by Jose Andres
It was my first time back at the FEMA headquarters since they kicked me out of the building at gunpoint. There was still an endless flow of volunteers from charities, newly arrived from the airport. Unlike the newcomers, who are issued credentials in no time, I still had no official ID card to enter the building, two weeks after the start of Chefs For Puerto Rico. Nobody ever told me why: it seemed petty and personal but that’s how FEMA wanted to behave. So I was forced to grab people as they walked into the secure space—or rather, officials walked up to me to ask me what was going on outside their Caribbean green zone. Eventually FEMA official Elizabeth DiPaolo came down the escalator to talk to me outside the security line.
“I can feed 500,000 people tomorrow,” I told her. “But I need to know what you think is the real need. We can use local kitchens and local food to get money into the local economy. I have already activated so many kitchens. I just need to understand how these contracts are going to work.”
“The first contract with you is no problem,” she said patiently. “That contract is already done. But we can’t make another contract like that. That contract was just to get you started.”
“But the requests we get are endless,” I said.
“We know we need to do at least two million meals a day,” she readily conceded. “But the people in charge are the state of Puerto Rico. We are all partners in support of them. In fact, we have to do six million meals a day. Work with us as a partner.”
“Let me loose,” I begged. “I can feed the island.”
“The first contract was easy but if you want a second, it’s something else. You’ve met your requirements already.”
“It’s the people of Puerto Rico who want food. And I can’t provide it to them.”
“So do you want another contract?” she asked, once again coming back to the bureaucratic needs, not the needs of the people.
“I don’t need another contract. I already have people on the radio saying I’m getting rich from the people of Puerto Rico.”
“Who is saying that?” Elizabeth asked, incredulous.
“The number one radio station on the island,” I told her, knowing she had no idea what that was or where to find it. “You should hear what they say about FEMA and the governor too.”
“Can you really do that many meals?” she asked, sounding just as incredulous as she did about the radio station.
“I have eleven kitchens already and can find more. There’s a catering company at the airport and they can do more than 250,000. And I can do it cheaper and faster than anyone else. And on time.”
The mass care meeting was about to begin, so we walked across the street to a huge windowless meeting room in the Sheraton hotel. Elizabeth opened the meeting by asking people to tell everyone their accomplishments for the day, hopefully with numbers, their plans for tomorrow and any challenges they might face to get there.
The Puerto Rico State Guard reported delivering 4.3 million bottles of water and 2 million meals, since the hurricane landed. The military was clearly the biggest operation on the island, and all of those meals were MREs.
The Department of Education reported they provided 115,000 meals to date through the first lady’s “stop and go” distribution points across the island, including 2,050 meals that day. With the island’s schools reopening tomorrow, there was a chance they could cook for many more. But the process of reopening and activating school kitchens was slow, and the education officials said it was taking time to get the orders through to the regional directors of the schools in the mountains.
Puerto Rican agriculture officials said they were still struggling to get enough truck drivers to move produce and water around. Their contractor had one hundred trucks but they were looking to activate many more. To me, it wasn’t clear why the military couldn’t or wouldn’t help. Perhaps they were simply in the dark, but the Pentagon is never short of trucks or drivers. And the need was urgent: the next day the island’s Department of the Family was expecting to receive one million pounds of food from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
At that point, the meeting turned to the nonprofits, or what they call volunteer agencies. FEMA mostly wanted to make sure we were all cooperating, or “playing in a big sandbox together,” as they put it. But it wasn’t clear what purpose or goals the group had, never mind how anyone could cooperate.
For now, the meeting was given over to the strange characters that disasters seem to attract. A new group had just flown in from Florida: Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, a fringe group with anarchist leanings that emerged after Katrina. Then the Scientologists said they had sixty pallets of goods coming from New York, and wondered how they could get them to Puerto Rico.
“FEMA doesn’t ship donations,” said one official. “We don’t take the task of bringing donations over.”
The Scientologists asked for help and the group pitched in with random ideas. FedEx perhaps? How about DHL? Maybe the airlines like JetBlue could help? Or they could get sponsored by a big corporation?
“We have the funds but we just don’t have the actual transportation,” the Scientologists replied.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was not just totally detached from the crisis on the island. It was even detached from my experiences of solving problems on the island.
It was the turn of the American Red Cross to weigh in, as the organization whose unique charter gives it a congressional mandate to deliver disaster relief, coordinated by FEMA. The Red Cross report was a window into how inadequate the disaster relief was on the island. They said they had distributed 1.2 million pounds of food to date, which sounded like a lot until you divided it between 3.4 million Puerto Ricans needing 3 meals a day for the last 20 days. It was less than an ounce of daily food for each Puerto Rican.
Even the measures of food were confusing and FEMA had no way of understanding what was going on. The Red Cross talked about pounds of food, while others were talking about pallets. We preferred to talk about meals, which was actually what FEMA’s contracts specified. All these counts went into a big Excel spreadsheet that FEMA maintained and emailed every day. At the bottom of the spreadsheet, the total count of food was supposed to be there for everyone to see. Instead, the count was a calculating error because there was no standard unit of food that everyone used. If FEMA couldn’t manage a spreadsheet, how could it manage an emergency?
