Join us for a free screening of No One Ever Went Hungry: Acadian Food Traditions Then & Now by Kevin McCaffrey

Kevin McCaffrey’s newest documentary, No One Ever Went Hungry: Cajun Food Traditions Then & Now. McCaffrey, a 2009 James Beard Award finalist, surveys the complex traditions and ingredients that make up Cajun cuisine, from the prairies to the coast of South Louisiana. He believes that the film shows lessons of sustainability, community, and environmental response all can be learned through the Cajun experience.

“I set out to show how Cajun food traditions have so little to do with the blackening or over-spicing America thinks they are. Food in Acadiana is way more complex and compelling. It’s all about taste, [and] community survival…,” says McCaffrey, for whom this program is part of an ongoing series of journeys through Louisiana‘s rich food heritage. He follows communities through the year, from crawfish harvest to Mardi Gras celebrations, and he explores contemporary issues, such as the effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.

Funded for the major part by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and the National Park Service, in association with the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, this one hour show was shot in HD video and travels through the swamps, the eroding coastal bayous, the crawfish fields and personal celebratory spaces all over Acadiana from Mamou to Grand Isle. It is punctuated by several styles of Cajun food, most of them celebrations, of course, of or with food.