grocery stores began to re-open but the struggle to find quality products continued.  For instance, when Tooker looked for butter and could only find margarine, she “burst into tears.”

Poppy Tooker

Slow Food USA wanted to help and by 2006, through the fundraising efforts of Tooker, the Terra Madre Relief Fund was established to assist Louisiana food communities hit by Hurricane Katrina.  Now that fund has evolved to lend a hand to farmers and food artisans struck by natural disasters on the Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Evacuees and food

Many evacuees, who were scattered all over the country, swore they would never return to New Orleans after they saw Katrina’s destruction on television.  However, some found that food comforted them in their homesickness.

Pam Broom and her family lived in Chicago for 18 months and sorely missed their native cuisine.  They’d get together with other evacuees and tell stories of home around a delicious Orleanian meal. 

Food had other effects.  Broom said she once saw a man with a basket full of green peppers and suddenly became extremely happy.  Green peppers along with celery and onions are part of the “trinity,” the base of New Orleans cooking. 

Broom began gardening in Chicago through Growing Power, an urban garden program started by MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient Will Allen.  One day as she harvested collard greens in an icy rain, she discovered that she really loved this work—but had had enough of Midwestern winters.  She decided to go home.

“Flying into New Orleans is like no other place in the world,” said Broom. “It’s full of mangled landscapes of wetlands and swamp, but I feel excited and blessed.  It’s a spirit that grabs you and holds you.” 

Broom is now executive director of the Women and Agriculture Network, a group of New Orleans organizations that strategically think and plan for food justice in urban areas. 

Lolis Eric Elie and his family evacuated to Baton Rouge, a mere 80 miles from New Orleans.  But it was obvious from the start that they weren’t in the same culture.

“There is an unquenchable human spirit and joie de vivre in New Orleans,” said Elie.

The former Times-Picayune columnist turned filmmaker (he wrote Treme, the HBO series about post-Katrina New Orleans) reflected on eating red beans and rice away from home.  The dish is a city tradition tied to Monday, laundry day, when people prepared it and let it simmer all day while they worked.

“[It] was affirming because it meant that all had not been lost,” he said.  “Through food, a part of the Orleanian culture could still be maintained.  There is a kind of security you get from food beyond having your stomach full.  Having a food tradition is part and parcel of one’s culture.”

Grassroots organizing

Since the storm new groups have been forming to address many of the city’s food—and health—needs.  For example, the New Orleans Food and Farm Network. (NOFFN) organizes projects and events that help citizens get fresh and healthy food through education, public policy, maps that locate farmers markets and local food vendors and by celebrating and addressing local food needs and resources at the neighborhood level.

NOFFN also latched on to the burgeoning urban gardens movement to teach people how to grow their own fresh fruits and vegetables on vacant land in neighborhoods that lost houses due to the storm.  Local government has responded to provide incentives for people to develop this vacant land for gardens, green spaces and beautification projects, although there is still a great need for soil building and composting.

Broom also recognized that urban agriculture has the capacity to develop a viable workforce by reaching out to groups like the underserved, at-risk youth and prisoners. 

Training them to grow food is far better than just giving them handouts, she said. 

It is interesting to note that most of these efforts to re-establish a local food system have come from grassroots people.

“City government lacks much understanding let alone does it have any policy on urban farms and farmers markets,” said Elie.  “The State of Louisiana recently set up a food policy initiative but there are lots of problems with it, some of which existed before Katrina.”

But things are changing as NOFFN “envision[s] a vital community that values its agricultural and culinary heritage,” according to its website. 

The oral history of a culture is important and food is quite connected to it. 

“It is part of discovering and understanding one’s identity but it is also a matter of food security where you not only prevent starvation but feel secure through food,” said Elie.

He added that several organizations are currently doing some “cultural excavation” through seed saving, writing community cookbooks, returning to the oral history of what the elders ate and how that has changed, learning about food-related diseases.

Among these efforts is Poppy Tooker’s book, The Crescent City Farmers Market Cookbook that not only incorporates renowned Orleanian chefs’ recipes, but tells the story of the rise and decline of the city’s markets, which date back to 1718. 

