By James Brown
When Hawaii's public school teachers and university faculty walked out on strike, they found that their collective bargaining position influence what they could afford to eat. Even before negotiations with management broke down, they knew what the United States Department of Agriculture has identified empirically: that food in Hawaii costs a third more than a similar market basket of goods on the mainland.
So, when strategizing healthy, flavorful cooking on a tight budget, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin's food editors suggested that striking teachers and professors consider--stews. Culinary responses to the challenges disasters pose differ, in other parts of the country. While Hawaii's teachers are vulnerable to the high cost of living on the Pacific islands; while on the Atlantic coast, residents—including schoolteachers—have to prepare to cook their way through natural disasters. North Carolina can be hit by five hurricanes a year.
So how can you cook, when the storm has blown over the power lines? The State University-based North Carolina Cooperative Extension provides residents with a list of foods that require no cooking, to help them last the storm. Fruit, breakfast bars, and canned milk make breakfast; canned meats, fish, and poultry can be combined with raw vegetables to make a lunch or supper. Residents are warned, however, that canned foods require refrigeration after opening; when there's no power; they have to be eaten at one sitting. Hurricanes are not the only natural disasters that strike coastal residents.
In 1906, an earthquake measuring 8.3 on the modified Mercalli scale struck the city of San Francisco. Among the images that survived the disaster is a photograph of a man cooking, currently in the University of Nevada, Reno Library, Department of Special Collections. Captioned, "Cooking at the curb." After the Earthquake, San Francisco—April 1906," the photograph shows a man wearing a hat, bending over to tend a toy stove. Wood is piled to one side, and smoke from the stove's chimney indicates that a good fire is going. Pressed into the work of an adult stove, this child-sized cook stove has been surrounded by wood partitions on three sides as well as above to improve its draft. The earthquake survivor is has a coffee boiler on the cooking surface, and is looking into the fry pan's contents. Stanford University Archives include a complementary image (Stanford Archives GP 9904) that indicates all ‘quake survivors were not so fortunate. A photograph of five students cooking outside their dorms shows has not a stove in sight; the men have propped their griddle on bricks as they slice bread and peel potatoes. Cooking fires and candles were commonly credited with having started the fire that followed the earthquake.
About the Author: James Brown writes about food network deals, Chefs corner Coupons and Coupon Deals
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