“As part of our distribution efforts we are doing some feeding activity with prepared foods,” the Red Cross explained. “Water continues to be a challenge and we’re also distributing water filters, things like that. It depends on the solution of how we can get clean water to small communities and homes. We need to know what are the communities, and the needs and the long-term strategies because some areas will be without for a long time. We’re trying to get creative right now. A lot of the normal tools in the toolbox are not there right now.”
So there was no water pretty much everywhere, and they had no idea what the solution would be or when it would come. The Red Cross did say it had handed out some water filters for “almost 3,000” families. I couldn’t understand why nobody was screaming about a water crisis for American citizens. Where was the sense of urgency?
The Red Cross was supplying a little food, they said. But the reality was, as they admitted, a bit more like people surviving on their own. “People are able to cook in a lot of communities,” they reported. “There are a lot of grills and propane users. We’re trying to support that effort as much as we can because we know there’s delays in getting food distribution.”
This is what we all knew from driving around the island, and what you had to assume in the absence of food riots. People were relying on their home supplies of food and propane. But who knew how long that would last? It was all very random and disorganized. And if you knew people were cooking like this, why would you continue to supply so many MREs?
The reality is that around 40 percent of Puerto Ricans qualify for what we used to call food stamps.
On the island, this is called nutritional assistance but it is paid electronically on cards. Just 20 percent of the assistance can be redeemed as cash to pay for food, which is all of $80 for a family of four. With the lack of power and communications on the island, the supermarkets were finding it impossible to swipe cards, including the food assistance cards.
Why weren’t the Red Cross and FEMA moving from the card system to good old-fashioned cash? Because the Trump administration was unwilling to rethink the basics of the system in this crisis. When the island’s Department of the Family asked to increase the amount that could be drawn as cash from 20 to 50 percent, the Trump USDA said no. As a consolation, it said people could use the cards to buy hot food or sandwiches in approved stores. If you walked into a Puerto Rican supermarket, with empty shelves and refrigerators with no power, you would know how unrealistic that was. Even the Trump agriculture officials knew how bad the situation was. “We understand that at this point in time all food retail outlets in Puerto Rico are challenged by a lack of inventory, power and connectivity issues,” the USDA wrote. “Additionally, ATMs are experiencing connectivity issues and limits on cash.”4
As an exercise in mass care, the meeting was just that: an exercise. It was as disconnected from the reality of food shortages in Puerto Rico as the sushi bar downstairs in the gleaming white bar of the Sheraton hotel.
The Salvation Army, with all its resources, was typical. They said they had heard of areas of need, but didn’t have the people available to assess those needs. In any case, their feeding numbers were in the single thousands. In Ponce, one of their largest sites, they were feeding a couple thousand people a day.
“Twenty thousand?” asked someone hopefully.
“No. Two to three thousand,” the Salvation Army replied.
It was finally my turn to talk. “So we have our famous chef José Andrés,” said Elizabeth. “Do you want to report on what you guys are doing today?”
I told them we were already distributing to sixteen municipalities, with four kitchens operational across the island, and preparations to expand quickly, including in Manatí in the north and Fajardo to the east. We were even feeding federal employees. “Today the National Guard called us in Toa Baja and they said they didn’t have hot meals for the last two weeks, so we sent them four hundred meals of rice and chicken. Even though they kicked me out of this building,” I told the gathering, which included military representatives. “The best partnership we have in the last two weeks, God bless them all, is HSI from Homeland Security. Many of them are border patrol and many of them are Puerto Rican. They have forty trucks, and they go to the rough and hard areas. They told me they wished they could bring food and water. These guys are very quick and they work on their own. Every day we’ve given them five thousand sandwiches to deliver. Every day. We have a fairly good track on where the need is because of them: which houses need help. So HSI has been great.
“If we can activate a helicopter operation, everyone wants to reach the middle of the island, but I already identified the people who can prepare twenty thousand hot meals precisely to deliver through army helicopters. It sounds so crazy but I only need to get to the army to say: Can you do that? The meals are prepared here by Puerto Ricans. People can receive 3,500-calorie meals anywhere that we want to land the helicopters. These are hot meals without having to open kitchens. At least this can be helpful for the next week or two until we are able to open roads in many areas. If anyone is interested in this, I have the intelligence on this and we could do 100,000 meals delivered by helicopter in twenty-four hours.”
I told them about my maps, created by the army team, with all its details about resources. “This isn’t just a dead map. This is a live map,” I explained. “I’m dreaming we are coming to this map, put the numbers here, and everything will pop up here and we’ll know immediately how many people we are feeding in every part of this island. So we can see the potential customers, people who are hungry, versus the potential of the givers, all of us. And we try to match the givers with the receivers. The army is doing a great job but I feel this could be a great map just to simplify our lives and look to see who we are, where we are, how we support each other and how we are feeding everybody in the areas that need it.”
Another FEMA official talked about a different kind of exercise: last week he asked everyone to put sticky notes on a map to track what everybody was doing. Almost three weeks after the hurricane, the federal government was using sticky notes to manage information. The year was 2017, and everybody had access to Google Maps and Forms on their smartphones. But FEMA wanted people to stick paper on a map.
