We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  The result was a shutdown of the coverage of Puerto Rico’s suffering. The island became once again the forgotten disaster, where American lives did not seem as valuable as those in places lucky enough to hold full statehood in the United States of America. The loss of news attention meant that so many problems that could have been solved, and so many scandals that could have been exposed, escaped attention for many months. The government officials at all levels—from the mayors to the island government to the Trump White House—dodged any meaningful scrutiny. The tragedy of Las Vegas was also another disaster for Puerto Rico.

  That night I returned exhausted to the AC Hotel, after spending a couple of hours at FEMA getting my hands on my first military-drawn map of the island. It arrived just in time to explain my plans to the island’s secretary of education, Julia Keleher. With more than a thousand schools under her control, Keleher was a powerful leader in what I believed could be the most dramatic expansion of all the feeding operations. My visit to the school in Ponce was proof of what they could achieve. Every school has a kitchen and its own team of cooks, and it would only take an order to activate those kitchens—to get them to cook longer and with more supplies—to feed their own communities. School kitchens could be a model for how to feed an island, if we could just organize and activate them.

  The schools were suffering in their own right. Most were closed, and communications were hard. But some were designated as community shelters and a few were already feeding families and relief workers. The key was to get the message to more schools—which was a great challenge without cell phone service, landlines and the Internet—and to get more food to them so they might serve their communities. The schools’ kitchen staff needed to know they would not get into trouble if they started cooking more meals: not just for the students but also for families who were going hungry. As we looked over my new map, and talked about how to serve the communities in the greatest need across the island, I felt like Keleher could be one of the best partners I could hope for. In my eyes, she was so much more than an education secretary: she controlled the largest number of kitchens on the island.

  The map was so much more than a piece of paper. You know what the map really became for me? A way to show that I wasn’t crazy. The map meant I wasn’t just a crazy chef who wanted to open eighteen kitchens. I could walk people through every step of the plan, through everything we had built and delivered, through every region and town that needed help. I was showing that all those activations of kitchens had a footprint. They were proof of what was possible, and I hoped that proof would help FEMA and the Red Cross to help other people. They might even help me feed those people. Thanks to my friends in the Army Corps of Engineers, especially Andrew Goldblatt, I even had a digital version of the map. It could have been so useful for everyone responding to the crisis, as an updated picture of all the resources and needs on the island. In my brain, this was a prototype for future disasters. If only people could get behind this project and what we were doing. Instead, I didn’t have FEMA credentials and could only get a temporary password to see the digital map.

  If they couldn’t help or wouldn’t help, I would call everybody who could help, who wanted to help. America is full of money, so I kept moving forward, with my phone and my maps. It was like opening a restaurant without knowing who your investors are. The return on investment was knowing that Puerto Ricans would not go hungry.

  THE SCENE OUTSIDE EL CHOLI WAS A MESSY, NOISY, WONDERFUL COMBINATION of ingredients. The constant buzzing of generators was the backbeat to the scraping of huge paella pans outside the west entrance to the giant arena where we’d set up our headquarters. As we organized ourselves with giant flip-chart sheets, and letter-size sign-up sheets, the cooks were heaping up mountains of rice and sloshing together large vats of stock. The hot meals would take shape just a few feet away from a crush of sweaty volunteers and anxious Puerto Ricans waiting to pick up the precious trays and boxes of food for their communities. The demand was so high that people arrived before dawn—some as early as four in the morning—waiting for hours to collect meals for their community. We hired extra security to manage the crowds, organizing them into lines for placing orders and picking up food. Close to the paella pans, our small fleet of food trucks waited to be filled with what would become several lifelines stretching across the island each morning. Our outdoor kitchen was also our storage depot: there was a trolley of propane tanks, ready to switch into the circular burners that were firing up the rice. By the arena entrance, a half-paved car park was always full of trucks and cars waiting to take our food across the island. There were heavily armed Homeland Security agents, with assault rifles over their shoulders and sidearms strapped to their legs. And there were pastors and mayors from small communities with young volunteers, all patiently waiting in the humid sunshine. When it rained, which it often did, the car park would turn into a soaking mud bath, just like much of the rest of the island, which was still saturated with groundwater after two hurricanes.

  The evidence of the storms was all around us. On one side, the home of the Puerto Rico Trade and Export Company bore the scars of the winds: its logos ripped off the building, leaving empty white space which once boasted of its business. On another side, an office block was boarded up with several plywood sheets, its tinted windows blown out. There was no sign of repairs going on in our neighborhood.

  Inside the arena doors we started storing huge supplies of our basics: cutlery, paper plates, clamshell boxes, aluminum trays, pallets of water, cans of vegetables, trays of bread, boxes of fruit and vegetables. In normal times, not so long ago, this was the Absolut Vodka lounge, and the walls were covered in playful takes on the vodka lifestyle. There were cocktail glasses and playing cards alongside giant warnings to drink responsibly. In this darkened lounge, just beyond the tropical sunlight, we set up two new sandwich lines on foldable tables. The space was big enough to take hundreds of volunteers and could be a factory for feeding the island. Beyond the sandwich factory was the half-empty floor of the arena, where the first lady’s supplies stood still, unused for reasons that were not at all clear to us. We were forbidden from entering the space, so we could only look at the stack of new generators and wonder why they weren’t getting to the people who needed them so urgently.

