We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  The scene at El Choli was humming. The generators we all relied on were turning over and over to keep the lights on and the stoves hot. There was the constant clanking of trolleys carting ingredients in and trays of hot meals out. The paella pans were getting scraped with giant paddles to mix the herbs and vegetables with heaps of white rice. Empty vats were being washed clean with a hose by the food trucks. Volunteers used loud-hailers to shout to those waiting in line that their orders were ready for pickup. Giant fans tried in vain to cool down the cooks both outside the arena and inside the main kitchen. At the sandwich lines, more volunteers wearing blue gloves would cheer and sing when they broke new daily records. Along the walls were giant boxes of fresh mandarins: someone had delivered seventeen pallets of the delicious sweet fruit, but nobody knew why. A casual conversation with a supplier two weeks earlier had suddenly turned into a massive delivery of $70,000 of fruit that somebody had just signed for. Outside, our food trucks were waiting to be filled, alongside the Jeeps of our friends from the Homeland Security police.

  FEMA was suddenly reaching out to me again, and it felt like the public pressure was finally breaking through. Two days earlier, the agency had sneaked out the news that its leadership in Puerto Rico was changing. The announcement got very little attention in the media, which had moved on to far more interesting stories. After the Las Vegas massacre, they quickly grew obsessed with Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul, and his disgusting sexual assaults. So maybe the reporters were too busy to read between the lines when FEMA said they had “expanded the leadership team overseeing Puerto Rico recovery efforts.”1 The regional director for the Caribbean, Alejandro De La Campa, was getting layered over by Michael Byrne, who would now be “federal coordinating officer.” De La Campa would be working with local government officials instead. “While Byrne will oversee the current operational needs, De La Campa will focus on working with the mayors and their long-term recovery needs,” FEMA stated.

  It was a classic non-decision by FEMA: if De La Campa was good at his job, he should have stayed in charge. If he was no good, he should have been fired or moved out. Instead FEMA would now have two bosses: one in charge, and one just hanging around. No wonder the agency was failing to lead in this crisis.

  By some strange coincidence, that change of leadership happened just two days before House Speaker Paul Ryan came to visit the island.

  Along with Byrne came contact from Marty Bahamonde, a former head of external relations, who was one of the few FEMA officials in New Orleans after Katrina submerged the city a decade earlier.2 Bahamonde was now director of disaster operations and he became one of my main FEMA contacts. On the morning Ryan was flying in, Bahamonde emailed me to introduce himself and ask if I could see the new boss in an hour at the convention center.

  We met outside, on the sidewalk, because of course I still had no credentials to get inside. Still, the meeting went surprisingly well. Byrne was positive about our work and asked me all the right questions. I wanted to know if he meant business, and it seemed like he did. He admitted that he was getting a lot of pressure from Ryan’s office.

  “José, you’re doing an amazing job with no resources,” he said.

  I agreed that was true. We were even feeding the National Guard hot meals, as a small nonprofit. He put his hands on his head and shook it in disbelief.

  “We can help you provide food to the island,” I said. “I can take one problem off your shoulders. If you tell me and empower me, I can provide a quarter of a million meals a day for three weeks, taking the pressure off you and giving people the food they need. Then we can start moving away, if you feel the operation is under control. But right now, I’ve been in every part of the island and I can see this isn’t under control.”

  He nodded and said, “José, there’s a lot of bureaucratic things but I’m not here to tell you that you can’t. I’m here to see how we can make it happen. Let me work on this. I’m good at that.” Byrne was widely credited with clearing up the logistical logjams—especially at the ports—that were strangling the island’s recovery.

  We talked about my press conference, which had obviously poked FEMA hard. But I told Byrne I was careful in how I talked about FEMA. “I always talked about the great men and women of FEMA,” I said. “I only said FEMA was broken.”

  “I thank you for that,” he replied.

  After our meeting I emailed Byrne immediately asking again for a new contract, this time for more meals over a longer time: 250,000 meals a day at $6 a meal for 3 weeks. It was much more food, at a much lower cost, than our previous contract or their previous offer.

  He wasn’t the only one suddenly trying to play nice with Puerto Rico. A day after threatening to pull out FEMA (along with the U.S. military, police, fire and medical responders) Donald Trump declared that he would never leave the islanders. “The wonderful people of Puerto Rico, with their unmatched spirit, know how bad things were before the H’s. I will always be with them!” he wrote. It was a complete contradiction of his feelings of a day earlier, which made everyone wonder if he truly meant it.

  I walked over to our sandwich operation and watched the volunteers laying out so many slices of bread, ham and cheese. They were well on track to break another record, making eighteen thousand sandwiches in a single day. We were producing more sandwiches in one day than the total meals prepared in our first three days in Santurce.

  I started to cry. The truth was that we had no contract, and no way to cover our costs, despite all the conversations back and forth about numbers of meals and numbers of days. “We almost made it,” I said. “We almost made it. We could feed this whole island.”

  I walked outside, into the bright sunshine and heat, toward the paella pans. I needed to lift my spirits and there was nothing like a few giant paella pans to do that. A song had been running through my head after hearing the paella cooks singing it a few days earlier. Some street musicians had serenaded them with a popular song that they had adapted with a few words to make it our own.

