As people of the US and World experience increasingly intense heat, we see money flowing to “Disaster Preparedness” investments in refrigerator trucks, not community infrastructure that would provide safe shelter for a community in an extreme weather event.
 
It should now be clear that Social Justice is fundamental to Climate Justice—with the need to improve food, housing, health care and civil security for our human populations, while respecting the natural world.
 
Judith Helfand’s powerful film Cooked:Survival by ZIP Code brings this convergence to light.
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 to the underlying man-made disaster of structural racism and insufficient urban infrastructure while delving into one of our nation's biggest growth industries: Disaster Preparedness.

Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand (Blue VinylEverything's Cool), uses her signature serious-yet-quirky connect-the-dots-style to forge inextricable connections between the cataclysmic natural disasters we're willing to see and prepare for, and the slow-motion disasters we're not. That is until an extreme weather event hits, making previously ignored structural inequality exponentially more visible—and deadly.

Whether it is the Chicago heat wave or Hurricanes Katrina—or Sandy, Harvey, Irma, and Maria—all of these natural disasters reveal the ways in which class, race, and zip code predetermine who was living on the edge to start with, who gets hurt the most, who recovers—and who does not.
Cooked: Survival by ZIP Code is available on DVD with public performance rights for school and library purchase or rental. Academic streaming can be licensed from Docuseek. Campus and community groups can book an in-person or virtual groups screening of Cooked through Bullfrog Communities.
"I have always pictured heatwaves at the shallow-end of natural disasters. I was wrong...As we reflect on the affliction of deprived communities ravaged by the coronavirus worldwide, this film reminds us of a hauntingly familiar situation. We need to change our definition of both disaster (to include socially-patterned deprivation) and preparedness (to deploy ample resources of rich nations towards education, health, and broader social goods) if we are to respond better to the next society-wide catastrophe in a way that leaves no community behind."
—Dr. Neil Singh, Medical Humanities, Brighton and Sussex Medical School
"[Cooked] is searing, smart and insightful...The film asks important questions with humor, humility, and humanity. This film can be used in a wide range of classrooms with social and ethnic studies and health policy as well as in public contexts of churches, community groups, and other venues."
—Julie Sze, Professor of American Studies, Founding Director, Environmental Justice Project, University of California - Davis
To order Cooked with public performance rights, visit the Bullfrog Films online catalog.
Order by phone at (610) 779-8226
or email us at info@bullfrogfilms.com
Bullfrog Films is the oldest and largest publisher of documentary films about the environment in the United States. We define "environment" broadly, and our catalog includes programs on ecology, energy, social justice, structural racism, women's studies, economic inequality, sustainable development, community regeneration, economics, ethics, and conflict resolution.