We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  “None,” Trump said. “They were so thankful for what we’ve done.” At that point, Trump noticed the reporters included Geraldo Rivera from Fox News. He said hello, even though Rivera had just interviewed him on the ground.

  Trump rashly told Rivera that Puerto Rico’s crushing debts would be canceled by the United States. “We have to look at their whole debt structure,” he said. “You know, they owe a lot of money to your friends on Wall Street, and we’re going to have to wipe that out. You can say goodbye to that. I don’t know if it’s Goldman Sachs, but whoever it is, you can wave goodbye to that.”9 This was actually an awesome idea if it ever became something more than an off-the-cuff opinion.

  One reporter asked Trump what his visit meant to Puerto Rico, and the president was happy to oblige. “I think it means a lot to the people of Puerto Rico that I was there. They’ve really responded very nicely, and I think it meant a lot to the people of Puerto Rico. I mean, I think you folks have seen it. And I guess it’s one of the few times anybody has done this. I didn’t know that at the time, but I guess, from what I’m hearing, it’s the first time that a sitting president has done something like this.”10

  Sitting presidents make visits to hurricane-hit parts of the United States all the time. And sitting presidents have visited Puerto Rico many times before, including Barack Obama in 2011. It wasn’t clear what Trump was talking about, or whether he understood what was going on in Puerto Rico.

  Back on the island, the reaction to his visit—especially the paper towels—was one of dismay. Even by Puerto Rico’s low expectations, Trump had managed to disappoint everyone I met. He lobbed supplies at Puerto Ricans rather than taking seriously and sympathetically the humanitarian crisis in front of him.

  “Forget politics, forget pundits,” I tweeted, trying to turn the conversation back to the positive work I was seeing firsthand. “What I have seen in #PuertoRico is people coming together, sacrificing 2 serve. This is humanity at its best.”

  THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WAS SECRETLY DOING MUCH MORE TO deliver food relief than it ever admitted to me or anyone else. Which made it even worse that the food relief never materialized.

  On the day Trump was tossing paper towels into a crowd of Puerto Ricans, his own FEMA officials signed a contract worth almost $156 million with a tiny contractor based in Atlanta to provide 30 million meals. The company, called Tribute Contracting, had one employee and no meaningful experience in food production. Just twenty days later, FEMA canceled the contract after Tribute produced only fifty thousand meals.

  Tiffany Brown, the owner and sole employee of Tribute, said she learned of the FEMA bid from a Google alert. She landed the contract by bidding at $5.10 a meal, and planned to subcontract the 30 million meals to two small caterers. One of them, a wedding caterer, had eleven employees. She insisted that the subcontractor “was experienced with this work” and would hire more people as they scaled up.11 They were going to freeze-dry mushrooms and rice, chicken and rice, and vegetable soup. Another contractor, a Texas nonprofit, was going to ship the food to Puerto Rico. “My biggest mistake was not asking for more help,” she said later.

  In addition to not delivering the meals, Tribute failed a key FEMA test. The meals were supposed to be “self-heating” but the supposed heating pouches were shipped separately from the meals.

  Of course, those FEMA tests are as stupid as they sound. Freeze-dried food needs water to be reconstituted, but clean water was in very short supply in Puerto Rico. And the idea of self-heating food could only come from a government official who has never actually cooked a meal that anyone wants to eat. Tiffany Brown was not the problem; she was just a symptom. The sickness is a food relief system, managed by FEMA and the big nonprofits, that does not understand food or the people it’s supposed to be feeding.

