Film review: "Cooked: Survival by Zip Code"

 

Cooked: Survival by Zip Code. Directed by Judith Helfand, 2020.

The documentary Cooked: Survival by Zip Code had its genesis in telling the story of a tortuous heat wave in Chicago in July 1995, in which 739 people died. Filmmaker/narrator Judith Helfand observes early that this event is "not part of our collective memory" the way that 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina are. Author Eric Klinenberg, who served as content advisor for Cooked, called the heat wave a "disaster in slow motion," which might have made it less memorable.

Judith Helfand (from pbs.,org)

For urbanists, the Chicago heat wave is recalled mainly thanks to Klinenberg's book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago, 2003), which investigated the effects of place ("zip code") on mortality in the event. Klinenberg's book is plugged by Jane Jacobs in Dark Age Ahead (Random House, 2004), which I had just finished rereading before I saw the film. Jacobs praises Klinenberg for pursuing the trail of evidence to make significant connections, rather than fitting the catastrophe into a convenient existing narrative. 

As Helfand spins out the story, we see the City of Chicago's improvised response, including a bunch of refrigerator trucks full of corpses that were parked outside the coroner's office for weeks until they were able to sort through all the bodies. We see Mayor Richard M. Daley at press conferences doing rather obvious blame avoidance. It took years for Klinenberg's research to clarify what a lot of people already suspected: the deaths during the heat wave were predominantly occurring in neighborhoods that were largely nonwhite and poor. It is in those neighborhoods--Englewood and North Lawndale are two examples--where large numbers of people don't have air conditioning, have their windows nailed shut to thwart home invasion, lack nearby grocery stores where they could buy ice, and lack places to gather (like public libraries or senior centers) where they might find relief during hottest part of the day. (Some police stations made themselves available, but not surprisingly there were few takers.)

Getting better in Gage Park? Pete's Fresh Market, 57th and Kedzie
(Google Earth screenshot)

Cooked draws the obvious conclusion: Those who died in that heat wave almost 30 years ago, like those who died or lost their homes in Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, died of heat or some other proximate cause, but what killed them was the systemic racism and poverty. "This disaster was man made," Helfand concludes. (For the disproportionate impact of urban heat islands on poor people, see Fitzpatrick 2024 and Anderson and McMinn 2019.) Here Jacobs, following Klinenberg, makes the additional point that black neighborhoods with better urban fabric had a lot fewer deaths than North Lawndale.) 

There is some though not very much attempt to describe how racism in particular is responsible for so much death and misery: there is a brief discussion of redlining, and how that influenced blacks' ability to buy and maintain their homes; there are some pictures and memories of a vibrant business district in Englewood that no longer exists since manufacturing employment dried up; and research showing segregation (both racial and economic) has devastating lifelong effects on people consigned to the underclass. 

Concentrated poverty affects crime victimization, too
(Source: Pattillo et al. 2018)

Helfand spends too much time staging "gotcha" questions for people who provide disaster preparedness equipment and services. (The city now has its own refrigerator truck for corpses, so it no longer will have to use trucks owned by private firms!) Given the accumulated evidence, it's fair to ask why we spend so much on equipment and flood walls to reduce damage from extreme weather, but don't address the poverty and racism that are at the root of disaster mortality ("extreme social fault lines"). I just don't think it's fair to ask people who are immersed in other things. 

16th and Central Park in North Lawndale, 2022
(Google Earth screenshot)

Late in the film we meet Michelle Dauber, author of The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (University of Chicago, 2012), who argues that those impacted by natural disasters are seen as deserving of help, but "our history and tradition" is that the poor do not. She speculates that people with resources can imagine being impacted by a weather event, and want and expect to be protected, but they can't imagine being black or extremely poor. I would add that we know how to build flood walls and levees, and how to mitigate the effects of urban heat islands (Kingson 2024), but even expensive engineering is less complicated than solving racism. So the film shows us the irony of a lavishly-funded tornado response drill amidst the abandoned and derelict buildings of Englewood. (I make the same argument about Bike to Work Week.)