The book features the Crescent City Farmers Market, founded by the Twomey Center for Peace Through Justice at Loyola University New Orleans in 1995 after an absence of public markets for nearly 50 years. 

The market is an outgrowth and a reflection of the core mission of marketumbrella.org, which seeks “to cultivate public markets for the public good, utilize local resources to bolster authentic local traditions and to improve social, health, environmental and financial through trust and respect,” according to its website.

The Crescent City Farmers Market prides itself on making an annual $9 million economic impact on the city, however, it deems the social transactions among friends, shoppers, farmers, fishers and vendors as critical to the market’s success.

For example, on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving after Katrina when the market re-opened, people who couldn’t previously find each other, all met at the market, said Tooker. 

“It was a real community builder,” she said.

The market’s co-founder and executive director Richard McCarthy regards the importance of community especially critical today as “the promises of life long careers, financial stability, and civic engagement” fade.  

“And yet, citizens hunger for belonging, meaning, and authentic places that nurture community. This hunger speaks to the work of my particular nongovernmental organization – marketumbrella.org – to reinvent public markets as mechanisms for community building.” 

In 2004, the White Boot Brigade, a project of Market Umbrella was formed to protect the livelihoods of wild harvest fishers in the Greater New Orleans’ coastal waters from the onslaught of farm-raised seafood imports and natural and industrial disasters.  After Katrina, they donned the white boots of their trade and knocked on the doors of New York and California restaurants to promote their boutique catch. 

One other significant outcome in the post-Katrina re-organization of New Orleans is the new partnership between the people and local government around food, something that didn’t exist before, said Broom.

For example, the city’s Food Policy Council, which began in spring 2007, a year later approached the New Orleans City Council with recommendations on strategies aimed at improving the local food system.

The Council also started a summer program that provided 800 meals per day.  Currently, the city is breaking ground for a 6,000 square foot community kitchen where 2 million meals will be served per year, said Broom. 

New Orleans illustrates the resilience and imagination of its people in response to extraordinary disaster, virtual abandonment by government and the wariness by some Americans in seeing the city re-built.  New Orleans also represents an example of what can happen when friends and neighbors see the need not only to help each other but to preserve their culture.  In this case the driving force of community was—and still is—centered around food. 

Hurricane Katrina: The Spirit of New Orleans

No other story about New Orleans matches the efforts of citizens who took the initiative to clean up the mess left by the Hurricane Katrina and begin rebuilding their city. Likewise, people’s determination to return home turned out to be the driving force toward recovery—even amid heartache, suffering, psychological trauma and incredible inconvenience.

But this wasn’t easy. Within a month after Hurricane Katrina tore through the Gulf coast, questions arose in other parts of the country about whether New Orleans could or should endure.

Known as the “Great Footprint Debate,” three options emerged regarding the fate of the flooded city: (1) abandon everything; (2) maintain everything in favor of the social and economic assets of the city despite its geological truths; (3) concede the risks and rebuild the city on higher ground.

“Topography does matter,” said Richard Campanella, associate director of Tulane University's Center for Bioenvironmental Research and a research professor with Tulane's Department of Earth and Environmental Science. He pointed out that sea levels have increased by four inches during the 20th century and predicted that in another 100 years they will rise another 41 inches. He spoke recently at the annual American Planners Association conference.

But, five years after Katrina, New Orleans and its people have endured. The question now is: how did they do it?

Tom Piazza wrote a wonderful, intimate book shortly after Katrina titled Why New Orleans Matters in an attempt to answer this question.

The spirit of New Orleans, he suggests, arises from people’s view of mortality and their utter connection to the place where they live. What it boils down to is a philosophy that espouses gratitude for another day since no one knows what tomorrow may bring. It is not a fatalistic or Pollyanna view of life but rather one that is present-oriented and open to all possibilities, something very difficult for most Americans to understand because of our rushed, busy and controlled lives.

