Tag: louisiana

Diabetic Friendly Rice to be Sold on Rouses Shelves

After just two years of setting its goal to partner with Rouses Markets, Parish Rice has recently inked a deal to stock all 65 supermarket locations with its diabetic friendly rice, according to this article from The Advocate.

Parish Rice is a product from second-generation rice farmer Michael Frugé that he grew from a variety of high-protein, low glycemic index-scored rice that’s been developed through the Louisiana State University Agricultural Center. Though the diabetic friendly rice has made its way from fields in Eunice, Louisiana to marginal popularity in just under two years, this recent partnership between Parish Rice and Rouses Markets has been a goal since the brand’s launch. Frugé told The Advocate that he has always been quite passionate about agricultural quality and celebrating local agriculture, feeling that his values aligned with the Louisiana-grown supermarket chain.

CEO and third-generation company leader Donny Rouse said of the partnership in a statement, “this is a fantastic addition to our Eat Right with Rouses program, which makes choosing healthy easier, by identifying grocery items that have lower sodium, lower saturated fat, healthier fats, more fiber, and less sugar. Our customers who are watching their carb intake are always looking for more options, and I love that it is local.”

Parish Rice was started in 2019, and until now it’s popularity has been rising at an unexpectedly steady pace. Eunice-based farmer Michael Frugé reported that 45% of his business’s gross online sales and approximately 80% of its total grocery store sales were conducted during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Soon afterward, the demand for his diabetic friendly rice began to grow quickly and to a certain extent, unexpectedly. Michael Frugé attributes the rapid success of his brand to word-of-mouth and a particular LSU AgCenter feature that began to circulate on social media.

In speaking on the partnership with Rouses Markets, Frugé said, “this is everything I’ve ever wanted. I love knowing that you go into a grocery store and see rice on the shelf and know that we had something to do with that. Now, I can go into a grocery store and know that is my rice, know that people are going to sit down at night or during the day, and eat my rice and have the opportunity to know where it came from.”

Frugé attributes the passion behind the growing and marketing of Parish Rice to an interest in rice farming and the rice industry that has been fascinating him since he was a boy when he learned about the rice trade from his father. After college, Frugé worked for a seed company that had a focus on the rice industry before he eventually eased back into farming full-time.

During his time in the seed industry, Frugé said that had gotten the opportunity to travel internationally, and by visiting countries like Japan and Uruguay, he gained valuable perspective and insight into how different rice-growing regions of the globe produced varieties for a surgically-targeted clientele. It was in this realization and study that Frugé saw opportunities for growth in the United States rice industry, particularly in Louisiana’s growing industry.

Frugé admits that he didn’t have a clear plan on how to distinguish his vision from other growers until he partnered with fellow rice grower and friend, Blake Gerard. It was then that Frugé had become interested in a particular varietyfrom the LSU AgCenter that Gerard had begun working with, and soon a deal was struck between the Eunice and South Illinois farmers to begin growing that rice in Louisiana in 2019.

Now that Parish Rice has a partnership with Rouses Markets, Frugé looks to his other goals for his brand’s reach, such as expanding his partnership with LSU or serving his rice in K-12 schools. In speaking on the future, Frugé said, “where’s it going to go? I don’t know,” he said. “So much has happened over the past three weeks, but I’ve got some more goals in mind. There are some other things I want to go after. I don’t know where the top is but I’m going to keep pushing.”

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King Cake Returns in 2022

With the christening of a new year comes a new Mardi Gras season, and while the state of the 2022 Carnival season is facing uncertainty amidst COVID-19 surges, Louisiana’s passion for the king cake is as strong as ever according to this nola.com profile.

Last year when many Mardi Gras parades, balls, and parties had been canceled or significantly limited due to the pandemic, Louisiana citizens proved that the spirit of the season wasn’t going to disappear along with the celebratory events. This was seen in the steady king cake sales seen by bakeries during the 2021 Carnival season; in fact, some bakeries even saw an increase in profits in the year despite many traditional festivities being canceled.

So it stands to reason that as the calendar has transitioned into 2022, the interest in king cakes will not have been subsidized in the least, even as the prospects for the 2022 parade season are masked in uncertainty. With king cakes becoming available during the first week of January on Twelfth Night (January 5th), the start of Mardi Gras season is officially underway, and this year’s Carnival will be nearly two weeks longer than last year’s. The 2022 Mardi Gras season is held between Twelfth Night and Mardi Gras Day, which lands on March 1st, giving the public over seven weeks or 55 days of delicious king cakes to enjoy.

