We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

Two Sundays after the hurricane, we wanted to support that tradition. We wanted to bring food back to the heart of these hurting communities. Not just to feed people, but to tell them that the outside world cared for them.

  It was also our last day at José Enrique’s restaurant in Santurce, a place I loved for all its warmth and community spirit. It felt like my home and hearth, where we sweated and struggled our way to cook tens of thousands of meals. In these narrow streets where San Juan used to party, we had built the foundations for an island-wide food relief operation, and a model for future disasters. But we had grown too big for the space, and as the team prepared to move on, we took our meals onto the roads.

  We now had four giant paella pans cooking vast amounts of rice, chicken and vegetables, along with our famous sancocho and a huge sandwich operation. We would hit a new record on this Sunday: 20,000 meals, almost 10 times our starting point less than a week earlier, and twice what we had produced just two days ago.

  Our first delivery was one thousand meals to Cataño, to the east of San Juan. Under a giant white canopy, with music blaring, we set up tables and served our meals in a party atmosphere. Alongside me were the mayor of Cataño, Félix Delgado, and the island’s secretary of state, Luis Rivera-Marín, who were only too happy to spoon out the rice and chicken. You could see the commitment in Félix’s face: like many mayors, he was very hands on. Our only problem was that we forgot to bring serving spoons with us. But when you’re committed to helping people, you always find a solution, and we survived without them. Four big spoons showed up from I don’t know where.

  As we set off for our next delivery, our team back in Santurce was packing up the whole operation and moving to our new home at the Coliseum arena.

  It was clear from our travels that we needed to grow, and we needed to do that quickly. On our drive to Ponce, in the far south of the island, the devastation was clear. The trees were stripped bare of their branches and leaves. The sad journey felt like we had entered another world, where the trees had just lost an epic battle against some immensely powerful force. Cell phone service died on the way to Ponce and we lost all contact with our team back in San Juan. I had to remind myself this was the United States, not some third-world country, eleven days after a hurricane.

  Slowly, some essential services were coming back. Thirty-six percent of Puerto Ricans now had cell phone coverage, according to the governor. One thousand more troops were arriving, but the total number now stood at only 6,400. At the same time, there were 8,800 American citizens in refugee shelters across the island. Even with expanded numbers of military personnel, the troops were overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the challenge.16 Besides, those numbers weren’t nearly as important as the 55 percent of Puerto Ricans who didn’t have access to clean water. That represented 1.87 million Americans without the essential ingredient for life. Fully 95 percent of islanders still had no access to power.17

  As soon as we arrived in Ponce, we met the city’s mayor, Maria Melendez Altieri, known to all as Mayita. She was happy to see us, even as she was troubleshooting an endless list of challenges with minimal support from the San Juan government. When the island’s secretary of state showed up at the same time, she calmly took him to task. FEMA had given her a satellite phone that did not work. How was she supposed to handle all the problems of the island’s second biggest city?

  I already knew about the gravity of the food crisis in Ponce thanks to my friend Lymari Nadal, the actress and writer, who had visited earlier to check on her family in the city. She brought 500 meals but said she could have handed out 5,000 or more.

  Together with the mayor, we visited a school that was also serving as a refugio, or shelter. I was amazed at how good the conditions were in the kitchen and cafeteria. They had enough food and refrigeration to feed not just the refugio but the egidas nearby. I gave an impromptu speech, thanking them for the job they were doing, and telling them how we were already cooking thousands of meals a day. They cheered with joy: at times like these, any message of hope is an important boost in the face of such overwhelming challenges.

