We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  We messaged Bill through Twitter to thank him for his reporting and told him we would love to help the people of Vieques. He responded by asking if he could come see our operation in Santurce. Given our operational problems that day, I wasn’t sure this was a good idea. We needed to show the world a kitchen in full swing. But soon after we started serving our daily sancocho, he showed up anyway. The lines for the soup were huge that day; word was spreading about what we were doing. I walked Bill through our mobile kitchen and refrigerator trailer, and talked him through the giant flip-chart sheets that showed our daily orders and output of meals. That evening we started planning our first trip to Vieques to see for ourselves what Bill had shown briefly on CNN.

  He wasn’t our only surprise visitor. Soon after he left, the Salvation Army stopped by unannounced. It was getting dark, and starting to rain, and our cooking was almost shut down for the day. “We’re looking for a kitchen run by chefs,” said Captain Don Sanderson.

  “Well, this is your lucky day,” I told Sanderson, as I smoked one of my Arturo Fuente cigars.

  He wanted to know if we had any food we could give them to deliver to a shelter full of elderly people.

  “How many people?” I asked.

  “Two hundred,” he said.

  “Do you want sandwiches?”

  “Yes!”

  “What about fruit?”

  “You’ve got fruit? I’ll take it,” he said, smiling.

  “Do you need water?”

  “Yes, sir. God bless you,” said Sanderson.

  It was only then that we realized we were a long way from being a small and scrappy start-up. Sanderson mentioned something about a FEMA meeting the next day, run by a group focused on what was called “mass care,” suggesting I come along. It sounded like a foreign language to me. But if the Salvation Army—one of the very biggest charities in the world with annual revenues of $3.7 billion—was knocking on our door, what did that say about food relief in Puerto Rico? It was stunning to think that there was nowhere else for them to go. Maybe we had no reason to feel inferior in Bill Weir’s presence about the size of our operation.

  The dry law that banned alcohol was lifted in Santurce, and the small bars around José Enrique’s restaurant started to reopen. It was great seeing the neighborhood I loved come back to life. But the extra visitors, combined with our lines for sancocho, were creating a scene. Our operations were filling the car park opposite the restaurant, and the historic narrow streets were straining under the load. Big delivery trucks couldn’t turn the sharp corners and needed to back up for blocks. There were paella pans bubbling away outside, while the restaurant itself had become a glorified storage facility. We were clearly outgrowing the Santurce neighborhood. We needed to think about the next phase if we were going to feed the island as it desperately needed to be fed.

  Chapter 2

  Feed the World

  SEVEN YEARS BEFORE MARIA, I GOT MY FIRST TASTE OF FOOD RELIEF ON another Caribbean island.

  I didn’t know what I would find on my first visit to Haiti. The earthquake of January 2010 flattened much of Port-au-Prince, including the presidential palace and national assembly building, as well as a quarter of a million homes. It stole as many as 158,000 lives, and prompted international aid of more than $5 billion. The place was overflowing with aid workers, doctors and nurses. What could a chef really accomplish there?

  I visited with a correspondent from El Mundo, Carlos Fresneda, along with a friend who had a brilliant idea: solar-powered ovens, giant metal parabolas that reflected the sun’s rays to focus all that natural energy on a pressure cooker at their center. My friend Manolo Vílchez believed they could be the solution to the food crisis in disaster zones, and I thought he might be right. Not just about the solar ovens, but about the mission: maybe food was the solution we needed.

  We landed in the Dominican Republican and crossed over the border to Haiti a few weeks after the earthquake, connecting with a Spanish nonprofit called CESAL. The scenes in Port-au-Prince were shocking and Haiti’s effect on me was profound. I realized I needed to do much more than a single chef or a single visit could achieve. I would need an organization, modeled on my volunteering back home in Washington, D.C., for the extraordinary nonprofit called DC Central Kitchen. So I adapted the name to create World Central Kitchen, eight months after the earthquake, thinking it would become a model for what we could achieve through the transformational power of food. I ended up traveling to Haiti more than two dozen times, as we developed smart solutions to hunger in five different communities. One of my main goals was to educate islanders about clean cookstoves, using solar power and natural gas instead of the charcoal and wood they had long used. Normal cookstoves belch smoke into the homes, making the women and children there sick. Young girls spend hours gathering wood for the stoves instead of studying to break the cycle of poverty. By cutting down the forests, the islanders had hurt their own farms, as the rains washed away their precious topsoil. Mudslides destroy farms and homes, and pollute the local waters to the point where fish and coral reefs cannot survive. You can understand my passion: if you can give women control of their cooking, you can feed and heal an island.