  Around the corner, through the long cinder-block hallway, we stored more ingredients: rice, oil, cans of vegetables, boxes of stock cubes, tray after tray of white sliced bread and giant bottles of canola oil. Beyond another lounge area that also opened up to the main arena floor, there were more supplies in the hallway that led to our central kitchen: a giant space that normally churned out arena food. On one side we were cooking vats of chicken and rice, pastelónes, even hot dogs. Behind a wall, we were washing and prepping piles of vegetables and raw chicken. And just behind the prep area, there were two giant walk-in refrigerators that were critical to the whole operation.

  Our cooks soon filled the walls with ripped cards where they wrote their targets for the day: the numbers of meals that would go to each location, and most important of all, the number of hungry Puerto Ricans they were feeding each day.

  Compared to our first home, El Choli was a five-star facility. More than just its size, the space allowed us to be efficient in our cooking. We had water and heat, the two essentials of cooking that were still only a memory for most Puerto Ricans. We had refrigeration and air-conditioning, even if the heat of the kitchens was overwhelming. We had space to deliver mass quantities of food, and space to store them too. We could finally set about feeding the huge numbers of people who were going hungry while they tried to rebuild their lives.

  Outside, on more foldable tables, I spread out my new maps and planned our expansion across the island. With this giant kitchen and outdoor space as our central hub, we could look after San Juan. But to get to the rest of the island, we needed a network of kitchens doing the same thing as El Choli but on a smaller scale. From those satellite kitchens, we could serve the local
communities and figure out where the real needs were. We needed to activate those kitchens and get supplies to them. In doing so, we would avoid the difficulties of daily travel with hot food, improve our intelligence and communications about the facts on the ground, and expand to be truly island-wide. This was our twenty-one-day plan to feed the island. FEMA had its own twenty-one-day plan, but they could never say when the clock on the twenty-one days began.

  On the walls we stuck photos of the scenes in Santurce as a way to show with pride what we already achieved. They were a message of hope about what we could do together. Anybody who saw the photos felt inspired to join our movement.

  What gave me confidence to grow was the first official sign of support, just eight days after I landed on the island. FEMA emailed to give us what they called “a notice to proceed” to cook twenty thousand meals a day for the next seven days. We quoted a price of $6 to $8 a meal, depending on the ingredients, covering not just the food and supplies, but the transport and power required to make and deliver it. For reasons that were never clear to me, that cost per meal was bumped up to $10 by the time FEMA gave us the go-ahead. All told, we were heading toward a FEMA contract worth $1.4 million to provide 140,000 meals. We knew we could hit those numbers. On our last day in Santurce we had produced twenty thousand meals. Now we were in a vastly bigger space, with new kitchens ready to activate across the island. Our plan was to cook to capacity, not to the contract. As a nonprofit, we had no interest in making a profit. Our sense of profit came from feeding the people. FEMA’s money was going to cover our current costs and beyond: anything left over we would spend on feeding more people, regardless of the number of meals in the contract.

  PERHAPS IT WAS JUST A COINCIDENCE THAT FEMA’S EMAIL LANDED ON the same day that President Trump was visiting Puerto Rico for the first time since the hurricane, fully thirteen days after Maria made landfall. But I wanted him and his team to know what we were doing, and what we could do together. My voice was turning scratchy and my throat was painful, but I recorded a video to give him—or his aides—an idea of what we could achieve.

  “Hi, Mr. President Trump. This is how we’re going to be feeding Puerto Rico for the next twenty-one days,” I began, standing next to the maps on the tables outside El Choli. “There’s a lot of things happening, with the Red Cross and other relief organizations. But this is World Central Kitchen and this is what we’re doing quickly. We are here in our headquarters where we’re already producing 50,000 meals. By Saturday we’ll be doing 100,000. We identified eight kitchens around Puerto Rico that we’re going to be opening: Mayagüez, Aguadilla. We’re going to do Manatí, and we’ll open one in Ponce tomorrow. We’ll do one in Guayama, and one in Fajardo to take care of Vieques and Culebra. And we’ll do one in Gurabo to take care of the center of the island. We are going to do in a week—if we get direct support, we are working with FEMA to make sure we’re actively feeding with this project—roughly over half a million people a day. Plus the other operations that are already happening, I think, Mr. President, we will feed the island. We only need to make sure that we put away the red tape and we keep moving forward. We have over 200 volunteers a day here. We can be doing this. We only need leadership.”

  Leadership was all we needed, but Trump’s visit did not exactly demonstrate the leadership we were hoping for. White House staffers were worried that there would be a repeat of Trump’s angry outbursts against Mayor Cruz.3 Instead of playing the traditional role of a president comforting American citizens in crisis, Trump might turn back into the spiteful tweeting politician the world saw just a few days earlier. His aides were concerned about protests, and critical comments from officials like Cruz. They might even have been concerned about someone like me telling the truth about the disaster of the recovery operations.