As a social scientist, I would have liked more discussion of the ways in which racism and poverty have informed and been replicated by policy choices, and how those choices have differentially affected people's life prospects. I don't remember them even mentioning the Interstate Highway System, or antiblack riots, of which Tulsa's is the best known but Chicago had one, too, two years earlier, in 1919.

Houses and shops that got bulldozed for the Dan Ryan Expressway
(my photo at the National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.)

The coverage in Cooked of how the heat wave played out in poor black neighborhoods is eye-opening and shocking to the conscience. There's not a lot about what needs to be done about racism and poverty, only that it needs to be done. So it's too easy for a viewer to say, well, I'm not racist, so what can I do? Many people know about slavery (which ended in 1865), and Southern Jim Crow laws, but it's less widely known how racial preference has pervaded American society since then, and even racial preferences that have ended (like in housing) have persistent effects. One of the things that keeps your humble blogger humble is that as a white person born to a middle class family in suburbs that were long closed to nonwhites, he has had opportunities that others have not had.

Undoing those advantages is not going to be easy. I think part of it is going to be to create a broader social safety net, so that social goods are not zerosum i.e. the perception that any remedial gains made by blacks are going to come at the expense of whites. Neoconservative economic policy and loose inheritance taxes have been good for a few but have created vulnerability for the many--of all races--that has constrained social justice (and made a lot of young people cynical about capitalism in general) while limiting opportunities for anyone not a "knowledge worker." Most people who oppose housing integration are worried about their property values, which comprise the larger part of their life savings.

Poverty is complex: housing matters, but so do transportation
 and connections to opportunities

If we can tamp down the widespread and mostly accurate feeling that if you fall no one is going to be there to catch you, then we can move on to undoing the effects the policies that have favored white people for years, which means... reparations. We need some intelligent, inclusive way of compensating for years of thwarted opportunities.

Short of that, and I admit these goals seem overly ambitious these days, we need to make policy with more attention to second-order consequences, specifically how it will affect poor and other vulnerable populations. The good news is the double-win of addressing poverty and racism means, not only we do right by the ideals we profess like equal justice and opportunity, but also, everyone is better off. Pete Saunders, whom I quote at every opportunity, argues on his Substack (as well as in Crain's Chicago Business) that "inequality is inefficiency," and "the industrial cities of the north have long been hamstrung economically by the most intense racial divides in the country," in part because "white Northern community leaders aggressively worked to keep the races apart."

If we can make inclusive opportunity the focus of broad public policy, we make a lot of social goals achievable. Helfand's documentary vividly shows the awful human consequences of not doing that.

SEE ALSO: 

"Map of Chicago Neighborhoods," map-of-chicago-neighborhoods.jpg (2086×3255) (ontheworldmap.com)

For the role of large retailers in concentrated poverty, see Susan Holmberg, Power Play: How Monopolies Leverage Systemic Racism to Dominate Markets, and What We Can Do to Democratize Economic Power (Institute for Local Self-Reliance, 2024). Maybe we should start by vigorously pursuing anti-trust enforcement, instead of dismantling the regulatory apparatus. In the meantime, communities are often at the mercy of megaretailers, megabanks, and megawaste disposal firms. A video presentation by Holmberg is available here.

For efforts at inclusive investing, see Lynne Richardson and Tracy Hadden Loh, "Helping Community Leaders Buy Back the Block," Brookings, 11 July 2024. "Redefine what kinds of projects are considered good when evaluating impact and return on investment. If a small project brings new and/or additional needed goods, services, and amenities to a community and performs financially to be sufficiently profitable and self-sustaining, that is good. If such a project is led or owned by a local resident or a person of color (inclusive economic development) and is not extractive (as opposed to businesses offering check cashing or furniture rental at predatory rates) and is not detrimental to residents’ life expectancy, that is even better. If such a project checks all of these boxes and is also desired by residents, that is the Holy Grail."