After Katrina

Unfortunately, many of the distilleries discussed in Corby Kummer's October column "Sweet Home Louisiana" were in the path of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding. As a result, it seems that some distilleries may have been destroyed—or, at the very least, have lost their stocks of aging rum. He advises that any reader who is looking for the rums mentioned in the article should buy what they find, since it may be some time before these distilleries, like much of the Gulf Coast, are running again. As part of the relief effort in New Orleans and elsewhere, two members of the extended Brennan's restaurant family started a job-posting Web site to offer relocation assistance to the estimated 64,000 displaced restaurant workers from the area. The Southern Foodways Alliance, "this country's most intellectually engaged (and probably the most engaging) food society," according to Kummer, joined in the effort, gathering volunteers to call restaurants across the nation about job opportunities, using the James Beard Foundation's database. In addition to making phone calls, Kummer recruited two other restaurant associations, Slow Food USA and DiRoNa Restaurants, to get involved.