We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  Our tensions with FEMA were worse than a difference of emphasis or values. Erin Schrode told the group how a FEMA official had come over the day before. “He wanted to check that all our volunteers were really our volunteers, because they weren’t getting as many volunteers as they would like,” she said. “They thought we might be getting them over here.”

  What he was really checking was how on earth we could produce so many great sandwiches. After he asked about our volunteers, he stayed for an hour making sandwiches himself.

  OUR CONTRACT WITH FEMA WAS OVER AND WE NOW FACED OUR BIGGEST test: we were producing huge quantities of meals for people who desperately needed them, but we had no way to pay for the ingredients it took to make more than seventy thousand meals in a single day. We had four kitchens open and were going to open another two, in Manatí and Mayagüez, tomorrow. We needed all the help we could get, and it didn’t seem like we were going to get much help from either FEMA or the big charities.

  It was time for me to contact my friends in Washington, so I started calling the senators I knew personally. I called Mark Warner, of Virginia, and told him that World Central Kitchen was a model. “We’ve been the spirit of how to give food relief,” I said. “FEMA needs to cut the red tape. I’ve told them I’m pulling out unless they get me a contract. We are their best partner but they need to empower us to do more.” The threat to pull out was a bluff: we were desperately short of cash but also desperate to feed the people of Puerto Rico. I knew we would never stop feeding them in their time of need.

  I left messages for Kirsten Gillibrand, the New York senator, telling her FEMA had things back to front. You feed people first, and then you have meetings, I pointed out. Everybody is saying this isn’t so simple, but it is so simple. If you are planning and planning, I continued, it would take six months before you fed anyone. What was my plan? Feeding the people of Puerto Rico.

  Martin Luther King, Jr. used to talk about the fierce urgency of now to convince people to support the civil rights movement. Well, the urgency of now was in Puerto Rico. And the urgency of tomorrow is all over the world.

  I was now spending far more time on funding and expanding our operations than I was on the meals themselves. We stopped at the Federico Asenjo middle school in San Juan to meet with Julia Keleher to check in on her order to activate the school kitchens around the island. With more than 1,400 schools in Puerto Rico, most of them with kitchens, the school cooks could easily produce 100,000 or even 200,000 meals a day. Keleher had essentially told the schools not to worry: that feeding people was approved and that food supplies would be coming. She even pushed the National Guard to help with some food deliveries to her schools, and the increased supplies seemed to be flowing. The department said it delivered ingredients for an extra three million meals in the weeks after the hurricane, but it was hard to see that on the ground. I thought the schools could do much, much more if we all worked together.

  “This is the Department of Education, not the Department of Food,” she told me, in a humble way.

  “You’re actually more powerful than you think,” I replied. “Every school I visit has a great kitchen with great people and great managers. That’s what we want to see working for the whole island. Ask them to double production, or whatever you can increase to. They know how to cook well. It’s food from the heart.”

  It may be hard to activate more than 1,400 school kitchens, but it’s a whole lot easier than dealing with FEMA. My calls with the agency were getting worse. I told them I could produce 100,000 meals a day; that they needed to partner with me. If they didn’t, I would go to the press. I would cook 100,000 meals a day and then leave, saying I did it without FEMA. They told me I should go raise my own funds. They complained they were hampered by the Stafford Act, which governs FEMA, and said they just couldn’t cut the red tape. We would need to go through a bidding process that would take several weeks. If people went hungry during the bidding process, well, that was just too bad. We had no idea they had already signed a $156 million contract for 30 million meals that would never materialize.

  “They are handing out shitty meals. Shitty, shitty meals,” I told Erin. “They should be ashamed of themselves. And people are making money from this. They are making money from hungry people.”

  I decided to go to FEMA headquarters at the convention center for one last try. Without a security badge, I was stuck at the main door, looking at the many armed guards in the lobby. A state department official walked up to me and shook my hand. “I’m a big fan,” he said. “Is there anything I can do to help? Anything at all?”

  “Do you know, FEMA is bringing bread from Florida when we have twelve bakeries on this island? We are making fifteen thousand sandwiches a day when nobody else can produce so many,” I told him. “And we’re doing it with local bread, and delivering the sandwiches by local food trucks.”

  The official asked if I wanted to come inside, but I told him about the last time the armed guards had kicked me out.

  Eventually I met with a couple of FEMA officials who insisted we needed to follow the contract bidding process. The conversation was depressing. Just a few days earlier, FEMA’s regional director for the Caribbean, Alejandro De La Campa, had stopped by our Santurce operation to see what we were doing and to eat some of our food. He seemed impressed then, but I now realized it was just a façade.

  As I walked away, I took a photo of the building and tweeted, “FEMA headquarters Puerto Rico, the most inefficient place on earth leaving the people of Puerto Rico hungry and thirsty.” I tagged Donald Trump for good measure. I felt so liberated that I didn’t have to go back there ever again.

  I returned to El Choli and was reminded why we were there. It wasn’t for FEMA and it wasn’t about contracts.

