We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  “There are 120 water oases in the island with more than enough water for everyone, but the director of health is telling people the water is no good, so nobody wants to use it,” de la Cruz said. “So you have the ridiculous situation of people buying water to wash their children.” When the person who makes a living from selling bottled water tells you the situation is ridiculous, you know the system is truly broken.

  In fact, the island’s department of health was telling people the water was so polluted they shouldn’t walk in it either, because of animal urine. The levels of fear around water were far above the real threat to public health, and the health department was struggling to even complete its water tests because the testing labs were damaged by the hurricane.19 It didn’t help that there were reports of people drinking from wells at Superfund cleanup sites, and the Environmental Protection Agency issued a blanket warning against such wells.20 The EPA later found that the wells in question were safe for drinking but nobody believed the official advice by that point.21 Bottles were all they trusted, and bottles were expensive and in short supply.

  “FEMA wants to buy my water but they want to buy only small bottles,” Alberto said. “I said I didn’t want to sell them small bottles because people will throw them away. I wanted to sell the gallon bottles to go to the oasis to fill them up there. But they created this panic and now there isn’t enough bottled water. It’s like the diesel situation. We didn’t have a supply problem; we had a distribution problem. We tried to resolve the water issue but we couldn’t get the department of health to agree with the water authority.”

  I believe that the private sector could have solved the water challenge in no time, just as it solved the gas and diesel challenge early on, with Alberto’s help. His bottling plant was so well prepared for the hurricane that they managed to be up and running again within two days of Maria. They placed tarps on their machines so the water didn’t ruin them, and they worked closely with the local mayor to clear the roads from the plant.

  Back in Washington, the Trump administration was already backing away from all the happy talk of the president’s visit. Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s budget chief, dismissed Trump’s strong suggestion that the administration would help solve the island’s crushing debt problem. “I wouldn’t take it word for word with that,” Mulvaney told CNN. “Puerto Rico is going to have to figure out how to fix the errors that it’s made for the last generation on its own finances.”22 I still thought we needed a Marshall Plan for the island. They could have called it the Trump Plan if it helped make it a reality for the island to recover and prosper.

  Reality was starting to bite. At a press conference, Governor Rosselló admitted that the death toll was higher than what Trump had bizarrely bragged about the day before. Instead of sixteen dead, Rosselló said the total was thirty-four. But his own official at the press conference suggested even that number was wrong. “I don’t think this will be the final number,” said Héctor Pesquera, the island’s secretary of public safety. “And we’ve never said it will be.”

  Pesquera said they’d been slow to update the death count because the bodies were stuck at hospitals that were out of contact with the island’s government. “The bodies weren’t coming in,” he said. “There was no way of transporting them. They were in the hospital morgues and there was no communication with hospitals.”23 If I were in their position, I would send teams around the island to check on their operations just as we were checking on our kitchens.

  Whatever food we were preparing and delivering, it was the least we could do for an island whose suffering was so hard to calculate.

  TO FEED AN ISLAND, YOU NEED TO THINK ABOUT THE WHOLE GEOGRAPHY. Even with a big headquarters like El Choli, there was only so much we could produce and distribute from San Juan. By spreading out across the island, we could cook so much more food. But more important, we could pick up precious intelligence about what was going on. Communications remained patchy outside San Juan, and communities had no way of knowing—beyond local radio news reports or social media—that we were cooking. Puerto Rico prospered and suffered from its island culture: everyone seemed to know everyone else, yet it was hard to separate rumors from reality. For real information about the rest of the island, we needed to leave San Juan. We certainly needed to leave the government headquarters at the convention center.

  Our plan, as we pinpointed on my precious maps, was to open kitchens across the island. For that, I needed a partner with lots of kitchens. We were already working with the Department of Education to get school kitchens to cook for their communities, but it was hard to know if those schools were doing the job. Even Secretary of Education Julia Keleher had poor contact with her own schools. The potential was real. All they needed to do was to find the local leaders and get their food to the elderly in the egidas and the homeless in the refugios. So we recorded a video together at El Choli in which I urged the schools to open their kitchens to meet more of the communities’ food needs. She posted the video to her social media accounts, saying this was a call to school kitchen employees to work together to feed those in need. But we had no idea if her staff would see or hear the message.

  Still, there was a model there. Schools are a tremendous resource in a time of crisis, and there are many different types of schools, not just for children. I have worked a lot with culinary schools on the mainland, and I know there are few places with more professional kitchens and cooks with basic training. I started talking to the vocational school network called the Instituto de Banca y Comercio, or IBC. If the Southern Baptists weren’t coming with their mobile kitchens, perhaps we could replicate their operation with a network of regional kitchens. IBC was a group of schools that were only loosely managed from the center, but their enthusiasm and their facilities were unmatched. They could prepare the meals, at a cost, and with the support of our deliveries. These were the kind of suppliers that a FEMA contractor needed to find: local partners, with technical expertise and local facilities. They could produce what we wanted, under our supervision, in real time and at large volumes. Between the IBC kitchens, the regular schools, my own kitchens and a commercial caterer I had found, we could feed as many as one million people every day. I don’t want to sound crazy but crazy is sometimes what you need to look for.

