The sun is low in the dusky Louisiana sky when we arrive at the home of Poppy and Nicky Tooker, the doyenne and don, respectively, of New Orleans cooking. We're here for a good ole fashioned crawfish boil. No sooner are week-old pages of The Times Picayune spread out in a double layer across a long table on the patio than Nicky extracts the steaming, dripping boil pot from the cooker and spreads its contents across the newsprint. Bright red crayfish shells, mixed with hot andouille sausage, small potatoes, edamame, whole heads of garlic, mushrooms, corn, and onions, cover the bad news, letting us put disaster and its effects in the back of our minds for awhile.

We dig in with enthusiasm, either standing over the table and snapping off the heads of the crayfish as Poppy has just taught us, or loading up round plastic trays with this prize of a dinner and retreating to a table by the pool. The combination of spices has penetrated every ingredient and we go back for seconds, savoring this first rich taste of a city whose food can never be mistaken for somewhere else.

After dinner, Poppy invites us into her spacious kitchen, where we gather around the stove and watch as she makes calas. "My grandmother always told me, 'Poppy, eat it to save it,'" she said, explaining that we will only save what we love, what is meaningful, what makes us who we are, if it is a regular part of our lives, if we cherish it and pass it on, if we teach each other about it. As she passes around the calas for us to sample, she goes on to tell us how she pretty much single-handedly saved these mini-footballs of sweet fried rice dusted with powdered sugar from a slow culinary death, teaching the recipe to others, sharing the popping hot rice treat with other New Orleanians and curious visitors to her city. Now, she says, calas can even be found on the dessert menus at classy Crescent City restaurants.

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I thought about "Eat It to Save It" all week, as the Culinary Corps chefs made meals that worked their way, slowly but surely, through people's palates and into their memories. I watched them serve on the line at Habitat for Humanity's Camp Hope, where several hundred volunteers rebuilding the Gulf Coast were fed dinner. The steaming tamales wrapped in corn leaves and the fried oysters sourced fresh from P&J Oyster Company just that morning were new foods for so many of the young volunteers, but they said, "Sure, I'll try that!" with gusto and gratitude. 

I thought about "Eat It to Save It" as inner-city kids at the Edible Schoolyard program tried wontons, figs, and pine nuts, and as the high school aged students at Central City's Cafe Reconcile, a job and life skills training program, tasted crepes for the first time, licking forks clean of the sweet orange glaze and proclaiming the dessert "delicious enough for more!" 

On the last night, the chefs ended up as they started: at a long, communal table, sharing plates of steaming, spicy food. They talked about their expectations before the trip and whether they'd made a difference. They agreed, for the most part, that what they'd done was make moments, creating memories through food that would remind people they were cared about, that they were appreciated, that they were worth saving.

We can't save anything unless we know, first of all, what that thing is.