  It was getting late and we moved on with the mayor to some outer areas, where Mayita told us they still didn’t have the full picture of how bad the conditions were. Her team was simply overwhelmed by the disaster. That was what we found in the El Tuque area near Ponce, in the southwest of the island. The people there had no water and would walk thirty minutes each way to get their hands on a liter. Some were drinking from a nearby stream out of sheer desperation. There was no power, and the mosquitoes were swarming. The local supermarkets were empty. Our arrival seemed to lift their hopes, even if they initially thought we were FEMA officials coming to save them, because we arrived with an escort of HSI officers. As we served our chicken and rice, along with half an avocado for each person, those we fed were smiling but their patience and good nature masked real hunger and need. We served one thousand meals and took one thousand sandwiches to another community nearby, and we made a critical decision right there: we would open up a satellite kitchen in the area to produce ten thousand meals a day to help serve this community of fifty thousand people, for at least a week or two, until they got back on their feet. Mayita thanked us but I was making promises when I didn’t know how I could keep them. Still, I was determined to make it happen.

  THAT DAY I WAS STILL FIRED UP ABOUT DONALD TRUMP’S ATTACKS ON Mayor Cruz. “If I was @realDonaldTrump I would be in Puerto Rico to lead no more than 2 days after the disaster,” I tweeted. “If I was @realDonaldTrump I would not attack a leader that has worked non-stop for her people,” I wrote in another tweet, posting a photo of Cruz. In a third tweet, I said I would praise the volunteers, and in another I said I would stop attacking the media, if I were him. Finally, I suggested he should activate all the food trucks on the island, to create block-by-block kitchens and food delivery. You didn’t need a federal bureaucracy to figure it out; you just needed to see what we were doing. Yes, it could look like I was trolling Trump. But my message was deadly serious: we needed real leadership from the White House, not a series of mean-spirited posts on social media. I thought about calling Ivanka Trump: I knew her and her brothers from several encounters, including the litigation around the hotel restaurant that I refused to open with them after their father’s comments about Mexican immigrants. I had great relationships with Republicans in the Bush White House and Democrats in the Obama White House. But this administration was different, and I felt disconnected from them.

  My argument wasn’t with all federal officials. I was clear that I wanted to make things work with the military, with Homeland Security and with FEMA. These were the people who could get things done, and I still had high hopes for what FEMA in particular could do. I thought Brock Long, the FEMA administrator, struck the right note when he appeared on ABC’s This Week that Sunday morning. When George Stephanopoulos asked him about Mayor Cruz’s criticism, and Trump’s suggestion that Puerto Ricans were sitting back, he took a long time to clear his throat. “So the success of a disaster response is predicated on unity of command,” he said. “The bottom line is, we had a press conference from the joint field office in San Juan. That operation has hundreds of people in it working around the clock to set the strategic objectives. FEMA, DoD, the governor’s objectives. We have been working with mayors all around Puerto Rico to make sure we have a strategy.” Brock pointed out that Cruz had only been to the joint field office once.

  There are very few heroes in any disaster, and there are no perfect leaders. Cruz had flaws, and so did FEMA. Some of those flaws were obvious at the time: Cruz was better at appealing for help than managing logistics. Some of those flaws, especially at FEMA, would only fully emerge much later. For all their bureaucratic checks and balances, the agency was sloppy about its contracts and detached from reality. Still, they had the power to do a huge amount of good for people in desperate need, and I wanted to encourage them to do just that.

  Long told ABC News that they were making “
slow progress” in Puerto Rico and that the island still had “a long way to go.”18

  “I believe FEMA will make it happen,” I tweeted back at Long, after his interview.

  None of those details would stop Trump from tweeting about what he considered to be a great success, at the same time as smearing anyone who dared to tell the truth about what was happening on the island. “We have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico,” he wrote. “Outside of the Fake News or politically motivated ingrates, people are now starting to recognize the amazing work that has been done by FEMA and our great Military.”

  I had no problem recognizing the great work of some people at FEMA, as well as the military. But I could also see very clearly that the administration was not doing a great job. The situation, as we found it, was not “almost impossible” unless you were stuck inside a government bunker with no contacts, no expertise, no local knowledge, and no urgency or creativity about how to feed the people.

