by Jose Andres
Soon journalists were asking Trump himself why he wouldn’t waive the Jones Act shipping restrictions for Puerto Rico as he had in Texas and Florida. His answer was more honest than the Homeland Security officials’ response: because the shipping industry didn’t want it lifted.
“Well, we’re thinking about that, but we have a lot of shippers and a lot of people who work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted,” he told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House.7 “And we have a lot of ships out there right now.
“Puerto Rico is a very difficult situation,” he explained. “I mean, that place was just destroyed. That’s not a question of, gee, let’s dry up the water, let’s do this or that. I mean, that place was flattened. That is a really tough situation. I feel so bad for those people.”
It was nice that he felt bad for those people who were his fellow Americans. But he didn’t feel bad enough to overrule the shippers, who were happy with the way things were. Two of the main operators, Crowley Maritime and TOTE Maritime, told the Wall Street Journal that their containers were stuck in the port because of a lack of ground transport.8 “We just can’t move trucks to depots and gas stations,” said one executive who asked not to be named. “The roads are a mess.”
Some of the roads were a mess, but many of them weren’t. When members of Congress demanded the lifting of the Jones Act, the White House caved—just one day after Trump talked about the shipping industry’s opposition. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis suddenly found that it was in our national security interests to waive the act. The White House announced the reversal in its approach through a tweet from Sarah Sanders, just a few hours before she promised we will not let you down.9 It was good news, for sure. But it was also a clear sign of how poor the preparations were for this recovery; how little thinking had been done, beyond protecting some vested interests; and how the response to Puerto Rico was being cooked up on the spot.
WE WOKE UP EARLY, THE MORNING AFTER MY CHANCE MEETING AT THE penthouse bar. FEMA’s meeting about food and water—coldly called the “mass care meeting”—was scheduled to start at 7:30 a.m. at the convention center.
The Puerto Rico Convention Center in San Juan sells itself as the most technologically advanced in the Caribbean. That may be true. But technology does not equal intelligence, and information about what was really happening on the island was hard to find inside its concrete and glass atrium. What you could find were Americans from the mainland. Lots of them milling around, traversing escalators, ducking in and out of meetings that had no visible impact on the life of the American islanders outside. The only way to know you weren’t in any other convention center across America was the sight of so many armed personnel, police and National Guard, in camo and flak jackets, bearing the kind of firepower that could have protected U.S. forces in Baghdad’s green zone. They lived in a perfectly supplied bubble, eating sushi, drinking beer and playing the slot machines in the Sheraton hotel across the street. Judging by the number of automatic rifles inside, the federal government was far more ready to protect itself against invasion than it was to protect its citizens from a humanitarian disaster. All those guns did not stop a steady stream of volunteer arrivals direct from the airport. You could tell the newcomers on sight: hauling bulging suitcases through the steel doors, wearing brightly branded T-shirts saying things like Love 4 Puerto Rico.
We entered through a back door because we had no official credentials or invitation. Chefs can always find a back door to any building like this: the kitchen staff need to go in and out quickly so there’s usually an entrance propped open for a cook to smoke a cigarette or take out the trash. I found that kitchen door quickly and we took the stairs to the floor with all the government meeting rooms.
The mass care meeting took place in a hallway where officials from all the main federal departments gathered—defense, agriculture, housing, education and FEMA, of course—as well as from the big NGOs, like the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. Josh Gill met me there but I already knew Captain Sanderson from the Salvation Army. It was obvious to me that there was no real coordination or leadership. Nobody seemed to be in charge, and everyone was doing their own thing. There was no overview or intelligence about questions concerning the real needs of the people: Where were the people in the worst situations, and how many were they? Who had what resources and how could we combine forces? The meeting was so chaotic, the participants decided to have another food meeting after the mass care meeting, on the balcony outside. “Just so we’re clear,” said one person, “this is a sub–task force.” These were the things they cared about. Sub–task forces.
I just cared about getting more bread, cheese, ham and mayonnaise. I thought our feeding operation was scrappy and still had a long way to go to reach a smooth state. But compared to how we had ramped up at José Enrique’s restaurant, the federal government was in complete chaos. There was apparently food and water stored in a government warehouse but the delivery trucks didn’t have the right approvals to go there. There was no way to match the words from Washington with what was happening in San Juan. I couldn’t see how this group of officials could get anything done. The government was unprepared, more than a week after the hurricane, and that made me feel—more than anything else—very sad. It also made me hate meetings, and endless planning, even more than I normally do. We didn’t need a never-ending strategy discussion at José Enrique’s. We just began cooking and delivering food.
The session was led by FEMA’s head of mass care in Puerto Rico, Waddy González. González was a former Red Cross official who knew the island well, having grown up in San Juan and graduated from the University of Puerto Rico. I had no idea at the time just how close the relationship was between the federal government and the Red Cross; I naively thought the Red Cross was an independent charity, even if it was huge.