  Parked by the arena entrance was a small bus from the Cataño municipality, close to San Juan, carrying a group of volunteers. We had visited them a week earlier, and ever since, they had come to El Choli every day to pick up one thousand meals for their community. They were my first big group of volunteers and their energy was infectious. As soon as I said hello to my Cataño friends, Lulu Puras from Mano a Mano walked up to me. She told me we needed to help the overlooked municipality of Patillas, in the southeast. “We delivered there last week and it was the first time they got food,” she said. “When it rains, they put buckets outside to drink the water.”

  Governor Rosselló stopped by to see what we were doing, eleven days after he failed to show up in Santurce. I showed him our giant sandwich lines and walked him through the huge main kitchen. “We could do so much more with your help,” I told him. But he barely said a word in response. As we crossed the arena floor, on his way out, I told him about the Rio Piedras neighborhood outside San Juan that needed seventy blue tarps. He agreed to give me the tarps on the spot, and I delivered them the next day. It made me wish that every problem on the island could be fixed as quickly and efficiently. It was also the last time I saw him or heard from him.

  Whether it was the tweet or my threat to hold a press conference, FEMA emailed me to say they would renew the contract after all. “We have a really, really simple mission: to feed the people of Puerto Rico, and to feed them well,” I replied, trying to hold out an olive branch. “That can’t happen without the support of the federal government, which is responsible for the well-being of the American citizens here in Puerto Rico.”

  But the FEMA offer spoke volumes about their way of thinking about food relief and about Chefs For Puerto Rico. They proposed that we prepare just 20,000 meals for the next 21 days, for which they would pay us $8 a meal. In normal circumstances, you could feed people for half that cost, but this wasn’t a normal situation: ingredients were expensive and we were cooking meals from scratch. By their own estimate, they were at least 1.8 million meals short every day. We were the only operation on the island preparing edible food, rather than shipping MREs, in any significant quantities. We were delivering to a wide range of places that were our partner
s, and returning day after day. MREs had no soul and just drove people away. While the overall value of the contract was large, at $3.4 million, the quantities of food suggested they weren’t taking the crisis seriously. We prepared 73,600 meals that day, and were ready to open several new kitchens across the island. Their offer of twenty thousand meals was a sad joke.

  I debated the options carefully with my team. We could use the money to produce more food if we wanted, not least because $8 a meal was more than we needed. But the principle annoyed me. They were over-paying and under-delivering, which seemed typical for a group of officials that had too much money and too little understanding. We decided to make a counteroffer: we would prepare 100,000 meals a day at $6 a meal for 11 days. The overall amount was $2.2 million more, but it was much more realistic, and would mean more food, more quickly, for less money. That was our final offer.

  FEMA replied quickly to our final offer: they said no. We would go ahead with our press conference the next day. For me, this wasn’t about the money. It was about some FEMA lawyer in Atlanta making decisions without assessing the very real problems on the island. I wanted them to commit to more as a reality check on the crisis in Puerto Rico.

  “They used me for a week like The Hunger Games,” I told my team. “The video they posted of me, explaining our plan, was just propaganda. That’s how bad it is. They said they would take care of us and take care of the people of Puerto Rico.”

  I WOKE THE NEXT DAY FEELING FIRED UP BY WHAT WAS AHEAD. FEEDING Puerto Rico wasn’t some act of generosity by the United States. The Puerto Rican people contributed their taxes to the U.S. government, and FEMA was one of the services they paid for. Now was the moment for FEMA to step up. I could deliver half a million meals tomorrow, cooked by local chefs for the local people. All FEMA had to do was empower us to do the job.

  “Leadership isn’t pretending to be a bad basketball player with a roll of kitchen paper,” I told my team. “Leadership is saying that it’s outrageous that people are drinking rainwater which is flooding the homes they sleep in at night. I can’t believe I came to the island to feed some people and now we have to do a press conference to call out the federal government for the lack of response. I don’t have any enjoyment in that. I am only doing this to push people.

  “But there are people in FEMA who tell me, ‘José, you are a small NGO. You have to follow protocol. We’ve already done more than you deserve.’ More than I deserve? I don’t deserve anything. The American people of Puerto Rico are in need of everything. I’ve been told by FEMA they have many priorities and food is not one of those priorities. How can they be serious, that food isn’t the most important thing?”

  With the help of my friends Bernardo Medina and Richard Wolffe, we called the press conference outside the entrance to El Choli, just in front of the giant paella pans. We stacked up boxes of fresh fruit and plates of freshly cooked food to show the world what we were preparing and delivering to the people of Puerto Rico. For good measure, we had on display an MRE in its brown plastic bag, as well as a typical meal from other NGOs: a bag of chips and an apple. I made sure my map was also on display, so people could see the full extent of our operations.

  I wanted to show the people behind our operations too: our Chefs For Puerto Rico in person, as well as the local support we had built up. There was Henry Newman, a senator from San Juan, and Angel Perez, the mayor of Guaynabo. Lulu Puras from Mano a Mano joined me, along with my founding chefs Enrique Piñeiro, Wilo Benet, José Enrique and Manolo Martínez.