This Weltanschauung has its roots in Caribbean and African nature religions that believe creation generously gives of its abundance so that human beings can respond to the Creator with expressions of thanks and by extending their generosity to others in imitation of Nature. Such a view is different from the New Englander’s Calvinism of judgment and renunciation or the fundamentalist’s notions that God selects a chosen few and then rids the world of sinners. Orleanians consciously give thanks for a new day, a deep friendship, a neighborhood picnic, a spontaneous parade or just simply being alive.

Nothing illustrates this view better than the famous jazz funeral. As strange as it may seem, there is a profound soulfulness that begins the procession in a slow, solemn dirge as the grieving family leaves the church and heads to the cemetery. “Second liners” join in and eventually the music turns to lively jazz with dancing and strutting.

This is not silliness, says Piazza, but rather “the triumph over the pain, the recognition of life's brevity.” And the message is that everyone attending the funeral has escaped death today so let’s celebrate that.

Katrina left Orleanians with incredible hardships that make daily living extremely stressful, especially for the poor. There isn’t enough public transportation, and neighborhood stores are sometimes two and three miles away. Roads are still in disrepair and the recognizable landscape has been drastically altered as commercial and residential buildings were destroyed and removed. Many shopping centers remain vacant. This is all emotionally and psychologically draining and disorienting; depression and suicide rates have jumped since Katrina. So when a store re-opens, people indulge in a great celebration amid their grief, anger, joy, worry and hope, according to city officials.

“Even in its most desperate precincts [New Orleans] is a city of deep and powerful humanity, of endurance, resilience, humor and affirmation in the face of adversity,” says Piazza.


The HBO series, “Treme,” which takes place in the aftermath of Katrina in the famous neighborhood of the same name, also illustrates this soulfulness. In the first episode people are feeling sad, tired and devastated, so they take up their musical instruments and start a parade. Such a reaction is not an escape or a reluctance to face grim realities. Rather, it’s a spiritual response that comes out of the Black gospel tradition of “No cross, no crown.” In other words, you can’t appreciate the good if you don’t know the bad. So you are obliged to accept your burden, finiteness, and suffering and then connect to the people around you. Actually, this is one major reason why neighborhoods have been so strong in New Orleans and why so many people have strived to return home.

Vera Triplett, a professor of counseling at Our Lady of Holy Cross College, who is a “proud resident of the Gentilly Neighborhood responded to the footprint debate with comparisons to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco and 9/11 in New York City:

“I’ve never heard anyone ask whether their city would come back,” she said. “I take that as an insult….This is my home. I have every right to come back to it. And I’ll come back no matter how many times it floods.”

But Triplett isn’t just talk. She is one of many local individuals from a number of different projects that stepped forward to lead in the recovery of her neighborhood. After starting the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association, which aims to give residents a voice in the rebuilding their neighborhoods, she later represented Gentilly in the Rebuilding New Orleans Initiative funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The initiative developed the United New Orleans Plan (UNOP), which was accepted by the city council and adopted as the city’s master plan in 2007.

UNOP addresses specific actions necessary to facilitate the recovery and rebuilding of New Orleans through input from local citizens instead of just the technicians, politicians and wealthy landowners.

“People came in with questions and concerns,” said Triplett in an interview with American City magazine on the UNOP process. “That’s when I first began to see some of the pain and distress, frustration and sheer exhaustion. Not a lot of people understood what the people of New Orleans were going through….We provided practical things like public transportation, childcare and two full meals….The other integral thing was that there were entertainment breaks. Little personal dance breaks to make people feel better.”

Many other good things have occurred over the past five years, which have made Orleanians proud and outsiders amazed, according to city officials. Various independent political entities (the city, parishes, neighborhoods and the state) are now working together toward recovery. The city's newspaper has improved its coverage and transparency. Unemployment is only five to six percent due to the vast amount of rebuilding and thanks to the billions of federal dollars that have come in for roads, housing and other reconstruction projects—although much more is needed.

City Park, a 1300-acre urban park, the seventh largest in the country and bigger than New York's Central Park suffered $43 million worth of damage. Katrina took down 1,000 trees including many live oaks. Piles of debris, some measuring 30 to 40 feet high, were collected in the park and later hauled away. The park's executive director, Bob Beck, almost single-handedly raised millions of dollars to rebuild the park and has succeeded in bringing much of it back to its former splendor.

