Documentary, COOKED: Survival by Zip Code
Chicago suffered the worst heat disaster in U.S history in 1995, when 739 residents—mostly elderly and black—died over the course of one week. COOKED links the deadly heat wave's devastation back to the underlying manmade disaster of structural racism, delving deep into one of our nation's biggest growth industries: Disaster Preparedness.
Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand forges inextricable connections between the cataclysmic natural disasters we're willing to see and prepare for and the slow-motion disasters we're not.
Whether it was the heat wave in Chicago or Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, Irma and Maria, all of these disasters share something key: they reveal the ways in which class, race, and zip code predetermine who was living on the edge to start with, who gets hurt the worst, who recovers and bounces back, and who doesn't.
COOKED is an adaptation of HEAT WAVE: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (2002), Eric Klinenberg's groundbreaking book.
82 and 54 minutes on the same DVD.