The main recipients of this information, FEMA made clear, was not the people feeding the hungry but their bosses, who wanted only the simplest of data. “We want to show it to leadership and say, ‘These are the numbers you want to see.’ They don’t want to see a long report, they want to see a quick snapshot of what’s going on,” the FEMA official said. It wasn’t clear what leadership he was talking about, but we all knew that President Trump didn’t read his briefings and preferred pictures to words.
“The leadership wants to see quick and dirty,” Elizabeth explained. “The need is 2.2 million meals on the island. Right now, we’re doing 200,000. Our deficit is 1.8 million or—I can’t do math. We are 1.8 million meals short. So that’s why we need to get the urgency. This isn’t going away. We’re doing this much today and this much tomorrow. But this has got to be sustained over several months. So we really have to think longer term.”
In fact, FEMA put the daily need at 6 million meals—3 meals for each of the 2.2 million people needing food relief. Of that 200,000 meals a day, my operation was already producing one-third. The other nonprofits were paralyzed or making only token efforts at providing food and water.
The remaining meals were almost entirely MREs from the military, but even those numbers fell far short of what was needed. According to the Pentagon, the military had delivered 7.7 million meals and 6.3 million liters of water since the hurricane, almost three weeks earlier.5 Neither of those numbers was anything like enough for an island of 3.4 million people, most of whom had no clean water, no money to buy food, no supermarkets to shop in and no power to cook a meal.
“Chef, thank you,” said one of the Scientologists, who started applauding. It was kind of him, but I found the meeting as depressing as anything else I’d seen in the disaster zone.
“You’re the only one doing these numbers,” Elizabeth told me afterward. “The only one out there.”
That evening, Trump tweeted a video of federal efforts in Puerto Rico, saying, “Nobody could have done what I’ve done for #PuertoRico with so little appreciation. So much work!” The video began with a swipe at the media: “What the fake news media won’t show you in Puerto Rico . . .” There were military helicopters lifting concrete slabs to shore up what looked like the Guajataca Dam, which was close to failing. There was the coast guard delivering medicine to the island of Culebra. But mostly the videos were a badly spliced together collection of unnamed agencies delivering bottles of water in unidentified places that looked like Puerto Rico. Perhaps they couldn’t cite the numbers for food and water delivered because they didn’t have a “quick and dirty” view, or because the spreadsheet counts were all calculating errors. The video ended, naturally, with Trump himself in Puerto Rico, including at his paper towel-throwing session, set to heroic music. Because the video was for one person, not for the American citizens of Puerto Rico.
I couldn’t help but reply. “You’ve done nothing Sir,” I tweeted. “The people at @fema @USNavy @USArmy @DHSgov @NationalGuard are Americans in action! To lead you must be a follower . . .”
I returned to the AC Hotel, where my team of chefs from El Choli and our satellite operations was meeting at the end of a long day. My experience at FEMA made me feel we were out there on our own, in terms of our vision for feeding the hungry.
“We can feed the island,” I told them. “We don
’t need anybody else. Everybody says we need the partners, but you don’t need the partners. They should just leave it to the professionals. We can teach people how to do this themselves.”
Karla had just come back from a trip to Manatí in the north and Mayagüez on the western coast, and her report was not good. We were exploring how to set up a satellite operation at the culinary school, but the supplies were not getting through.
“Oh my God,” she said. “It’s really, really bad. No communication at all. They can’t even get products for their kitchens there. Can we at least do sandwiches for them? The only supplier that normally goes there is José Santiago, delivering on Wednesdays and Fridays. They only have a small walk-in freezer. But they have three grills, one oven and a lot of big pans we can use.
“We took sandwiches for the Salvation Army there. When we got to them, the Salvation Army said, ‘Thank God. We were just going to Manatí. We don’t have any food.’ They need a lot of help. We passed one house and I could see the closet from the street because half of the house was gone. We tried to get to one part of town, but the road was flooded. They didn’t have hot food or anything. Maybe we could do paellas there? I was sobbing in the car. They are really struggling.”
I explained to the team my solution for scaling up even more: an airline catering company I had met, called Sky Caterers. They could produce 300,000 meals a day with sandwiches, fresh fruit and chips. They could also make hot meals with chicken and fish, or vegetarian meals. Each meal would be packaged as it is on a plane. We could start delivering to the military whenever they wanted. And the meals would be produced in Puerto Rico by Puerto Ricans, helping the local economy along the way.
As for our sandwiches, I needed the team to maintain quality. “Increase the quantity of mayo,” I said, yet again. “The paper bag is sucking them dry. That was a bad idea. We created the best sandwich in hunger relief, but this is drying out the sandwiches. Older people love the sandwiches but without a lot of water, it’s hard for them to chew. They need to stay moist. Aluminum pans is how we began delivering them. It’s so cool because they bring the pans back to you. If you put paper between the layers, they stay moist. I want people to say this is the first hunger relief operation where the food was good. Nobody at FEMA or in the NGOs talks about how good the food is. They only talk about how much food did we give away.”