  Brown describes herself as “a broker” taking a cut of the contracts, much like Josh Gill. Her expertise was in contracts, not food. “They probably should have gone with someone else, but I’m assuming they did not because this was the third hurricane,” she said later. “They were trying to fill the orders the best they could.”12

  That’s being kind to FEMA. Another company called Bronze Star won $30 million in contracts to provide half a million emergency tarps and sixty thousand plastic sheets to cover roofs damaged by the hurricane. From what I saw across the island, Puerto Ricans desperately needed the tarps to stop the rain flooding what was left of their homes. But the tarps never arrived because Bronze Star was just another tiny contractor: two brothers with no experience and no track record, relying on other suppliers who failed to deliver. The tarp contract represented one-third of all the FEMA money spent on tarps at the point when it was canceled. The brothers were both former military personnel, but neither had won a Bronze Star.13

  FEMA said that everyone who needed a tarp could get one. And it said that nobody missed a meal because of Tribute’s complete failure to provide anything edible in any quantity. “At the time of the contract termination there were ample commodity supplies in the pipeline and distribution was not affected,” said William Booher, a FEMA spokesman.

  At best, this is meaningless jargon: a pipeline is not a meal, and distribution was not affected because there was so little to distribute.

  At worst, this is a shameless lie.

  The contract only came to light when Democrats on the House Oversight Committee demanded a subpoena of FEMA to turn over documents about the contract. Tiffany Brown told committee staffers that she worked hard to provide the meals, “24 hours a day, seven days a week.” But her suppliers stopped working because FEMA was late with payment.14

  How could FEMA know Tribute would fail? Maybe they could have checked its capacity to deliver such a huge order, never mind pay its suppliers. Maybe they could have checked the federal contractor database, which showed Tribute had failed to deliver on four other food contracts in 2013 and 2014. When Tribute failed to deliver a contract for tote bags, another federal agency—the Government Publishing Office—said the company should not get a contract worth more than $30,000 until 2019 at the earliest.15

  On the day the Tribute contract was signed, we had already prepared and delivered 78,000 meals, most of which were cooked that day with healthy, fresh produce. The meals didn’t need a self-heating pouch because they were already hot. They didn’t need shipping because they were already on the island. Much of the money we spent went back into the local economy, through Puerto Rican suppliers and producers. That included bread baked on the island for, at that point, fifteen thousand sandwiches. The private sector was doing just fine.

  The Tribute contract was being negotiated at the very same time as FEMA’s head of mass care in Puerto Rico was telling me the agency couldn’t move that quickly. It was finalized while the Red Cross was suggesting to me that Chefs For Puerto Rico was too small to handle this crisis.

  “José, you don’t understand the process,” Waddy González had told me at FEMA’s offices. “We can’t do this as quickly as you want.”

  To this day, I don’t understand FEMA’s process. Of course they could have done this as quickly as I wanted. I was only talking about one million meals when they were about to sign a contract for 30 million meals. What they meant was that they preferred to deal with a one-person contractor in Atlanta rather than a group of chefs in Puerto Rico. They preferred a for-profit business 1,500 miles away over a nonprofit with good intentions and great understanding of the needs of the island.

  People liked to say at the time that FEMA was overextended, and it’s true that overall, during that same time period there were many hurricanes and many floods in many places. But the truth is that FEMA had the people and the money to do much better in Puerto Rico. They chose not to do the right thing for American citizens living in the worst conditions. The problem might have been too big for their brains, but the solution was right there in front of them. We didn’t want a contract because our business was winning contracts. We wanted to feed the people.r />
  FEMA weren’t the only ones to give huge contracts that didn’t pass the smell test. PREPA, the Puerto Rican public power company, gave a $300 million contract to a tiny Montana contractor called Whitefish Energy, which first contacted PREPA through the LinkedIn social network. One of Whitefish’s main investors was a major donor to Trump’s presidential campaign, and the CEO was friends with Trump’s interior secretary, Ryan Zinke.16 But the company had no experience or resources to do the job. With only two full-time employees, Whitefish hired workers from the mainland at $63 an hour, and billed PREPA five times that amount, not including travel, food and hotel costs. Those massive profits were in sharp contrast to the traditional way utilities help each other out after a natural disaster, sending workers at cost when the requests come in. PREPA had overruled its own lawyers in signing the Whitefish contract, after no competitive bidding process. The contract strangely stated that it could not be audited.17 As Puerto Ricans continued to struggle with no electricity, Whitefish became shorthand for the scandal that nothing was getting fixed while somebody was getting rich. In the face of huge public criticism, the governor ordered the contract to be canceled after just a few weeks of work.18

