“Katrina: 20 Years Later” is Word In Black’s series on Hurricane Katrina’s enduring impact on New Orleans, and how Black folks from the Big Easy navigate recovery, resilience, and justice.
With iconic dishes that draw on its French, African, Latin American, and Southern heritages — think jamabalya, étouffée, and seafood po-boys — the history of New Orleans is written in its food. It’s one of the reasons Lenora Howze of Baltimore and her friends have visited the Crescent City every year for more than 25 years.
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“It’s the food, the museums,” says Howze. “It’s the whole city: the nightlife, the day life — oh, and the shopping.”
But when Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans in 2005, flooding almost the entire city, it practically wiped out the city’s food heritage. The storm drove nearly half of the city’s approximately 800 restaurants out of business.
Reshaping the Food Scene
Twenty years later, New Orleans’ renowned food scene has rebounded from Katrina’s devastation. The survival of legendary eateries like Pascal’s Manale, famed for its barbecued shrimp, and Commander’s Palace, where celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse got his start, are testaments to resiliency.
Promoting healthy eating in the same place that invented beignets and Bananas Foster may seem like a tall order. But Leah Sarris, a chef and dietician formerly with Tulane University, has tackled the challenge by helping create a program that uses food as medicine.
“I always said, if you could do it here, you could do it anywhere,” she says.
There’s a lot [of people] that are interested in living a healthier lifestyle. So, believe it or not, once people started hearing about it people wanted to come back.
leah sarris, chef and nutritionist
It’s hard to overstate the importance of New Orleans’ relationship with food. With some 1,800 restaurants, the city is a premier global food city that draws tens of thousands of food tourists worldwide. Last year, roughly 19 million visitors spent over $10 billion on dining and hospitality; Mardi Gras regularly pours $900 million into the city’s coffers.
After the storm, the restaurant industry had a bit of a renaissance starting in 2010, and by 2015, the city had almost as many restaurants as it does today. Then, in 2020, the COVID pandemic led to more closures and labor shortages.
Health Equity Through Food
But experts say New Orleans’ food scene, like other aspects of the city itself, is sharply divided by race and income. Residents in some parts of the city live in food deserts — areas where supermarkets are rare, and there aren’t any other dining options besides fast food.
At the same time, Black residents, on average, tend to have higher rates of chronic diseases, like diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure, than whites. The pandemic exposed the disparities: Black residents made up roughly 80% of all New Orleans’ pandemic deaths, yet made up around 60% of the population.
Sarris, the former Tulane nutritionist, is using food to reverse those trends.
In 2012, at Tulane University’s School of Medicine, she helped create the Culinary Medicine program — the nation’s first. It began after the parents of a Tulane medical student participated in a hands-on cooking class for physicians offered at a conference.
“The original conference was called ‘Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives.’ And one of the parents asked the [Tulane] dean, ‘Why aren’t we teaching this to our medical students?’” Sarris says.
Traditionally, medical students only receive about 16 hours of nutrition education; even then, the classes primarily focus on the biochemical structure of food. There is little emphasis on the role of diet in maintaining or improving health.
Because most chronic diseases are correlated to diet, “we were trying to start that conversation,” Sarris says. They created Tulane University’s Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine, where chefs, dietitians, and physicians teach caregivers and community members how to help patients to cook and eat tasty, healthy food.
Taught in accordance with the American College of Culinary Medicine’s Health Meets Food curriculum, Tulane’s course focuses on improving patients’ diet and lifestyle, as well as condition- and disease-specific diets that dovetail with other medical treatments.
“New Orleans Is Not Healthy”
But it was tough going for a few years: the team didn’t have a kitchen, and Sarris, the director, didn’t have an office. Instead, the Goldring Center staff worked in churches, community centers, and pop-up kitchens.
The program found a permanent home at the ReFresh Project in the Mid-City neighborhood. Because the location is home to nine organizations that focus on achieving health equity in the region’s neighborhoods, Sarris says it helped build a sense of community. That included a partnership with Whole Foods, which opened a low-cost, community-driven model of its stores.
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“They were next door, which was really cool. We all shared a lobby because we could take [participants] on a grocery store tour,” Sarris says. “There [also] was a partner on site that did community gardens and [taught] around that, so we would partner with them as well.”
Although foodies love the city, “New Orleans is not healthy, and I think there’s a lot that are interested in living a healthier lifestyle,” Sarris says. “So, believe it or not, once people started hearing about it, people wanted to come back. And it’s just perpetuated that way over the years with the community.”
Many Black residents are restaurant and hospitality workers. And they continue to influence what New Orleans’ tourists and residents enjoy when eating out.
“There is something about the city, the spirit, the soul of the city, it’s just such a beautiful soul,” Howze says. “In all of its good — and even [after] its destruction, there is something about that city.”