But when it comes to what they technically call “mass care,” the Red Cross and FEMA are so closely entwined that they co-chair something called the National Mass Care Council.10 That group produced a strategy document in 2012, and González was a key player in its creation. The strategy calls itself “a road map for national mass care service delivery.” It’s full of technical language like standardization of terms and expanding capabilities. It has no section dedicated to food and water. Its recommendations are for more planning and processes, and it makes clear that nobody is really in charge. In fact, it prides itself on that lack of structure. “The strength and resilience of our current system is that we do not rely on a single entity for the provision of mass care services,” the strategy document declares, “but have a history of collective action by government, nongovernmental organizations, faith groups, the private sector, and other elements of our society—the Whole Community.”11 This is a great idea in many cases: to be adaptable and open to anyone who can help, especially the private sector. However, the reality was the opposite: rigid, closed, unresponsive and unwelcoming to the private sector mind-set.
González started with what sounded like an impossible goal. He said FEMA had identified that 2 million people needed feeding in Puerto Rico: almost two-thirds of the population. At three meals a day, that meant an operation producing 6 million meals a day, across the island. That number sounded right to me, but those were still eye-popping numbers. Who could produce that much food, never mind deliver it? We had just doubled our output to five thousand meals a day. I dreamed of reaching one million meals in total. It was a colossal amount of food, and the sheer scale of that goal seemed intimidating. But it also felt right: with a lot of help, we could achieve the impossible because the people needed feeding.
My hope was that we could partner with the Red Cross and Salvation Army. I thought we might be able to supply them, to feed into their system of delivery. I was unsure about speaking up, which is an unusual feeling for me. But I was just a chef, running a small and young nonprofit that was never supposed to be there, in a meeting with people representing huge charities. The Red Cross has
annual revenues of $2.6 billion. We weren’t just small compared to them; we were microscopic.
But Josh Gill prodded me to talk, so I gave it my best shot. Here was my plan: We could source the food and deliver it to kitchens across the island, staffed with chefs and volunteers, making rice and chicken, as well as sandwiches and soup. We could double and double again, every day. Boom, boom, boom. Surely there was some way we could partner to feed the island? I looked around. The group seemed to like my energy but that was about it: they looked at me like I was a smart-ass with some crazy vision of saving the world.
“You and I need to work together,” said Sanderson from the Salvation Army. “I’m going to take care of you.”
I thought, Great! He’s going to give us the money. I don’t need to worry. In hindsight, it was clear he actually meant that I would just give him the food. They avoided any further talk about money.
“Who is going to distribute the food?” asked González.
“Everybody who has a car,” I said, knowing that municipal officials were already coming to pick up the food in Santurce.
“What if they don’t deliver?”
“Let’s say 10 to 20 percent of the food is stolen,” I replied. “So what? They will still eat the food!”
The Red Cross seemed annoyed by my plan and asked the kinds of questions that made me feel they didn’t really believe we could stand up to anything. I turned the question back on them.
“Where are the trucks of the Red Cross?” I asked. “When are the units of the Southern Baptists coming? Where are the red Cambros for distributing the food?”
“We have no trucks,” they said. “And we have no units of the Southern Baptists.”
“If you don’t have trucks and the Southern Baptists, you can’t feed the people,” I replied.
You also couldn’t feed the people if you didn’t understand the island. It sounded to me like they had no idea where the food was produced and stored on the island. For instance, I had been talking to José Luis Labeaga, the owner of the Mi Pan bakery, who told me they would donate bread and contact the other bakeries to do the same. They had enough flour and frozen bread to keep donating bread, and it was produced by local people. The only catch was that we needed to send people to pick it up because they had problems with their trucks. Did FEMA and the Red Cross know there were working bakeries in Puerto Rico, which were desperate to help? If they supplied diesel and gas to the bakeries, they could have helped to feed the island.
“Why don’t you get a gas tank to every bakery so the bread is delivered around the island?” I suggested.
“We have other priorities,” said González. “Food isn’t a priority right now.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and they couldn’t believe what I was saying. If I were president of the United States or the director of FEMA, I would make food and water the top priority. With a couple of pieces of bread, you can easily put something in between and make a good sandwich. In a moment of real need, a simple sandwich looks like heaven. And if you feed the people, you are creating an army of first responders. If you look after people in their time of need, they become the most important and effective response: they become volunteers.
González looked at me carefully, like he was trying to comprehend which planet I came from or what language I was speaking. He seemed to be struggling internally with wanting to help while also wanting to say no.
“José, you don’t understand the process,” he kept telling me. “We can’t do this as quickly as you want.”
It wasn’t about me wanting to do things quickly. I just wanted to feed people as quickly as they needed food, which is to say, every day. It felt like González had been at FEMA for so long that there was only one way he could look at the world. He was a sympathetic man, sensitive to the needs of Puerto Rico, but he seemed handcuffed by the system. I had heard that he was concerned about his family on the island, but was too busy to go see them. He clearly placed his sense of duty and public service above his personal needs. But he also could see no way to cut through all the red tape to help the Puerto Rican people he knew so well.
“We’ll see what we can do,” he said.