  Failures like these don’t happen because of one person or one agency. They happen because the whole system breaks down. They happen because the president wants to play golf, or pat himself on the back or throw paper towels at his own people. They happen because his own administration is too proud or too stupid to find the right people to do the right job in a crisis. They happen because the local leaders are too busy playing local politics, or talking to TV cameras or hoping the president will solve all their problems. They happen because the big charities and nonprofits are more interested in preserving their power and their budgets than the expensive work of getting food, water and power to the people.

  They certainly don’t want a loud-mouthed chef telling them to think in a different way.

  That day we doubled our meals, from eight thousand to sixteen thousand. El Choli was ramping up on our way to my dream of 100,000 meals a day. Orders were coming in and we never said no. “We have big plans because people have big needs,” I told my team.

  THE DAY AFTER TRUMP VISITED, FEMA OFFICIALS ASKED ME TO GO TO the government headquarters at the San Juan Convention Center first thing. The mass care team under González wanted to meet in person, and promised to escort me into the building. I still had no official credentials, and our FEMA contact was not around when we arrived. So we found our familiar side door and walked right in. I was waiting at the meeting space—a large hallway—when a security guard, armed with an automatic rifle, confronted me.

  “Where is your pass?” he demanded.

  “I don’t have one,” I explained. “I don’t know why. They still haven’t given me one.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “Through the side door. You should check it,” I told him, sarcastically trying to help.

  At that point, González came over with his team. I started unfurling my map on the floor, explaining in detail my twenty-one-day plan to feed the island, while the armed guard stared at the whole scene. The man tasked with feeding the island looked at me like I was an alien, when all I was doing was giving him the plan he needed to do his job, to help our fellow Americans. We needed military support to provide fuel and water for all the kitchens we planned to open. If we all worked together, we really could feed the whole island. As I talked, more security guards arrived.

  “You don’t understand, José,” González kept telling me.

  I looked at him and wished we had a president in office who could make me the food tsar of Puerto Rico. You can achieve so much if you have the power to cut through the bureaucracy that makes the federal government so expensive and inefficient.

  I felt the security guards bearing down on me, as I kneeled on the floor with my maps. Nate walked over but they yelled at him to stay back, and the grip on their guns tightened. They insisted I get up and leave, so I did, under four armed escorts.

  “You should check out that side door,” I reminded them as I walked out. “And actually there’s another one.” They thanked me as we traveled down the escalator. Some FEMA staff recognized me as we left and thanked me for my work. At least we were leaving through the front door, I thought.

  On my way out, I met with the real experts in food relief: the Southern Baptist Convention, whose mobile kitchens are so critical in these disasters. However, they had no capacity to transport their mobile cooktops to Puerto Rico. I suggested I could activate a kitchen for them, complete with volunteers, but it was all too complicated. Instead, they were housing one hundred homeless people and doing some door-to-door searches to reunite families. “It’s too complex,” Jack Noble of the SBC told me. If the Southern Baptists weren’t cooking, then there was no way FEMA, the Red Cross or the Salvation Army could feed the island. There was no other group who had the ability or the experience to do the job. Other than us. I knew it because I had watched them at work. Instead of cooking, they were focused on rebuilding homes and handing out tarps to stop leaking roofs.

  “We decided we are going out alone,” Noble told me. “It’s time for the Southern Baptists to step up and mobilize our own volunteers. It’s not everybody else’s job to make us look good. We have to step up and do our own work. It’s our calling. It’s our job. It’s our mission. We need to help people think about how they are going to get along without electricity for nine months. This is America’s biggest disaster in its history and that’s the bottom line. The fact that this is an island just complicates the matter so much. If this was on the mainland, it would be significant but the fact that this is an island just compounds the difficulty of the response. It even makes partnership more difficult because it makes you a little bit hesitant about sharing.”