  We started our partnership in Ponce, in the south, serving the second biggest city on the island. My promise to Ponce’s mayor was important to me. It was the beginning of an important transition for us. We needed to show that our model could be repeated time and again, for Puerto Rico and for food relief operations anywhere in the world. Our expertise was not just in cooking, and we couldn’t be the only ones to cook the food if we truly wanted to feed the island. Our expertise was in the whole food chain: from understanding what people wanted, to establishing where hungry people could find the food; from securing reliable supplies of ingredients, to distributing that food to the kitchens. We were matching supplies with needs, on an island where power and communications were still very unreliable. We had no idea how anyone had done this before, or how the official powers were planning to do it now. But we solved the problems as they popped up, as chefs do, and we just started cooking. Ponce was a case in point: the IBC kitchen needed our help to distribute their meals on the first day we visited. So my friend and board member Javier Garcia walked into the nearest church and asked the whole community to spread the word about our hot meals. Soon, those meals were gone.

  With FEMA’s apparent endorsement, and the arrival of military reinforcements on the island, I started imagining what we could achieve if we combined forces: World Central Kitchen with other NGOs and the U.S. military. I heard that Oxfam was coming out, and I started tweeting at Oxfam officials, urging them to contact me. If the U.S. Navy had a hospital ship, why couldn’t we use a ship as a floating kitchen? We could cover the island that way, using the ship-to-shore transport normally used in military operations. With all the freshwater production on navy ships, we only needed to figure out how
to get enough tankers filled every day and position them in the streets where people lived. We didn’t need to bother with all those plastic bottles that were so hard to source and had ended up as a vast mountain of trash in Haiti. We could be creative with the massive resources of the U.S. government and avoid both a humanitarian and environmental disaster. My mind was dreaming of ways we could ease this crisis and every other disaster yet to come. If only someone could see what we were doing, how we were improvising. If only someone could see how people were suffering, and react with the same urgency we were. If only someone would listen to me.

  “We only have 6 water tankers. We need 12 more,” I tweeted at the state department and the defense department. “So we transport water faster and quicker. I buy them, you bring them?” Maybe we needed 100 tankers, but this was a start.

  I never heard back on this or any other idea for how the military could help at scale. But that didn’t stop me. People told me Twitter wasn’t the way to do this kind of work. Oh really? With poor phone service, social media was good enough for anything. If President Trump can negotiate by Twitter, I am entitled to use the same platform. I started targeting the people who surely would be heard: the talented performers whose fame gave them a platform to talk about Puerto Rico. A plane arrived that day with several stars who wanted to help. I wanted to meet them at the airport but arrived too late for their press conference. I invited them to see our cooking at El Choli but their day was too busy already. Still, they brought a lot of happiness to many suffering people.

  Luis Fonsi, the man who brought the sound of San Juan to the world with that summer’s blockbuster “Despacito,” arrived to hand out water bottles in La Perla. Fonsi was literally giving back to the historic and colorful slum in Old San Juan, where he made the video for “Despacito.” I asked him on Twitter if he needed any help. He didn’t reply but Lin-Manuel Miranda, the genius who created Hamilton, did. Miranda’s Puerto Rican roots were strong enough to take him back for a month each summer to his grandparents in Vega Alta, west of San Juan.

  “You have been so inspiring in this time,” he tweeted at me. “Gracias.” His support meant more to me than any FEMA video, not least because it would reach so many more people who might possibly help the hungry people of Puerto Rico.

  Other stars were even more direct: Emilio and Gloria Estefan gave me envelopes full of cash to distribute around the island any time I encountered people in need.

  That day we smashed through our previous record, preparing 25,828 meals. Just a week earlier, we’d produced less than one-fifth of that number.

  BY THE END OF THE WEEK WE COULD SEE THE IMPACT OF SPEAKING TO the outside world, beyond the island. Donations were showing up at El Choli in significant volumes, although we were cooking so much food that the donations barely made it through one day’s worth of meals. There were limits on what local businesses could donate because they were still struggling to survive. Meanwhile, donations from the mainland faced logistical obstacles in reaching us. Goya Foods led the way with a big delivery of juice, rice, yucca and other items. Goya, founded by Spanish immigrants in Puerto Rico, is the biggest Latino-owned food company in the United States. Mario Pagán, one of the island’s best chefs, introduced me to one of his childhood friends, Jorge Unanue, a Goya executive and part of the family owners, and the partnership quickly felt deep and personal. Goya shares so much of my view of the world: bringing high-quality food that people want, spreading Spanish and Latino culture across the world, and giving back to the community whenever possible.

  They were by no means the only donors to deliver. UPS, which quickly established reliable deliveries to the island, brought us ten thousand bottles of water, which we sorely needed. The water tasted even better because some of it was donated by the New York Mets. Walmart helped us financially, while Chili’s restaurants—run by my friend Ramón Leal—donated thousands of pounds of chicken that would be essential for our chicken and rice meals. The pallets and boxes began to pile up in the giant hallways and loading bays at the arena.