  My dream was to find a way to feed the many in ways that would help the local economy. We could create a network of chefs, like Doctors Without Borders, to help in a crisis. Rather than dumping food aid on an already struggling economy, we would source our supplies locally, wherever possible, and help put the farmers and suppliers back in business. Ultimately, we would develop viable food businesses—from farms to restaurants—that could help deliver local services to the people in greatest need.

  But first, we needed to understand the people and what they expected of their food. It wasn’t good enough to be a chef; I needed to learn, and a group of Haitian women were my teachers. On my first visit, I had been cooking a bean stew for hours on the solar stove, and I planned to serve it with some rice at a camp. These women looked at my beans and said thank you, but that wasn’t the way they liked their beans. The beans needed another hour of cooking before I could puree them into a sauce they liked. My first reaction was frustration. But then it hit me: if this was your only meal of the day, and perhaps your only hot meal in several days, you too would want it prepared your way. So I strained the beans through part of a U.S.A.I.D. bag that used to be full of rice. In an emergency you need to get creative. At these times, you need to know when to lead and when to follow, when to teach and when to learn. These women taught me a lesson I could never learn in a classroom, or dream up in the office of an international aid group. A plate of food is not just a few ingredients cooked and served together. It is the story of who you are, the source of your pride, the foundation of your family and community. Cooking isn’t just nourishing; it’s empowering.

  Haiti also taught me what people, even in the most desperate situations, think of military food that comes plastic-wrapped in bags that can be dropped by parachutes. Military MREs, or meals-ready-to-eat, can survive heat, cold and floods. They also taste like they can do only that: after eating three of them, you never want to see another. In Haiti I saw some kids playing soccer with an MRE. It was obvious an MRE could survive being kicked around for hours on end, but it would never represent real food to anyone.

  Cooking food is one of the very few features of human life that makes us different from other animals. Some evolutionary biologists believe that our brains developed around 1.8 million years ago precisely because we found a new way to consume calories without using lots of energy to chew and digest them: by cooking meat.1 Along the way, we evolved by eating cooked food, as our social customs revolved around cooking and eating together. We communicated around the food and fire, developed language and love, told stories of who we were and who we wanted to be. We may have changed greatly over the millennia, but in a disaster we revert to some very basic needs. Yes, we need water, food and shelter. But we also need our food to represent something more than food, if we are to rebu
ild our lives. Meals need to be cooked for our communities to come back together.

  In Haiti, our ideas grew to long-term community-building through food, delivered through local partners. In 2014, we opened a bakery and a fish restaurant in Croix-des-Bouquets, on the grounds of a Partners in Health children’s home, with the help of my friends Jean Marc and Verena de Matteis. The bakery, Boulanjri Beni, bakes bread for the children’s home and sells more to the public. Two pastry chefs from my restaurants helped train five staff to bake the bread, and we donated all the equipment, from mixers to ovens. Because of the disabilities of some of the kids at the children’s home, we built the bakery to be accessible to all. “Some of them will never leave,” says Loune Viaud, executive director of Partners in Health in Haiti. “We are their family.” The restaurant, Pwason Beni, opened soon after, and cooks fish from its own fish farm, which was created by the impressive foundation Operation Blessing. Pwason Beni started just serving the staff, but we soon opened it up to the whole community. The revenue from both businesses support the children’s home, meaning the food serves the community in three ways: by feeding customers and children, employing staff and suppliers, and funding the children’s home itself.

  Beyond our local social enterprises, we knew we had to help the whole island. We converted more than a hundred school kitchens to clean cookstoves and trained more than seven hundred cooks in food safety and sanitation. We also opened a culinary school in Port-au-Prince in 2017 to train forty students a year to help grow the island’s hospitality industry, after helping to create the curriculum three years earlier.