  I admired the SBC enormously. They were serious about their work and felt a responsibility to help people. But he was right about the scale of the disaster—the biggest in living memory—and the challenges of being on an island. This wasn’t Southern Baptist country and they had no reason to overcome the logistical hurdles of being on the island. They also had no real support or leadership from the Red Cross, their normal partner, to solve these problems. Chefs For Puerto Rico was entirely different: our chefs and kitchens were already on the island, and we knew the suppliers whose very businesses were built on overcoming the logistical hurdles of being here.

  I returned to El Choli believing the worst about FEMA. Yes, we had our first contract in the works, but it wasn’t finalized and the money seemed a long way off. More important, they didn’t care for my plan to feed the island, and weren’t interested enough in my work to give me a security badge or tell the security guards to stand down. I gave an interview to Jorge Ramos of Univision and I could barely hold back my tears in front of the TV cameras.

  OUR OWN FOOD OPERATION WAS DOING SUCH GOOD WORK, IT WAS HARD to miss the spirit of what we were creating. We were determined to set a record for the number of meals we prepared that day, with the sandwiches and the hot meals. Our food trucks fanned out across the island and what they reported back lifted us all.

  Xoimar Manning, in the Yummy Dumpling truck, said she found some community workers when she arrived as usual in Loíza, a small, poor community on the eastern tip of the island, where Maria first ripped through.

  “They were talking to each other, talking about food,” she said. “They saw my T-shirt and immediately recognized World Central Kitchen. They said they went to El Choli today but they only got food for two hundred people and they were super-worried because the community is much bigger. I told them we had come with 1,500 meals and they started to hug me. I cried.”

  I began crying too when I heard her story. Every day stories like this popped up in my WhatsApp chats, or were scribbled on a piece of paper that was handed to me, or were told to me in person by someone who had waited for hours to see me. I have always looked like a strong boy and tried to protect
that image. But I was astonished by these stories and heartbroken for the many people still suffering without clean water and food.

  Around the same time as the food trucks reported back, FEMA seemed to reverse itself. With a single tweet, they appeared to endorse my twenty-one-day plan, posting a video of me explaining the plan and talking about my partnership with agencies including FEMA itself.

  “Here’s @chefJoséandres sharing his plan to feed #Maria survivors across Puerto Rico with support from federal partners,” FEMA tweeted. After all the struggles and confused stares from FEMA officials and the big charities, it felt like vindication.

  “Team, you can be proud!” I told my chefs. “FEMA has just announced that our plan is the plan to follow!”

  Later on, I realized I was being naïve. They were just using my image like Katniss Everdeen is used in The Hunger Games propaganda. It was a rollercoaster of despair and happiness. That was Puerto Rico. One moment, you were freaking out; the next, you were thrilled. For a brief time, I felt like I belonged, like they recognized their shortfalls, like our plan could be successful.

  The team could also be proud of their performance that day. We set a new daily record with 21,965 meals prepared: more than we managed on our last full day in Santurce. If that weren’t enough of a milestone, we also crossed 100,000 meals in total since we’d started cooking, little more than a week ago.

  Water was now our biggest challenge because there was such a shortage across the island. But we were making steady progress on water too. One friend promised to donate eleven pallets of water, which would be eighteen thousand bottles. We bought eight thousand bottles from my friend Alberto de la Cruz at Coca-Cola, at the relatively low cost of thirteen cents a bottle. But we were all frustrated by the water crisis. De la Cruz was selling his water to FEMA, and had very little to spare for us. Pepsi’s production was offline. FEMA’s supplies of water were getting distributed by the Red Cross, and they refused to share them with us. I knew there were places where there were stockpiles of water when there were many thirsty people on the island. When we got our deliveries of food, it all disappeared within hours. Why was water different? Sourcing more water was a daily struggle that often ended in failure. If you got your hands on any water, the task of trucking the bottles was no easy feat.