  Voy subiendo, voy bajando: I go up, I go down.

  Voy subiendo, voy bajando: I go up, I go down.

  Tu vives como yo vivo, yo vivo cocinando: You live like me, I live by cooking.

  Tu vives como yo vivo, yo vivo cocinando: You live like me, I live by cooking.

  The original line was yo vivo vacilando: I live by slacking. But I preferred our adapted version, and so did my chefs, because all good missions need an anthem. We sang it loud and proud by the pans, and I felt my spirits lift. I started to believe that FEMA would come around.

  I had been talking with a Washington friend, Jimmy Kemp, the son of Jack Kemp, who was Ryan’s mentor and inspiration. Jimmy was a government relations consultant and he also ran the Jack Kemp Foundation, working to develop the next generation of leaders. He promised to help me navigate the Washington swamp of disaster relief, and I believed him.

  Ryan’s visit changed nothing and everything at the same time. He had just led the House to pass a $35 billion relief package a day earlier, including more funding for FEMA and some loan support for Puerto Rico. It was only a first wave of help, but it was still something to brag about. Ryan’s public comments, alongside a small bipartisan group of visiting lawmakers from the House, were what you would normally expect from any visiting politician from the mainland. “We do not forget that these are Americans,” he said. “A large number of them fight alongside us in our wars. I’ll say it again: We are committed to helping Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands get what they need to make it through this difficult time.”3 It sounded like a direct slap at the tweet from Donald Trump the day before.

  FEMA was beginning to change; I could tell from the language they were using in public. At that morning’s press briefing, they started talking about buying food from local suppliers and providing hot meals. It sounded just like our operation at World Central Kitchen. I was so happy.

  I sat on some outdoor steps of the arena, in my oil- and ink-stained
pants, smoking a cigar, trying to gather myself, when my phone rang. It was Elizabeth DiPaolo from FEMA. She told me the news stories from the press conference had put pressure on them all, and the agency wanted to figure out a sound plan.

  “Can you really do this?” she asked, about the massive expansion I proposed.

  “Do you remember that I have thirty restaurants?” I replied. “I know how to do this. I under-promise and I over-deliver.”

  It wasn’t an idle piece of bragging. To feed the island, I needed to create the biggest restaurant in the world, and launch it in record time. My solution was not just to open more kitchens. At this point, we were operating out of ten kitchens spread across the island. To go from 100,000 meals a day to 250,000 meant adding a whole new factory and I had found the solution: airline food. The largest kitchen on the island was not at the arena, but at the main caterer for the airlines: Marivi Santana and her company Sky Caterers. Santana was introduced to me by Alexandre Vargas, a friend in Barcelona. Santana could produce in large quantities a boxed meal of a ham and cheese sandwich, plus fruit, water and snacks, for around $5. She could make hot meals at competitive prices too.

  Santana’s company had laid off its workers because the hurricane had disrupted so much air travel and tourism on the island. A partnership between us could feed the island and get her company back on its feet at the same time. It seemed to me like a great solution, and certainly much better than dumping more unwanted MREs onto the poor people of Puerto Rico. I didn’t know if there would be a FEMA contract, but I was planning for a big expansion all the same. We were discussing the contents of the boxed meals and she brought samples to my hotel. Santana was conflicted, though. While she wanted to move ahead, her father—who was one of the owners—was resisting the deal for reasons that were unclear. She liked what we were doing and wanted to restart her business. But he had worked with FEMA before, and didn’t seem comfortable that we had the inside track with them.

  Still, we had sourced food and prepared it in huge quantities several weeks ago, when nobody knew where to look for food supplies, and when the island was in a far worse state. One way or another, we would meet the bigger needs. It was like opening a restaurant and not knowing how many customers would come in. Even if you start slow, you know you can build by doing a great job.

  WE WERE RAPIDLY APPROACHING THE FOUR-WEEK MARK AFTER THE hurricane made landfall, and there were few signs that FEMA was adequately dealing with the humanitarian crisis. Above everything else, clean water—that most essential ingredient for life—was still in short supply. Shipping bottled water was both extremely expensive and difficult. The military had only transported 3.3 million gallons of potable water in the last month, which represented just one gallon for each Puerto Rican. In public, officials were boasting that 72 percent of the island had water. But access to water was different from water supply: without electricity to drive the pumps or filters, there was no water in the pipes in Puerto Rican homes. Only 15 out of 167 water treatment plants had regular power, and only 16 out of more than 2,000 pumping stations had power.4 Those numbers squared with what I heard on the ground, as we delivered food. Water supplies—if they worked at all—would come and go. In any case, the official advice was to boil all water, if it emerged from the taps at all. That alone meant the water was undrinkable, since nobody had electricity to boil the water and most people were in very short supply of propane gas. On a tropical island, in the world’s biggest economy, these daily struggles for survival were impossible to understand or accept.