  “So we’re here today to talk about the food emergency that millions of Americans are suffering today here in Puerto Rico. You can talk all you like about other statistics in the island’s recovery. But nothing is more important than food and water. Without food and water, there are no people to rescue and serve. Period,” I told the reporters and cameras.

  “The truth is that FEMA says it needs to provide more than 2 million meals a day to meet the needs of the people of Puerto Rico. That’s just one meal for 2 million people going hungry. But by its own account, FEMA with all the partners and agencies including us, World Central Kitchen, are delivering slightly over 200,000 meals a day. And that’s being generous.

  “So at least 1.8 million Americans are going hungry still, every day, in the richest country on the face of the planet. And that’s wrong. Three weeks after Hurricane Maria, and today is three weeks after Maria hit these islands.”

  I showed them the meals. “MREs are kind of the last resort for human beings but the first resort for the federal government. You cannot eat more than three of them without your stomach giving up.

  “But then other people, because they cannot cook like we cook, they give this food and this equals one meal,” I said, picking up a bag of cheese puffs and tipping them out on the table in front of me. “That’s what we’re trying to be feeding our fellow Puerto Ricans. And then we give them uncooked food like rice and pasta. But people don’t have the money to buy the other things to go with that rice. They don’t even have money to buy gas or gas isn’t available. And if they do, they don’t have clean water to cook that food.”

  I showed them the food that we cooked: the rice and chicken, beans and vegetables.

  “We give them food that is done with love, that is done with heart, that is served hot. Made by Puerto Ricans, serving Puerto Ricans,” I said. We were on track to cook 100,000 meals a day by the end of the week, but we could be cooking 250,000 meals. “If we let the dogs out, we can feed the whole island,” I declared, my voice now scratchy as I shouted above the constant hum of the generators.

  Instead FEMA was happy with the way things were. They asked us to cook twenty thousand meals a day, and that was it.

  “We still don’t know who is going to feed this island,” I explained. “Now, because of this press conference, FEMA says in a last minute effort, and after telling us it’s over, we could do a few more weeks at 20,000 meals a day. Which is 100 times less than what this island needs. Or we can wait for several more weeks as people negotiate contracts. This is all about red tape, not feeding the people.

  “Puerto Rico was hit by two disasters. The first disaster was natural. The second disaster is man-made by a clear lack of leadership. The sad truth is that FEMA is over-paying and under-delivering. It is paying too much for food, and too few meals are being delivered to the people. There is no urgency to the government’s response to the humanitarian crisis. We only want to feed the people. Nothing more, nothing less. Because nothing is more important.”

  I thought the press conference was a success but my chefs weren’t happy, for all the right reasons. They didn’t understand why we stopped cooking for an hour, when we had so many people to feed. I walked into the arena kitchen and gave them a pep talk: we were all one team and we needed to show that to the world. We could cook even more, and feed even more people, if we had more support from the rest of the world.

  THAT AFTERNOON WE WITNESSED FIRSTHAND WHAT WE WERE FIGHTING for. My friend Jorge Unanue at Goya Foods offered to take us into the mountains on his private helicopter, giving us a glimpse of the forgotten interior of the island—and what a food relief operation could look like if the military used its helicopters to help. For a few hours, the comfortable corporate Bell chopper smelled like a kitchen, with tray after tray of chicken and rice stacked on the floor. “It’s like a flying restaurant right now,” Jorge said. We dreamed about creating a Goya MRE with great protein, rice and vegetables, that we could deliver instead of the plastic military sludge.

  It was a tricky flight to Utuado and we weren’t taking any chances. We needed to stay clear of all the wires and poles that were down around landing sites. As we flew from San Juan into the mountainous interior, we could see the scale of the devastation. Vast numbers of trees were felled or stripped bare. Bridges were collapsed into narrow ravines and roads blocked with mudslides. High up in the hills, homes looked like they were on the brink of being swept away by the next mudslide. “If you
want to feed people who are totally screwed, you have to come up here,” Jorge said.

  We found an overgrown baseball field on the edge of a hill where it looked safe to land. Beside the field was the remains of a gym: its metal roof peeled off and dumped on the basketball court like the twisted lid of a giant can of sardines. We circled a few times to see if there were any cables that might catch the helicopter, and set down slowly in the overgrown outfield. There seemed to be nobody in the town here, and the streets looked empty. “Don’t worry,” Jorge said. “They will come out once we land.”

  As we landed, my phone picked up a signal and I received some emails. One was from FEMA: they rejected our offer to prepare 250,000 meals a day. As I was watching people without roofs, people who hadn’t eaten a hot meal in weeks, FEMA sent me an email declining my offer to feed all those people. The army wouldn’t even give me helicopter rides to do the work, even though we heard they were idle, and I had to ask my friends to help me bring meals to places like Utuado. We could do this. But the federal government was refusing to let us feed the people. The federal government. The president and the director of FEMA. They should have been fired immediately for being so removed from the needs of the American people in Puerto Rico. They should have been ashamed of themselves. They should have resigned. I couldn’t stop the feeling of helplessness and started to cry.