The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Hurricane hardened city copes ‘New Orleans way’
When Ida knocked out power and dumped buckets of rain, hurricane-hardened people did what they always do.
Shrimp and grits served for breakfast on the sidewalk at El Pavo Real. “Super Secret” seasoned pork and braised greens handed out at the door of the Live Oak Café. Spicy jambalaya dished out under a canopy erected on the empty sun-scorched streetcar tracks by a couple who just wanted to help.
The hearty fare is being served from neighbor to neighbor, free for the asking and needed in a city where the lunchtime conversation topic is often the dinner menu and where camaraderie flourishes over Monday plates of rice and beans.
In New Orleans, food is just one of the many ways that residents help each other during hard times.
And it’s been no different in the days after Hurricane Ida, which flooded or destroyed homes, tore up trees and knocked out the entire city’s power grid.
While chefs and amateur cooks piled plates high with comfort food, residents with generators charged neighbors’ cellphones and revved chain saws to clear downed trees, while a local church gave bags of cleaning supplies and diapers.
“In times of crisis ... we all join together,” said City Council member Jay Banks, one of several people at the Israelites Baptist Church who distributed donated goods in the low-income neighborhood of Central City on Thursday.
New Orleans’ problems echo those of much of urban America: dismaying bursts of violent crime, ingrained poverty, a dearth of affordable housing for the poor. Throw in a decrepit drainage system in one of America’s rainiest cities, and a dispiriting vulnerability to hurricanes as climate change contributes to more severe and frequent storms — and one could forgive anyone here who wants to give up and get out. The population has shrunk over the years. But many stay, and not just those who lack the means to relocate. They do so to nurture beloved neighborhood traditions: second-line parades, jazz funerals, century-old “social aid and pleasure clubs” — and good food.
In Treme, a cradle of Black culture and New Orleans brass band music, Backatown Coffee Parlor owners Jessica and Alonzo Knox couldn’t cook in their all-electric kitchen but gave away salad makings, pastries and rapidly thawing bags of frozen, precooked crawfish tails.
El Pavo Real restaurant owner Lindsey McLellan used food preserved “with ice and prayer” to whip up a free steak taco meal Wednesday afternoon, using herbs and peppers salvaged from a hurricane mangled community garden by neighbor Jelagat Cheruiyot, a Tulane University ecology professor.
The garden is a project of the venerable Broadmoor Improvement Association, which rose to prominence advocating for the preservation of the working-class Broadmoor neighborhood after levee failures during Hurricane Katrina inundated homes there in 2005.
Refreshment-related relief efforts weren’t limited to those with culinary skills.
“Take all you want. Leave what you can,” read the hand-scrawled sign taped to a box of d snack mix bags on a little folding table in front of a “shotgun” cottage near the Mississippi River.