  ON OUR WAY BACK FROM PONCE, I FELT THE URGENCY OF NOW. THE SITUATION was so bad in El Tuque that we needed to mobilize the entire private sector quickly. I called Ramón Leal to organize a meeting of business leaders at our hotel. With or without a FEMA contract, we couldn’t stop. I was barely eating myself, but I couldn’t stop thinking of the people who were drinking rainwater and going to bed hungry that night. The turnout at the hotel was impressive: even the Red Cross showed up. I told them about our plan to feed as many people as possible, and asked them to prioritize donations of food. If they could afford a cash donation, that was awesome too. But I needed to run the operation like a professional restaurant kitchen, and I needed their support. Among the business leaders was Rafael O’Ferrall, a retired U.S. Army brigadier-general, who was now general manager of Dade Paper Company in Puerto Rico. One of our biggest challenges was how to deliver food. Since we weren’t sure if we could get our hands on reusable plastic Cambros, we needed a huge supply of aluminum trays. He took our plan seriously and we would never run out of trays for the weeks and months ahead, as we sent tens of thousands of trays packed with hot food across the island.

  After the meeting ended, I wanted to go to José Enrique’s restaurant to recharge. But my team was all gone, as they worked tirelessly to move our operations from the small pink restaurant to the giant concrete arena. They were exhausted but they never stopped working. We all were driven by the need to feed an island whose suffering we were still only beginning to understand. I went to the hotel rooftop and lit a cigar, accompanied only by the buzzing of the city’s air-conditioning units and generators. As I looked up to the stars, I began to cry. I thought the one star that was missing was the Puerto Rican star on the American flag.

  Chapter 5

  In the Arena

  IT WAS ONE WEEK SINCE I ARRIVED IN PUERTO RICO AND THE FIRST DAY in our new home at the Coliseum. We knew we were going to take a big dip in our cooking output as we moved to this huge new space, having hit a record in the number of meals we prepared the day before. It takes time to build an operation like ours, and the task of rebuilding is no easy job.

  It was even harder when the largest kitchen on the island was out of action. My experience in Houston underscored what I already understood: that arena kitchens are perfect for a disaster. They are sized to feed tens of thousands of people, have great storage and refrigeration, and enjoy the best access for deliveries going out and coming in. But as I tried to activate the central El Choli kitchen, I encountered challenge after challenge. In my mind, I was already dreaming that we could feed an entire island: we had a kitchen that could feed twenty to thirty thousand people a day. When we arrived there was no electricity and the arena staff seemed like they thought they were doing us a favor by allowing us to be there. What a waste of space, I thought. Even the convention center, where FEMA was headquartered, could produce ten times more food from its giant kitchen.

  I was determined to get this place up to full capacity, but it wouldn’t happen on day one. Still, those initial problems could not hold me back. With the space and facilities we now had, I could see my dreams coming true. I wanted to get to 100,000 meals a day by the end of the week. I liked to think of El Choli as the biggest restaurant launch in the world. We were firing up a huge capacity kitchen that would feed, every day in the open air, 100,000 customers. Perhaps I had that vision because I was also launching a new restaurant back on the mainland at the same time. My team kept sending me photos of the dishes they were creating at our new restaurant Somni at The Bazaar in the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills. One minute I was looking at photos of delicate avant-garde creations for luxury diners in Los Angeles; the next minute I was looking at a giant paella pan of chicken and rice for hungry Puerto Ricans. It was not easy maintaining two lives. When I called my wife, Patricia, to let her know I would not be home any time soon, she naturally asked how long I would stay on the island. Her simple question set free all the tears I had been holding back. I couldn’t speak, and she understood.