  My questions to FEMA were like a broken record: How many water tankers have you delivered? How many wells can you secure? Where are your water filters to clean those wells? Why don’t you pay for water trucks to come from the mainland? The response was always a shrug of helplessness: we don’t have enough cash, they told me. They would talk about contracts but I felt they were hiding behind these words. These weren’t contracts we were discussing; they were lives. I began to think that we weren’t even treating the people of Puerto Rico as well as we treat cattle. At least cows can eat grass and drink rainwater. But the island government was squabbling over whether the water was safe to drink or not, and the people were confused. On a Caribbean island, there are natural springs where all that rainwater emerges clean and safe for drinking. The official agencies needed to test the water and tell the islanders where to go. I couldn’t understand why Governor Rosselló allowed this to happen. Why was he so reluctant to stop the squabbling so that his people could have clean water? What bigger priority could there be for any elected official on the island? Meanwhile, the federal government, with all its money, seemed not to care about stepping in and solving the critical problem of clean water.

  I was crying a lot. Not because of exhaustion or the people I was meeting, but because of the inability of the federal government to help the people—people who have actually paid for that help. That is why Puerto Ricans pay taxes: to take care of things in the good times and the bad times. Here we were, a nonprofit offering private sector solutions to a Republican White House and Congress, and we were struggling to work with the government to help the American people.

  There were signs that FEMA was slowly improving with its new leadership on the island. We heard back that they were now prepared to talk again about a second contract, which we desperately needed. We were preparing around 100,000 meals a day out of thirteen kitchens across Puerto Rico. Since the end of our first contract, a week ago, we had produced more than half a million meals. But we heard other news as well: FEMA was negotiating directly with our airline caterer for fifty thousand hot meals and sandwiches a day.

  I met with my team in a windowless, cinder-block room, deep inside the arena. We needed to talk through this pivotal decision: Would we continue to grow, or begin to scale back? Could we continue to grow at all if FEMA took away our airline caterer? I didn’t care who cooked the food as long as someone did: the priorities were feeding people, and reviving as much of the local food economy as we could. The challenge wasn’t just about scaling up: it was delivering the meals to the places in need, with great partnerships and intelligence on the ground. We were burning through huge amounts of cash—as much as $400,000 a day—because of the number of meals we were cooking.

  A lot depended on the true state of affairs with FEMA and the Red Cross, which was not easy to discover. We had asked for a contract for 250,000 meals a day for twenty-one days to meet the needs of the island. They came back to us with a fourteen-day contract for 120,000 meals a day. It was a big step up from their last offer of 20,000 meals a day, even if it wasn’t close to what we could produce—or what the people of Puerto Rico needed.

  “That’s a feasible number,” said Erin. “I don’t know how we can really get to 250,000. We have no way to deliver that number, based on the actual infrastructure we have.”

  “That’s why I’ve been talking to the airport catering woman,” I explained.

  Erin, who had been the point of contact with FEMA, said they would post the request for bids in the middle of the night. I didn’t understand the secrecy, but we needed to be ready to respond. This wasn’t a matter of money; it was a question of how we could continue to feed the people.

  “The best thing that can happen to us is that somebody else picks it up, and our job is done,” I said, only half joking. I had no idea somebody had done this already, and failed to deliver on the contract.

  WITHOUT FEMA’S HELP, WE NEEDED SOME OTHER BIG SUPPORTER AND there was only one worth the trouble: the American Red Cross. I was trying to reach Gail McGovern, the CEO of the Red Cross, to see if they would help, but she wasn’t responding. A week earlier, Gail had emailed me with what sounded like a complaint about me asking (politely) what they were doing in Puerto Rico.

  “First, I’d like to thank you for all that you’re doing in Puerto Rico to help people in need in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria as well as for your work in Texas after Hurricane Harvey,” she wrote. “Disasters of
this magnitude require the collaboration of many organizations, and the American Red Cross is grateful to work side by side with government agencies, other non-profit groups, faith-based organizations, businesses such as yours, and many other institutions to coordinate emergency relief efforts and get help to people in need.”

  It was interesting that she said the Red Cross was working side by side with other nonprofits, because I did not see that happening in Puerto Rico. The Red Cross wasn’t just another nonprofit: it was effectively an arm of the government, based on its charter, its role in developing the mass care strategy and its shared position alongside FEMA in the mass care meetings. Yet, in all my travels across the island, I never saw a Red Cross truck or shelter or other operation. On top of that, her description of my nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, as “businesses such as yours” was just plain wrong.

  “Mr. Andrés, I understand from a few different sources that you have expressed some concerns regarding the American Red Cross disaster response operation, most recently in Puerto Rico,” she continued. “I would very much appreciate the opportunity to schedule time to meet with you—along with our head of Disaster Operations, Brad Kieserman—to give you a fulsome picture of all that the American Red Cross is doing to respond to this spate of concurrent natural and man-made disasters, including Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and the horrific shootings in Las Vegas (and of course Hurricane Nate which is headed into the gulf this weekend). If you’re willing, please let me know when you’re available and I’ll do my best to accommodate your schedule. On a personal note, it would be a privilege to meet you—my husband and I recently dined at the Mini Bar to celebrate his birthday, and it was an unforgettable evening.”