  We took our social entrepreneurship to the Dominican Republic, with a honey business called 21 Women Honey, supporting a whole community of women and their families. Our support doubled the number of hives there and more than doubled the community’s honey production. We traveled to Nicaragua, where we invested in coffee roasters and packaging equipment to stand up Smart Roast, and helped lift the income of coffee farmers by 400 percent. At two schools—one in Haiti, another in Zambia—we developed vegetable gardens, chicken coops and a bakery to help feed the children and sell the surplus for extra revenue. Soon we were operating in eight countries, including Brazil, Peru and Cambodia.

  THE SOURCE OF MY INSPIRATION WAS BACK IN MY HOMETOWN. DC Central Kitchen is an amazing idea that has delivered incredible results. At its heart, the nonprofit founded by my friend and mentor Robert Egger is a giant recycling organization. It takes leftover food from hotels and restaurants, and turns those leftovers into meals for the homeless. The “Central Kitchen” name comes from the fact that it was founded in the basement of what was then D.C.’s central homeless shelter. The kitchen didn’t just feed the homeless in its own shelter; it trained some of them to become cooks by feeding their own community, so they could later get hired by a restaurant or hotel.

  Egger started out as a young nightclub manager who was frustrated by the traditional approach to the hungry and the homeless. He wanted to reinvent the very notion of a soup kitchen, creating a social enterprise that could fund itself. Coming from Washington, he believed his vision had something for people on both sides of the aisle. Democrats could support the community spirit of caring for those in need; Republicans could support the premise of self-help that lay at the heart of the work. Egger was also great at evangelizing about his model, helping to start more than sixty similar community kitchens across the country, as well as a food recycling program for college campuses.

  Egger showed me the way. I joined as a volunteer but he quickly brought me on to the board of DC Central Kitchen. It was his example that led me to create an international version of his original idea: a network of chefs and kitchens that could serve the hungry across the world.

  IN MANY WAYS, HAITI WAS THE BEST PLACE TO DEVELOP WORLD CENTRAL Kitchen because it was also the worst place for international aid. If you want to learn about the broken state of disaster relief, there is no better school than Haiti.

  Haiti was broken well before the earthquake of 2010. During a century of French rule, one million slaves were forced onto the western half of Hispaniola to work on the sugar and coffee plantations. When the former slaves rose up in rebellion in 1791, the French and Americans retaliated. Napoleon’s invasion was defeated but an American embargo was far more damaging. In 1915, the U.S. invaded and took control of the country’s finances, after Haiti had suffered a century of debt to France for the land and slaves it had lost. After the Americans left in 1934, Haiti suffered decades of dictatorship and misrule. The farming economy was destroyed by cheap U.S. imports, subsidized by the American taxpayer. Crops, as well as forests, began to disappear. In the years before the earthquake, there were food riots, floods and hurricanes. If you wanted to change Haiti, you didn’t work with the government; you worked through the aid workers, who were the new foreigners in charge.2

  After the earthquake, the world was genuinely shocked by the scale of the human suffering and loss. Regular American citizens put their money where their hearts were: private donations to organizations like the Red Cross reached more than $1.4 billion. Rescue and aid efforts were uncoordinated, in the absence of a working government and amid fears of civil unrest. Reports of looting, including at a World Food Programme warehouse, turned out to be false. Rather, Haitians were often found in wrecked buildings either salvaging their own property or searching for food and water. Many people expected violence, but those expectations were based on movies or bad journalism, not experience. There was no lawlessness after the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, just as there wasn’t after the 9/11 attacks or the London bombings four years later. Yet the fear of chaos and panic clouds the judgment of aid workers, leading them to issue top-down orders that are out of touch with the reality on the ground.3

  Haitians were all too familiar with the mistreatment and misinformation. They have been linked to HIV/AIDS ever since the Centers for Disease Control issued guidelines in 1983 that wrongly suggested they were carriers alongside intravenous drug users and homosexual men.4 When cholera broke out on the island for the first time ever in Haiti, the assumption was that Haitians were the source. In fact, cholera arrived in Haiti with UN peacekeeping troops from Nepal.5