Many Louisiana bakeries are seeing the lengthier season as an opportunity to be more competitive in the name of the Carnival spirit and thus more inventive with their king cakes. This inventiveness is coming in the form of new flavors, textures, and partnerships. In a traditional year, New Orleans bakeries can showcase a competitive spirit due to the limited window of king cake availability despite the ever-growing public demand, but this year is shaping up to showcase a new cooperative spirit as various collaborations have already begun.

One such collaboration is the King Cake Hub which stands as a centralized location that houses several king cakes from various restaurants and bakeries in one spot. At the King Cake Hub, one can survey a variety of flavors, textures, and confections all in a single location, allowing you to truly compare different bakers’ approaches to the opulent dessert. Originally created in 2019 by Will Samuels, who was a notable community leader in New Orleans known for his previous forays into the Crescent City food and music world.

This year, the King Cake Hub has returned to New Orleans through the help of Samuel’s wife, Jennifer, who has brought back the celebrated and innovative king cake epicenter in accordance with her husband’s wishes. Will Samuels passed away from cancer at the age of 52 this past September, but his dream lives on in 2022 in two locations: the Zony Mash Beer Project on Thalia Street and The Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter, which is accessible through the museum and cultural center’s gift shop on Royal Street.

In a similar spirit of Mardi Gras resilience, Steve Himelfarb, the founder of the Marigny Bakery and Restaurantpartnered with his neighbors at the NOCCA (New Orleans Center for Creative Arts) to bring back his legendary king cake to benefit a local high school’s culinary program. Himelfarb’s bakery had closed in 2020, but that didn’t stop him from returning in 2022 at the King Cake Hub and offering king cake preorders online as well.

Speaking of online sales, one of the areas of king cake commerce that saw tremendous growth in 2021 was the shipping of king cakes around the country. Because king cakes travel well and serve as a great way to share the holiday spirit with loved ones, 2022 is projected to similarly be a successful year in terms of king cakes sales and shipping. Now’s the time to conduct your research and support your favorite small bakery with a king cake shipment, allowing you to start the Mardi Gras season in spectacular style.

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Louisiana State Parks Rebuild Following Hurricane Ida

In their continuing coverage of the commercial, regional, and environmental aftermath left in the wake of 2021’s Hurricane Ida, this recent article from The Advocate outlines that because some of Louisiana’s state parks had received monumental damages from the Fall 2021 storm, they are being altered in their rebuilding.

One such state park is Tickfaw State Park, which is located in an isolated pocket of Livingston Parish and encompasses approximately 1,200 acres (most of which are undeveloped). It was reported that prior to August 29th, when Hurricane Ida made its historic landfall in Port Fourchon, Tickfaw State Park was so heavily set in an overarching shadow as a result of a tree canopy, that the sky was very rarely seen. Then the eyewall of Hurricane Idaknocked down an estimated 80% of the trees and buried them mostly in mud so that the 30-foot arm of a rescue excavator couldn’t reach them from the roads running through the swamp-filled state park.

Unfortunately, the damage observed at Tickfaw State Park is too similar to other parks in the state, which has caused the deputy assistant secretary at the Louisiana Office of State Parks, Clifford Melius, to wonder about both the longevity of these parks and the short-term solutions that may be possible. Melius commented saying, “This is going to be a major change to the ecosystem,” and he also wondered “do we repair the boardwalks when there’s no swamp to walk over?”

For decades, the Louisiana State Park system has been very regenerative, despite the annual state parks budget being regularly lowered in favor of Higher Education and Healthcare budgets receiving the attention whenever the state government faced annual deficits. According to the statistics acquired by The Advocate, “between the fiscal year 2008 and the fiscal year 2017, Louisiana reduced annual state general fund contributions by 34% from $29.7 million to $19.7 million.”

Despite this significant decrease in funding, recent years have shown that the Louisiana State Parks system has only grown in popularity. In fact, Louisiana’s 21 State Parks ended the 2021 Fiscal Year on June 30 with 1.5 million visitors, which is the highest number of recorded visitors in a Fiscal year- in recent memory. Additionally, 11 of the total 21 parks made a profit, which is quite the achievement when compared to the system’s owing of $1.5 million on June 30.

After Hurricane Ida, seven State Parks had to close because of severe damages they received, and thorough assessments are still being conducted by park officials, who estimate approximately $4 million in damages. This figure is determined to be roughly one-third of the parks departments’ funds dedicated to repairing and improving facilities.

Melius stated that he would like to see the parks reopened as quickly as possible, which might mean that he and his office will be “short-circuiting the long ponderous path of paperwork and congressional approvals that delays recovery for months.”

For instance, the state park in Fontainebleau, which is located near Mandeville, has sustained damages to their air conditioning facility, which would normally result in a bidding process to hire contractors. Instead, Melius took action and sent in his own staff to replace the air conditioning unit and reopen the park in just two-day at a cost of just $2,500 rather than the $10,000 cost and several weeks of delay that an “out of house team” would have called for.