Piazza does not shirk from acknowledging New Orleans’ many problems, many of which were there before Katrina: crime, corruption, bad schools, extreme poverty, racism and the stark mismanagement of the city as well as the threat of violent weather and the loss of wetlands. Things are definitely turning around for the city although city planners admit that recovery will probably take 20 years. Then came the oil spill and its threat to fishing, tourism and the loss of wildlife in the Gulf and the bayous.

Clearly, a loss of New Orleans would be a tragedy so I pray that Orleanians—and people in the entire Gulf region—get through this latest dreadful crisis. I suspect they’ll do it through deliberate citizen action and participation and in the spirit of New Orleans that defiantly declares: “I’m here, I’m still alive and I’m willing to take whatever comes.” What a model of recovery from disaster for all Americans!

Hurricane Katrina: How Music Helped Save New Orleans

No other American city values music the way New Orleans does. Heck, one of its airports is named after legendary musician Louis Armstrong!

Music is not something that is tangible, linear or measurable, said Nick Spitzer, producer and host of the National Public Radio show “American Routes,” but it is one of the things people value.

Even in the midst of their own gloom over Hurricane Katrina’s destruction where homes and neighborhoods were crushed and where there was little infrastructure and not much support from state or federal government, music helped many evacuees rebuild their lives with a strong hope in the future and a deep connection to a place they loved.

“That's what life's about,” said Spitzer, “creating space for creativity.”

Spitzer and several jazz musicians spoke at the annual conference of the American Planning Association held recently in New Orleans where many sessions discussed the recovery effort after Hurricane Katrina.

Before the storm hit, Benny "Big Benny" Pete, tuba player and leader of the Hot 8 Brass Band, headed to Atlanta with his family. Only two of his band members were there while the rest were scattered all over the country. One day he received a phone call to reunite the band in Baton Rouge to perform for the evacuees living there. He jumped at the chance—despite the fact that neither he nor any of the band members had their instruments. Students from Louisiana State University and local high schools loaned them their band instruments just to hear a concert.

Pete said that all he cared about was playing music again but he soon realized how important it was for the evacuees who were homesick and traumatized by Katrina to hear their music.

“We found out the power of our music, said Pete, quite surprised. “We didn't understand that before but it was music that pulled us all together. It showed us the value and power of our culture.”

The music Hot 8 performed that day hearkened back to the social aid and pleasure clubs, said Pete, where a well-dressed band led a parade down the street, forming the “first line,” while onlookers joined them to form the “second line” with strutting, jumping and high-stepping underneath their decorated parasols as they blew whistles and waved feathered fans.

These clubs, called benevolent societies, developed in New Orleans during the mid- to late-1800s to help poor African Americans, and later other ethnic groups, defray health care costs, funeral expenses, and other financial hardships. The presence of these societies gradually fostered a sense of community among the people as they provided charitable works and hosted social events. The benevolent societies were also responsible for the “jazz funerals” where bands play somber, processional music from the church to the cemetery. On the way back, the music became more upbeat and joyous as mourners celebrated the deceased’s life with tears and joy.

The evacuees living in Baton Rouge recognized their culture and joined in the “second line,” said Pete. Once they returned to the city to pick up the pieces of their lives, they often held similar parades in order to obtain some relief, even though the familiar stores and landmarks of their streetscape were missing because of the storm.

Irma Thomas, known as the Soul Queen of New Orleans, said that storms have been a part of her life and career over the past 50 years and that she has left New Orleans three times due to hurricanes. Katrina, however, took on new meaning for her.

“Katrina gave us a look at the way we are and how vulnerable we are to weather,” she said. “It also showed us how lax and unconcerned government agencies are.”

When Katrina hit, Ms. Thomas was in Austin, Tex., on a gig. She said she saw the rooftop of her home in water on television.

“You always know where you live,” she said. “You know it.”

She and her husband lost both their home and her club, the Lions Den.

However, the tragedy didn't sink in for her until one night she sang “Back Water Blues,” a song written in the 1930s about a Louisiana storm. When she came to the line: “I went high on a hill and got no place to go,” she lost it in front of her audience.