  If the violence wasn’t real, the hunger most definitely was. Among the widespread scenes of desperation were written signs pleading for food and medicine. But it was hard to know the scale of the food crisis: aid agencies could not reach the Haitian agency coordinating food security because its office was destroyed. The result was chaotic and inefficient. Huge numbers of water bottles were shipped in, at great cost. To this day, the island remains full of plastic waste that blocks drains and canals after heavy rains. Air drops of food and water were tried and abandoned as ineffective and unsafe. The direct distribution of food led to chaotic scenes and long lines for cooking oil and rice, manned by fearful soldiers who fired warning shots or pepper spray. Most Haitians believed at the time that food should have been distributed through church and community networks, by the islanders and for the islanders. Instead, the volume of free food kept local food vendors and suppliers out of business.6

  What happened to all the money spent on aid in Haiti? Through the year after the earthquake, $2.43 billion was spent, and the vast bulk of that—93 percent—paid for UN and NGO staff and supplies. Fully $151 million of that money went missing and couldn’t be traced at all. Of the U.S. government’s spending, $1 billion went to contracts, but only $4.8 million of that was spent on Haitian suppliers. The Pentagon spent $465 million on its own operations, including $1 million a day for a supercarrier harbored in Port-au-Prince for 18 days. Individual examples of waste told the bigger story: for some reason, the navy spent $194,000 on photo and video equipment in Manhattan, and the coast guard spent $4,462 on a deep-fat fryer.7 What were the results of all that manpower and resources? The U.S. military distributed 2.6 million bottles of water and 4.9 million meals over six months to a population of around 10 million people.8

 
; Of the estimated $3 billion donated to NGOs, the American Red Cross raised $486 million on its own. With just two dozen staffers on the ground, it struggled to spend the money. Six months after the earthquake, it managed to sign contracts for (but not spend) less than a third of the money raised. Most aid groups refused to say how they spent the money they raised, or if they spent it at all. Doctors Without Borders was rare in asking people to donate to its general funds because it admitted it couldn’t spend the 30 million euros it raised for Haiti.9 Most of the government money was pledged but never arrived, and much of the money donated was never spent. The dollars that made it through to Haiti were wasted on international staff who had minimal impact on the actual disaster experienced by Haitians.

  When anyone bothered to ask Haitians what they wanted from reconstruction, the answers were mostly about independence and self-help. “For us to be adults, we must be able to feed ourselves,” said one Haitian, who took part in a focus group trying to find the right solutions. “If they really want to help us, they need to invest in agriculture.”10

  THE QUESTION OF HOW AND EVEN WHETHER TO HELP PEOPLE IN A DISASTER is not a sideshow in American politics. America has a long and proud tradition of helping both U.S. and foreign citizens with crisis funds. In fact, Haiti itself was one of the first cases where Congress intervened, in the early years of the Republic. Those earliest examples of disaster relief would eventually serve as the legal foundation for the New Deal and the welfare state as we know it today.

  In its early days, Congress served as both a legislature and a court, deciding on individual claims for relief. At the start of the Haitian slave rebellion, in 1791, the federal government helped finance the white slave owners in their war against the rebels. Three years later, Congress was funding relief for the white Haitian refugees living in the United States. Once it started helping foreigners, it could hardly refuse to help Americans. Congress later gave funds to people who suffered in the 1812 war, as well as an 1827 fire in Alexandria, Virginia. Soon, earthquakes, floods and even insect plagues were covered.11 That tradition paved the way for New Dealers to extend government relief to the poor and the unemployed, who were suffering from the disasters of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Conservatives opposed their efforts, arguing that such relief amounted to socialism and pushing in vain for the Red Cross to take care of the poor. The effort to move public opinion behind the new social safety net was determined and creative. John Steinbeck’s book The Grapes of Wrath was—like Dorothea Lange’s photos of mothers feeding their hungry babies—a concerted and moving attempt to win widespread support for federal relief.12 It wasn’t long before the movement that started with soup kitchens led to the creation of Social Security.