  Our food trucks showed up early at the car park outside El Choli, but I was worried about how long it would take to ramp up the sandwich line. It made much more sense to keep the sandwich operation humming at José Enrique for one more day. We were short of bread as we switched over to much simpler food, including hot dogs and hamburgers, for the day. But we managed to buy vast quantities of bread by going to the most obvious place. You didn’t need any experience in the food industry to know that Sam’s Club is a great supplier for small businesses like restaurants, and they never let us down. We rapidly became their single best customer in Puerto Rico, and they treated us well: we skipped the lines to enter through a side door. They were our lifeline when we began to exhaust supplies at José Santiago, and they needed time to restock. We always adapted our cooking to whatever ingredients were available. I could never understand the other NGOs struggling with supplies when the answer was as easy as Sam’s Club. We had one Jeep and we filled every corner of it, from floor to roof, with loaf after loaf of bread.

  But we were running late that day because of the move, and the result was a huge problem. The food trucks missed the lunchtime window for handing out hamburgers and didn’t know what to do with the seven hundred left behind. To me, the solution was simple: go to where you know there are lots of people. “Stop at a gas station and give them away,” I said. Within two minutes, all seven hundred burgers were gone.

  I needed people who could solve problems like that, and fortunately one arrived that day. Erin Schrode, an activist who had worked in medical relief after the Haiti earthquake, came to help, alongside Nate. She arrived just as my executive director, Brian MacNair, was leaving to keep our operations going in Nicaragua, where he was traveling on a training trip with two of my chefs. I really needed all the help I could get, but we couldn’t leave our other programs behind. My private business and family life were already suffering enough. Brian could help me by maintaining our other programs and supporting us from a distance.

  “We’re going to serve 100,000 meals a day,” I told Erin. She looked at me like I was crazy. That day, because of the move, we were only going to prepare eight thousand.

  Erin wanted to know what her responsibilities would be, but I didn’t want to play the title game. When you give people titles, they screw up everything. They need to figure out how to make things work, not argue about their titles.

  “You are chief of happiness,” I told her, hoping to end the conversation.

  “Okay,” she replied. “I’m chief of operations and happiness.”

  There wasn’t much happiness on the rest of the island. The official numbers were getting worse, not better. Héctor Pesquera, the island’s secretary of public safety, admitted to a reporter that the number of dead exceeded the official count of sixteen, but said he didn’t know how many. “I understand that there are more dead here, but what I do not have is reports that they tell me [for example] in Mayagüez eight died because they did not have oxygen, in San Pablo four di
ed because they did not receive dialysis,” he said.1 I had seen four dead bodies myself, so I thought his numbers were far too low.

  The situation on the island had hardly improved much. Governor Rosselló reported that only two-thirds of supermarkets were open, and in my experience, many of the open stores had no supplies to speak of. People had no money, and if they did, their cards weren’t accepted in the supermarkets because of a lack of internet or power. Only slightly more than a third of islanders had cell phone service and, according to our volunteers and delivery drivers, most of those seemed to be near San Juan.2

  For the people of Puerto Rico, we needed to grow quickly. But we also needed to grow at El Choli in a much more organized way. FEMA was now talking about a contract to get us going, which would require a whole new level of paperwork that might be audited at a later date. It wasn’t yet clear how far that contract would take us. FEMA seemed to be taking our work seriously, not least because of the attention we were getting in the traditional media and on social media.

  However, that media attention became vastly harder to attract because of the horrific events in Las Vegas a few hours before we started cooking at the arena. A gunman had opened fire on a country-music festival near the Vegas strip, leaving fifty-eight people dead and 851 injured. The numbers were stunning, and the carnage was shocking, even after the recent news of so many mass shootings. You could feel the news oxygen getting sucked out of Puerto Rico, just as we were finally gaining some traction with reporters from the mainland. Anderson Cooper could no longer stick around for days on end, as he had done in Haiti. He and the rest of the mainland media needed to fly to Las Vegas as quickly as possible.

  I knew these were difficult news decisions to make. It was impossible to compare one tragedy to another. But it should have been possible to cover both disasters at the same time. One was quick and bloody. The other was slow-moving but killed many more. Both deserved extended attention from journalists.