Ms. Thomas lived in the 9th Ward. Like all evacuees who were dispersed throughout the country, she and her husband had to decide whether or not to return to New Orleans. For two years they stayed in Gonzales, 60 miles upriver, until they were able to return home “where their hearts were.”

Katrina inspired Ms. Thomas' new album, After the Rain, which won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album in 2007.

“Music orients us to the place and provides the creative spark for ourselves and the whole city,” she said. “Music was all Orleanians had after Katrina.”

In fact, the city lost a lot of its musicians, many of whom lived in the 9th Ward. They either couldn't return home because of finances (many work for cash and don’t have a credit record) or the older ones were on tour in Europe.

Losing many of the city’s musicians created a problem for young people looking to be mentored by them. Most schools had closed and opportunities for kids to join bands and play music were severely reduced. As a result, the first Mardi Gras after Katrina had few high school marching bands playing in the parades.

“We want to let them know that they have a culture,” said Pete. “Without that [music] connection, they are lost. We needed to let them know that they have a rich culture here in New Orleans.”

“Music kept the kids out of trouble,” said Ms. Thomas. “Music teaches them discipline.” If students have bad grades, they aren't allowed to play in the band.

Since Katrina, the Tipitina's Foundation's Instruments a Comin' program has been helping students obtain musical instruments and to learn to play them.

Music has also inspired many musicians to write songs about saving the wetlands in Louisiana, which would have helped protect New Orleans from Katrina by providing buffers between land and sea.

“We're losing wetlands the size of football fields every day,” said Ms. Thomas. “If you lose New Orleans, you've lost America,” she said.

Five-time Grammy winner and singer/songwriter, pianist and guitarist Malcolm John "Mac" Rebennack, Jr, known as Dr. John also expressed his concern about the wetlands as well as his love for the city.

“Thirty years ago we had a plan to build new wetlands,” he said, “but corruption in the state made the money go elsewhere.”

As a boy growing up in the bayou where people lived with the land, Dr. John learned how to hunt, fish and trap. However, 50 years later most of these wetlands are gone.

He performed his song, “Please Save Our Wetlands” on piano for conference attendees.

Dr. John now lives in New York but he retains the reputation not only as ambassador of New Orleans but as its social critic through his music.

For example, he has often railed against the influence of the oil companies whose 8,000 miles of man-made canals have played a role in Katrina's destruction.

The companies own the politicians who built the canals for “Black Gold,” the title of another song, despite the vulnerability of the coastline, he said.

Murphy Oil storage tanks spilled one million gallons of oil in St. Bernard Parish, one of the worst hit places in the city, due to Katrina's 145 mph landfall winds.

The City That Care Forgot, an album produced in 2007, won Dr. John his fifth Grammy. He said he wrote these songs because he found he couldn't live with himself if he didn't say something.

Seeing all the damage, having friends whose homes were destroyed and going to funerals was a real heart breaker for Dr. John. A post-Katrina function of the New Orleans Jazz Foundation was a great relief for people, he said. They were so glad to be there because it was a diversion from all funerals they had been attending. Now he is trying to save the city's Charity Hospital because “it has personally saved me a bunch of times.”

“Any civilization has health care,” he said as he riled against the hatred and confusion that had come out in the health care debate in Washington.

“It's simple to see what's going on. The insurance companies, chemical companies and pharmaceuticals have everyone locked in and they're making a fortune on people dying. That's not the thing to do. We all have a right to live.”

Dr. John is now working on a song about insurance companies turning their backs on Orleanians and stranding them such that they can't come home again.

“I love New Orleans and south Louisiana. It is a real sacred place.”

Off to New Orleans

I'll be in New Orleans April 9-13 to attend the American Planning Association's annual conference. This will be my first time in the city or at an APA conference and I'm very excited. My focus for writing will be on urban agriculture as economic development, sustainability issues in planning, and urban planners' recovery work after Hurricane Katrina.

I'm going to the conference as a reporter, so I'll post my writings on this blog and other news websites.