Melius had said, “in-house saved us money and we didn’t have to wait on contractors to come in and do it,” because otherwise “during all that time I have to keep the park closed because I can’t air condition the buildings.” This improvement to how we assess and process the damages occurring in our state parks is just one way in which theLouisiana State Parks Department is reinvigorating its park system in the rebuilding stage.

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Lake Charles Theatre Bounces Back After Storms

After a particularly rough year enduring Louisiana storm weather, the city of Lake Charles has opened the doors of the famed ACTS theatre to the community, according to this article from The Advocate.

Many of Lake Charles’s cultural structures and institutions had sustained significant damage from the four natural disasters that have hit southwest Louisiana this past year. Despite much of the outside world seeing Lake Charles as a working-class town mostly comprising industrial plants and casinos, the oft-forgotten cultural structures are left behind in the conversation but not in the damages sustained.

The smaller Lake Charles theatres, though not as profitable as the industry that leads the city’s GDP, often bring a sense of community and spirit to the city’s population of roughly 80,000 people. This includes music venues, art galleries, and other performance spaces throughout the city limits for the area’s collection of zydeco musicians.

But as of Fall 2021, the arts are alive again in Lake Charles as a production of a musical, 42nd Street, has premiered in the ACTS Theatre, standing as the first play the former movie house has “put on” in over a year. Mike Ieyoub is one of the lead actors in the production of 42nd Street, and just before a recent rehearsal began for the show, he assessed damages that the theatre had sustained from Hurricane Laura and worried about the likelihood of reopening the theatre to the public. “We looked around and we didn’t think we’d get it reopened,” Ieyoub told The Advocate.

He and Kristen Harrell both play leading roles in 42nd Street, and they both commented on the audience’s excitement for the theatre’s return as well as the cast’s. They attributed the anticipation to the fact that dramatic performances in a theatre are symbolically representative of a return to normalcy for audiences, and they provide an outlet for cast members as well. Harrell said, “for a lot of us who grew up doing it, myself included, it’s like, ‘I can tap again;’ coming back together and just having fun.”

The cultural affairs director for the city of Lake Charles, Louisiana, Matt Young, said the following regarding the resilience of the city and its residents in light of the past years of storms: “living in Lake Charles is kind of tough these days, but I think the more that we’re able to restore our festivals and fairs and open our cultural institutions and attractions, the better chance we’re going to have of keeping our residents, and not just keeping them, but giving them a great quality of life.”

Over the past few years, Lake Charles has put in noticeable efforts to address some of the citizens’ concerns that certain neighborhoods and structures in the city have been neglected for quite some time. These efforts include the creation of the Nellie Lutcher Cultural District in the northern area of the city through the use of tax incentives. This creation of a district named after the famed Lake Charles jazz singer and pianist is an effort to spur new development in this area of the city.

Another effort supported by the city is to construct a new performing arts space, and given that the Lake Charles Little Theatre had sustained heavy storm damage recently, it will soon be demolished. Randy Partin is the former president of this once-operating theatre, as it’s the second-oldest performing group in the state, having established itself in 1926, but due to the scheduled demotion, Partin has aligned his goals with the city’s. He founded the Live Arts Venue Alliance in an effort to lobby for and support the establishment of a new performance space in the city.

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New Study Indicated Louisiana Parishes with Highest Flood Risk in the Nation

A new study laying out nationwide flood risks is highlighting a problem that Louisiana residents know all too well: the risk of flooding. According to an article from The Advocate, this study not only highlights several Louisiana parishes as having the highest risk of flooding nationwide, but the analysis is serving as further evidence for State officials advocating for flood mitigation and coastal protection projects.

The new study by the First Street Foundation, a New York-based nonprofit organization, uses a formula that assesses threats to residences, commercial properties, and roads to determine the top 20 counties across the United States at the greatest risk of flooding. Of these 20, eight are Louisiana parishes within the top 15, seven parishes are in the top 10, and Louisiana Parishes comprise the top four parishes in the nation. Cameron Parish sits at the top of the list at No. 1, followed by Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes.  Also noted throughout the study are Plaquemines, Terrebonne, St. Charles, and St. John the Baptist.

The head of research and development at First Street, Dr. Jeremy Porter said of the survey, “our primary goal was just to raise awareness around the infrastructure at risk in these communities so people knew. If their home, for instance, was raised 20 feet — they’ve adapted their home for the area they live in – their power plants or their police stations or their fire stations may still be at risk. What we are advocating for is the use of proper flood and risk tools for understanding that risk.”

Louisiana state officials are said to be using models very similar to the one utilized by First Street to plan and prioritize various flood mitigation projects through the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) and the Louisiana Watershed Initiative.