As for the Salvation Army, their situation seemed hopeless. They had a kitchen running in Ponce, on the southern coast, but were struggling to produce any real quantities of meals. They complained they were having trouble getting cash out from the banks so they were flying cash into the country. As a result, they were finding it hard to buy enough food to cook.
They complained they could only bring in less than $10,000 at a time, which confused us. This wasn’t a foreign country and there were no restrictions on cash, because there were no customs. It was still the United States.
By this point, we had already spent more than $80,000 on food through our suppliers, José Santiago, based on a line of credit that was opened with a simple handshake. The Salvation Army, as huge an organization as you could imagine in this sector, was struggling to spend $10,000. They seemed paralyzed by the whole mission, and could barely cook two hundred meals out of their Ponce kitchen. That was a full digit less than we were cooking out of a leaking restaurant and car park after a couple of days of effort. They asked for our help getting their kitchen up to speed, but it sounded like more bureaucracy than it was worth, and their kitchen didn’t have the capacity we clearly needed to feed the island.
“What the hell is going on here?” I said to my friend Nate. “The Salvation Army can’t buy food?”
On my way out of the convention center, I noticed a military team whose job it was to create maps. My dream was to get an overview of the island—a comprehensive summary of every area of need, showing every bridge that was down, every gas station that was open or closed, and every community that needed most help. It was only with that kind of information that we would be able to locate our kitchens, or target our deliveries, in the right parts of the island at the right time. I started talking to the mapping guys and one of them said he’d been to my restaurants in D.C. That day they were running out of ink for their maps, and I promised them I would try to get some new supplies for them. They were modest people—not what you would expect from the self-confident American military—and they seemed to appreciate my offer of help.
“I’m going to be feeding 100,000 people a day—maybe more,” I told them, to help them imagine the scale and detail of maps that I’d need.
“Wow,” was all they could say.
I knew I sounded like a crazy dreamer, but that was a risk I was willing to take. Sometimes when I speak my mind, my dreams help push me—and those around me—to achieve more than we thought possible. It’s never good to over-promise and under-deliver. But in this crisis, to produce any meals would be better than the current catastrophe.
After the meeting, I regrouped with Josh Gill and we wrote to the Red Cross detailing what food supplies we needed to fulfill a big order for 240,000 sandwiches, including five thousand pounds of deli-sliced ham and bologna. “Let me know when we can get them,” I wrote. Based on their disinterest, we weren’t holding our breath. We needed to give them the chance to step up, but it didn’t sound like they knew how to manage a food operation in these conditions. We were happy that World Central Kitchen, our small nonprofit, was at the table for the talks with the biggest NGOs like the Red Cross. And who knew? If they couldn’t get their hands on the supplies, they at least had the resources to pay for the sandwiches.
The conversation with Gill was an eye-opening insight into the world of disaster relief: a jungle of tenders and requirements, contracts and fees, of middlemen and bureaucrats handling millions of dollars. It was a world away from the hungry, thirsty Puerto Ricans just a few minutes’ walk outside our door.
Gill said he could help get us a food contract from FEMA and I was naïve. I thought everyone was working out of the goodness of their heart, but it was clear that Gill expected more, so I asked him what he was going to get out of it. He named his price: one do
llar per meal would go to him. I had no idea who he was barely twenty-four hours earlier, but he had already proved his value to me. He took us to the right people in the right meeting, and they were comfortable with him. Above all, he gave me the courage to speak because he believed in me. Even if he believed in me because he hoped there was money to be made.
My head was spinning with all the jargon and numbers. I just wanted to feed the people. At first, I said okay to his price: it seemed like some combination of Monopoly money and The Hunger Games. It was only later that I realized how much money this could stack up to be, after a few hours of work by Gill. “This is fucked up,” I told Nate. We briefly considered halving his fee, to 50 cents a meal, thinking it was a tough piece of negotiation. But then we caught ourselves: we were getting sucked into a crazy calculation that would take food away from hungry people. If we cooked one million meals, as we hoped, Gill would still make out with half a million dollars.
I called him back to put a cap on his earnings at $250,000. Gill was upset with me, but I had to insist. This was not the time or place for anyone to get rich. I wasn’t interested in contracts and didn’t understand this business. I only wanted to feed the island.
WE DIDN’T HAVE MUCH MONEY, BUT WE DID HAVE SOMETHING PEOPLE wanted: food. We were improvising and doing whatever it took to get that food delivered. So we weren’t above bartering the food for an essential commodity: gasoline. Ricardo Rivera Badía of El Churry had a brilliant idea: one of his restaurants was right next to a gas station, and he knew the owners loved his food. So we traded food, and lots of it, for as much gasoline and diesel as we needed. It was one of our very best deals, and it allowed us to feed so many more people across the island. When our mobile kitchen ran out of gas, we drove to this gas station to fill ten plastic cans of fuel, some of them with no caps to stop the gasoline from sloshing out. We literally traded food so we could carry on cooking some more. FEMA asked us how we were going to distribute the food. The answer was simple: with creativity. If people know you are cooking, the right people will always show up to eat and help deliver the food to others.
