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Cooked: Survival by Zip Code  

Cooked: Survival by Zip Code is a story about a severe example of environmental injustice. 739 citizens of Chicago died in a heat wave in a single week, most of them poor, elderly, and African American.  The film questions existing policy as it explores a slow-motion disaster that continues to disrupt and shorten the lives of Chicago residents in neighborhoods like Englewood, a district ravaged by pernicious poverty, social isolation, and racism. This is a place where one resident says, “It’s easier to buy a gun than a tomato.” One epidemiologist concludes that 3,200 people die each year from preventable illnesses in such Chicago neighborhoods. The filmmaker comes to question policies that ignore these kinds of ongoing disasters while preparing, at the same time and at great expense, for rare events like earthquakes. Date: 2020 Length: 82 minutes