Cooked: Survival by Zipcode

2019 1h 16min

Available for free on PBS through 3/4/2020… http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/videos/cooked-survival-by-zip-code/

Cooked: Survival by Zipcode (2019) tells the story of the tragic 1995 Chicago heatwave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in which 739 citizens died over the course of just a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American. This is a story about life, death, and the politics of crisis in an American city that asks the questions: What if we approached poverty through the lens of disaster management?

The film is really a synopsis of sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (2002). Both the book and the film examine the social fault lines which proved fatal for a vulnerable population. It does a good job detailing structural inequalities and critiques the privilege behind “prepping” (a modern trend where wealthy white people prep for future disasters).

How do oppressions intersect in this film, or how can intersectionality inform our understanding of this disaster? What might happen if we treated poverty as a “disaster in slow motion”? Why does one of the people interviewed critique Chicago’s new heat response unit as a “poverty response unit”? How might “prepping” be an unreasonable allocation of resources?

Sociological themes include: Intersectionality, racism, poverty, individualism, privilege/oppression, redlining, food deserts…