  We began to think about how to sustain our funding, since FEMA was hardly prompt in payment and we still did not have a signed contract. We started asking for small donations on our World Central Kitchen website, and I asked my wealthy friends for help. I got my own restaurants on the mainland, including Bazaar in Beverly Hills, to donate food to local fund-raisers for Puerto Rico. Every donation helped raise funds, and awareness of what needed to happen.

  However, the most important donation was the time and passion of our volunteers. We couldn’t just rely on the chefs in Puerto Rico, because they were small, independent entrepreneurs like me. They needed to get their own restaurants back into business. We needed regular people to help with our massive sandwich operation. Some of them were hurricane victims themselves, homeless and hungry, and the meal they ate with us was their only meal of the day.

  We also needed experienced cooks—people who knew how to cook at volume—to run our hot meals. I flew over a team of my own chefs from my restaurants, led by David Thomas, my executive chef at Bazaar Meat in Las Vegas. David quickly helped bring some order and procedure to our work at the arena kitchen, to better manage inventory and all our culinary operations. He was central to building our capacity to grow so quickly. Chefs like David are problem-solvers, and that makes them ideal for figuring out how to meet the daily challenges of a food relief operation.

  I also asked my friends running big catering and restaurant businesses back on the mainland if they could spare anyone, and the offers of help came back even faster than I could have hoped. Gary Green, who runs the Compass Group in North America, jumped into action, just as he did in helping me prepare 25,000 meals in Houston. After one email to my friend Fedele Bauccio, the CEO of the Bon Appétit catering company, I was introduced to Karla Hoyos, a twenty-nine-year-old executive chef who was at the heart of how we fed an island. Well before the hurricane, Karla was an activist: the president of an organization helping immigrant families in the U.S. dealing with deportation, or the criminal justice system. She was also providing food and education for forty kids with her own money. Within Bon Appétit, she was known as an activist who organized gala dinners for groups like Africa Outreach. So when my request arrived, Fedele knew who to contact. Karla’s manager texted her to see if she could talk and she feared the worst. Oh fuck, she thought. I’m going to get fired. Instead her manager asked if she was interested in going to Puerto Rico. She said yes, of course, and ten minutes later he called back to tell her to get a flight and a satellite phone to travel out the next day. Karla arrived just as we moved into El Choli, and her experience in the catering world was essential to our operations there.

  Karla was born in Mexico, moving to the U.S. when she was a teenager. Her father’s family is from Santander in Spain, and her mother’s side is a Mexican family that includes farmers. That mixture has given her a courage that I admire. She is humble but she also isn’t fazed by people, rich or poor. In Puerto Rico, that’s the kind of attitude that will take you a long way.

  She learned her pastry skills in France as she dreamed of becoming a chef, at a time when her father wanted her to become a lawyer. At a young age, she had set up a pastry business in Mexico City, before going to culinary school. She did a stage with my friend Martín Berasategui, the brilliant three-starred Basque chef. She learned Italian cooking in Florence, before returning to Spain and another Basque restaurant in San Sebastián. Now she was working as an executive chef at DePauw University in Indiana for Bon Appétit. She liked to joke that she was the only Latina in Indiana, but I knew that was hard for her. People told her not to speak Spanish because it made them feel suspicious. Or they would ask her why a Mexican was telling Americans what to do, instead of washing dishes.

  When you cook at scale, you become expert at processes, and Karla was a cooking systems specialist. She quickly helped establish order and structure out of the chaos of the first days at El Choli, where we had no power and little coope
ration from the people on-site. She chased down suppliers and organized our teams to the point where we could ramp up quickly.

  The day after she arrived, I wanted her to join me on a trip to Manatí, on the north coast, where we were going to meet some children and visit kitchens where we might expand our operations. I wanted to know if we were taking any food and water with us, but I was told we were just talking to the mayor and visiting some children’s home.

  “But what am I going to do if I find someone in the middle of the road who is thirsty or hungry?” I asked my team. “How am I going to help them?” We took a few hundred sandwiches and some water just in case.

  They surely needed our help. As we arrived and were waiting to meet the mayor, I noticed two women dressed in their best clothes, as if they were heading to church. It was hot and humid already, at ten in the morning, and they were standing next to a water truck that had broken down. The women were politely but firmly asking the soldiers manning the truck why nobody had come to their community to bring food and water. Suddenly one of the women collapsed. As she recovered, she said she had barely drunk anything for the last two days. We gave her two bottles of water and some sandwiches to help her recover.

  Further down the main road, we found a small restaurant, La Tacita, that had just opened with one dish on the menu: a mixture of rice, beans and a meat that looked like Spam in sauce. They had no power and were running a single lamp on batteries. They only had twenty-five portions to sell, at $5 a plate, because they had no money to buy more ingredients. I bought two plates and gave the owner more cash to help her get back on her feet, using the Estefans’ cash. All she needed was some customers. In the meantime, cash was the smartest way to help. This was an island that wanted to feed itself, but the economy was paralyzed.