American Cooking: Creole & Acadian // Gulf Oil Spill

I want to find as many books from the Foods of the World series as possible. I have the one pictured, American Cooking: Creole and Acadian by Peter S. Feibleman, and The Cooking of Provincial France by MFK Fisher.

Feibleman's prose doused me in the romance of Louisianan food from the perspective of one who had grown up with it. He has a delicious nostalgic tone along with the recipes and large photographs--traveling through his earliest memories of his own kitchen to the restaurants in the French Quarter, all the way to the bayou. He talks about glistening trees and shimmering water and eating po'boys in the rain, his lilting, lazy narrative easily evoking his New Orleans upbringing.
An example:

Children in New Orleans believe that the only thing better than eating outdoors in the sun is eating outdoors in the rain. Richard and I ran under a moss-laden oak tree to wait for the squall to pass. The water lashed us, soaking the live craps and everything else except our new poor boy-- which we protected from the rain simply by swallowing it. The hot gravy of the meatballs, flecked with red pepper and rich with the taste of onion and thyme, had soaked into the bread and fused there with  the taste of the garlic pork chaurice;the good French bread and its contents were as warm in my throat as the rain on the back of my neck. Maybe there are finer ways of eating hot food than in a subtropical squall-- but I don't know them. 

After reading about the food culture borne of the Gulf's seafood bounty, the thought of the immense damage done by the BP oil spill became even more real in my mind-- a way of life has been truly catastrophically attacked by the carelessness of the company, and by what I see as sheer foolishness in the aftermath. And continued foolishness that

When the news of the spill cleanup reported the use of dispersants in the water, I think many of us had the feeling that this just did not make sense. How could using chemicals to break down the oil so that they could continue to spread farther, to be carried away and absorbed by the Gulf creatures that survived the spill, possibly seem like a good idea except as a short-cut cover-up? I thought that we had long given up the notion that the ocean is big enough to just throw anything in and forget about it. The use of dispersants seemed to shirk the question of public health in favor of just making it "look" better. How many millions of gallons of oil are drifting in the ocean while new pipeline proposals are making their way steadily toward realization?

I wonder about the safety of the seafood that has passed the smell tests. I wonder how much life has changed for the local community. BP seems to be doing well, and a new Gulf oil lease sale has been scheduled for December. Some things never change, eh?