  They had plenty of reasons to worry about their boss. The whole trip was designed to shower praise on Trump and for Trump to return that praise to his own team. He didn’t venture outside of his comfort zone, which was very small indeed. Even before he left Washington, Trump told reporters that the recovery was awesome. “I think it’s now acknowledged what a great job we’ve done,” he said at the White House.

  The only person doing the acknowledgment was Trump himself. At a fake briefing in an aircraft hangar at the Air National Guard base, on the site of the main San Juan airport, Trump began strangely by praising the weather in Puerto Rico. Soon he was praising Brock Long, his FEMA administrator, in ways that echoed George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina, when he said his FEMA chief had done a heckuva job.

  “Brock has been unbelievable,” Trump said, after giving him an A+ for his work in Texas and Florida. “And this has been the toughest one. This has been a Category Five, which few people have ever even heard of—a Category Five hitting land. But it hit land—and boy, did it hit land.” He continued to praise his team before turning to the governor.

  “Governor, I just want to tell you that, right from the beginning, this governor did not play politics. He didn’t play it at all. He was saying it like it was, and he was giving us the highest grades.”4

  If it sounded like an exercise in giving good grades, that’s because it was. The person who seemed to need the most relief was Trump himself. When he started to talk about the suffering in Puerto Rico, it was detached from any sense of human feeling.

  “Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico, and that’s fine,” he explained.

  “We’ve saved a lot of lives. If you look at the—every death is a horror. But if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering—nobody has ever seen anything like this. What is your death count as of this moment? Seventeen? Sixteen people certified. Sixteen people versus in the thousands. You can be very proud of all your people, all of our people working together. Sixteen versus literally thousands of people. You can be very proud. Everybody around this table and everybody watching can really be very proud of what’s taken place in Puerto Rico.”

  Never mind that the official death count was obviously wrong, or that there were credible reports of the morgues being full across the island. What kind of person is proud of sixteen people dying? Only someone who could draw a line between “all your people” and “all of our people.” Someone who didn’t see Puerto Ricans as “our people” or real people at all, even though he was the president of all American citizens, including those in the Caribbean. We needed leadership to feed the people of Puerto Rico, but we had a leader who was more interested in patting himself on the back than the difficult work of disaster recovery.

  The day would get worse with Donald Trump. He drove the short distance to Guaynabo, where a church called Calvary Chapel was using an old Office Depot warehouse to store and distribute hurricane relief supplies. In front of a table stacked with rolls of kitchen paper and cans of food, Trump looked at the excited crowd of Puerto Ricans taking his photo and started lobbing the paper rolls at them. Like he was shooting a basketball at an imaginary hoop, he turned to one side and threw a roll, then turned and shot another.

  He seemed to have no idea what his role was, as president of a country in the midst of a humanitarian disaster. At one point, he picked up a water purification packet and seemed astonished that anyone would use it.

  “Wait, you put it in dirty water?” he asked.5

  “Yes, and you can drink it in ten to 12 hours,” said one volunteer.

  “Would you drink it?” he asked, sounding more incredulous with each word.

  “Sure,” said the volunteer.

  “Really?” he asked again, looking alarmed.

  “Really,” she replied.

  Trump looked at the purification packet, held it at arm’s length and scowled. A famously germophobic man, he looked like he’d rather drink a
bottle of Purell. He handed out some cans of food, posed for a few selfies, then turned to the cameras behind him.

  “There’s a lot of love in this room,” he declared. “A lot of love in this room. Great people.”

  He meant: there’s a lot of love for me.

  His last stop of the day was with the governors of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, on board the USS Kearsarge. Technically the massive ship is an amphibious assault ship, but in practice it has often been deployed for humanitarian missions, including the evacuation of some three thousand civilians from Sierra Leone in 1997, as its capital, Freetown, descended into violent anarchy. Its medical operations are only second in size to the hospital ships Mercy and Comfort, which also arrived in San Juan that day. The ship has such massive capabilities that it can distill 200,000 gallons of water a day: enough daily fresh water for the entire population of San Juan.

  Sailors and marines from the Kearsarge were on the ground the morning after Maria passed through.6 With Kearsarge in Puerto Rico, the United States had every capability needed to minimize civilian deaths in the most extreme circumstances. The ship’s helicopters were flying relief supplies into the island, as well as helping with urgent repairs to equipment like hospital generators.7 But five days after the hurricane, they had only made eight medical evacuations.8 Compared to its service in Sierra Leone, it seemed like the Kearsarge wasn’t being used at anything like its full capacity. Now it was simply a stage for a photo op, with the Virgin Islands’ governor arriving on board to help Trump avoid the trouble of flying to his devastated island.

  Trump was pleased with his day in the disaster zone. On the way back to Washington, aboard Air Force One, he interrupted a media briefing by Jenniffer González-Colón, the island’s non-voting representative in Congress. One reporter asked Trump if he’d heard any “constructive criticism” on his trip.