The CPRA has a coastal master plan that is kept up-to-date every six years. In this plan are various outlines for how the state of Louisiana would spend $50 billion over a half-century, or fifty years, on levees, flood control structures, shoreline protection, and coastal restoration. Planning of this magnitude and longevity has positioned Louisiana as a leader among those areas of the nation looking to address land loss and flood protection on such a massive scale. This, of course, comes as a result of vast portions of the state eroding away or being inundated by the Gulf of Mexicoat shockingly quick rates.

Looking forward, concerns have arisen as to whether or not the CPRA’s coastal master plan can be financed. CPRA executive director Bren Haase told Advocate reporters, “having that single vision for our coast has been very, very beneficial if you think back to the BP oil spill, past storms that we’ve had to deal with and now looking ahead at recovery from Hurricane Ida. As the federal government is looking to invest in infrastructure and recovery across the nation, not just here in south Louisiana, I think we’re well-positioned to make a very, very good case that ‘hey, we know what we want to do, it’s the right thing to do and it’s worth funding.’”

Outside of the CPRA’s coastal master plan is the Louisiana Watershed Initiative, which has been aiming to improve the method in which Louisiana deals with flood risks. The initiative does this by approaching the issue from the standpoint of a watershed instead of a city or parish, thus dividing the state into eight watershed regions and prioritizing projects under a scoring system.

Already, the Watershed initiative has selected over $400 million in projects, ranging from an east Slidell ring levey to massive drainage improvements to be made in Ascension Parish. This intel comes from the head of Louisiana’s Office of Community Development, Pat Forbes, who oversees the initiative. He was quoted as saying, “the watershed initiative is not just about spending the $1.2 billion that (the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development)sent us for mitigation activities. It’s about changing the way that we manage flood risk.”

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Lafourche Levee Systems Withheld Most Water from Ida

For all the damage left behind by Hurricane Ida, matters could have been made much worse if the levee system of South Lafourche had failed, but the levees held strong when it mattered most, according to an article from HoumaToday that details the strength of Lafourche’s levees.

On August 30, 2021, it was reported by the Associated Press that Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards examined a preliminary survey of the state’s levees, and he reached the conclusion that the levee systems, thankfully, had done “exactly as they intended and held the water out during Hurricane Ida.”

Hurricane Ida initially made its landfall on the shores of Port Fourchon on August 29, 2021. When it touched land, it was a vigorously strong Category 4 storm with winds of 150 mph. These finds blew down countless trees and decimated many homes in its path, but they were not able to penetrate the South Lafourche Levee system despite facing a particularly high storm surge of 12 to 15 feet.

Windell Curole is the executive director of the South Lafourche Levee District, and after he had spent hours looking over the Lafourche levee system in late September, he had said, “it’s still amazing looking at what took place and the power of that storm. This levee was originally designed for a strong Category 2 or a weak 3. It was a close call. There were no guarantees.”

Curole continued to detail how essential the levee system’s foundation was throughout the roughest parts of the storm by saying, “ We knew the winds were extremely strong for an extremely long time. We didn’t get a chance to get to the pump station and the floodgates for 18 hours. I’ve never seen South Lafourche look so bad. That wind came in and just tore it up. If we would’ve had a levee breach, we think people would have died. You can’t move when the wind is blowing like it was. There would have been 5 or 6 feet of water in some of those houses. We are very fortunate that didn’t happen.”

The news of Lafourche’s successful levees was well-received being that the United States Corps of Army Engineers had decertified south Lafourche’s hurricane-protection system after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. They had attributed the decertification to the levees lying too low to be able to provide adequate protection.

At one time, the ring levee in South Lafourche was only 13 feet high in the south and nearly 8 feet high in the north, but after residents passed a 1-cent sales tax in 2015, the system was appropriately elevated. A new building program was created in the district to raise the levee to at least 16 feet and 13 feet above sea level on the south and north ends, respectively.

Additionally, praise came in from Washington to celebrate the Lafourche levee’s strength, as it was reported that United States Representative Garret Graves, R-Baton Rouge, praised Curole and the entire district for taking the time necessary and putting in additional effort to improve the levee system. He said, “Curole and the Levee District worked with the citizens of Lafourche Parish and the State of Louisiana to help invest in better hurricane-protection projects for our community. Despite the headwinds of cease-and-desist letters, legal threats, and government red tape, they succeeded. They knew that if they could get the Larose to Golden Meadow system elevated, lives, homes, businesses, and communities could be spared from future storms. The levees held, and their effort saved a lot of lives and prevented severe destruction.”

It’s certainly affirming to learn that despite experiencing some of the toughest storm conditions South Louisiana has seen in some time, that our vital levee systems are maintaining the peace by doing what they’re built to do: protect and withhold.

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