We Fed an Island

by Jose Andres

  There was talk of a third contract, possibly extending into December, but it seemed very distant. If we were going to be here that long, cooking in such large quantities, we needed to look at expanding the satellite kitchens in a big way. These kitchens gave us tremendous reach, and I wanted them to serve food within a radius of one hour’s travel. But not all of them could be expanded easily. And if we couldn’t partner with the airline caterer, maybe we needed to think about buying a catering company ourselves.

  I needed to know if FEMA was serious about the new contract, but I didn’t want to ask directly. So I called Marty Bahamonde at FEMA and hung up. He called me back immediately.

  “Sorry, Marty, I did that by mistake,” I said, and he hung up.

  “Actually, it wasn’t a mistake,” I told my puzzled team. “I did it to see if he returned my call. They’re not going to walk out on us if we’re busy and especially if we’re humble.”

  Erin was worried that we could only scale up as fast as our suppliers, José Santiago.

  “The food will keep on coming,” I reassured her. “Santiago told me personally that they may have issues on this product or that product, but the food will keep on coming. We just have to be creative enough that if they don’t have the mashed potato powder, we have grits. And if they don’t have grits, we use wheat.”

  If we didn’t get another contract, we would keep a skeleton operation going with small quantities in a few kitchens where there was the greatest need, like Vieques. And if FEMA negotiated behind our back with Sky Caterers, we could only hope that the caterer negotiated a good price, like we did. But in my experience, that wasn’t likely. “They don’t know how to negotiate,” I told my team. “FEMA doesn’t negotiate lower prices.”

  I called up my FEMA contact Elizabeth DiPaolo to see if she would tell me what was really going on. “Part of my plan to feed 250,000 people a day was bringing in this catering company at the airport, which I have never kept secret,” I began. “I just heard from them and they said they just signed a contract with FEMA to start with 50,000 meals. I was very happy because it’s happening and it’s part of my plan of scaling up, using the resources of the island. Are you aware of that?”

  “They are just doing cold boxed lunches,” DiPaolo said. “I’m not aware of any hot food.”

  “They told me someone from Washington signed the contract with them yesterday for 50,000 hot meals,” I replied. I knew they could prepare hot food and had trucks to deliver those meals. “The owner said he’s working with FEMA because he says I’ve been a bad boy with FEMA. But it’s not true. I’ve been a pushy boy. If I were FEMA, I would have hired them twenty-one days ago.”

  DiPaolo said she didn’t know about that.

  “It’s like we are two different people negotiating to feed the American people,” I said, before promising to come back to the FEMA offices to pick up a new version of my maps of the island. “I only want to be protected from getting kicked out,” I joked. “I still don’t have a FEMA card. It’s a dream of mine. I will die disappointed without it.”

  Chapter 8

  Transitions

  WE PREPARED OUR ONE MILLIONTH MEAL, WITHOUT MISSING A BEAT, ON our twenty-second day of cooking in Puerto Rico. My original plan was to cook maybe ten thousand meals a day for five days, and then return home. But this was our third day preparing at least 100,000 meals in just a single day, and we had room to grow. We were cooking out of thirteen locations across the island and there was clearly demand for our hot meals and sandwiches.

  We put out a press release and I shot a video at what had become my headquarters: the stretch of concrete outside the entrance to El Choli where the food orders came in and the meals came out. “Hello, people of America, people of the world. Today: big news,” I began. “Twenty-one days in this beautiful island of Puerto Rico, and I can tell you at the World Central Kitchen Chefs For Puerto Rico initiative, we are about to reach today one million meals cooked by the men and women of Puerto Rico. Big day. I love you all.”

  Before Maria, today would have been the biggest day of the year for a totally different type of cooking. Michelin had just announced its star ratings for Washington restaurants, and my avant-garde restaurant Minibar had kept its two stars for the second year. I missed the call from Michelin because I was checking on the giant volumes of chicken and rice in the paella pans outside the arena. Whether the meals cost a few dollars or a few hundred dollars, you do your best with the ingredients you have. In the end, it’s the same thing.

  The milestone was a whole new reason for the media to remember Puerto Rico. The Washington Post declared in its headline that we had served more hot meals than the Red Cross.1 A Red Cross spokesperson said they had “served” what they considered to be the equivalent of 1.6 million meals in the form of 150,000 MREs, 302,000 “meal boxes” and 1.4 million pounds of pantry goods like cans, rice and crackers. That might sound impressive until you remember that a single can of beans weighs one pound and retails for less than one dollar. The fact that they considered those meals, whether or not you could cook the rice, told you everything you needed to know about the leader in humanitarian aid in America. FEMA told the Post it had delivered 14 million meals, but that included our numbers, and the rest was mostly MREs. Those meals, by their own estimate, were only a little more than two days’ worth of what the island needed in the three weeks since Maria.

  We used the one million mark to ask people to donate directly to World Central Kitchen because the only limit on what we could achieve was cold, hard cash. We needed that new FEMA contract urgently. Our food costs alone were now running to several hundred thousand dollars a day.

  The next day FEMA sent us an email notice to proceed on a deal that was good enough: 120,000 meals a day at $6 a meal for the next 14 days, worth around $10 million. It didn’t meet the island’s needs, at least according to FEMA’s own estimates of 6 million meals a day. But it was substantially more food at a lower cost than our first contract, which had specified 20,000 meals at $10 a meal. It was an acknowledgment that our direction was the right one: pay less per meal to reach more people.

  We met with our FEMA consultant Josh Gill at the penthouse bar of the AC Hotel, where he first found me a few weeks earlier. Gill was not happy, even though we were close to another contract, which meant that he was close to taking another cut of money that could otherwise be used to feed the island. He talked darkly about working with FEMA in Puerto Rico. He described a world full of political power, intrigue and ill feeling, and I couldn’t tell if that was real or not. He was setting himself up as the only one who could navigate the swamp—at an offensively large fee—describing a strange organization that was both incompetent and powerful at the same time.

  “One of my counterparts is extremely tied into FEMA and politically close to Brock Long,” he stated, using words that were both so grand and so vague that I didn’t really understand what they meant. “You have to be cognizant of the political capital out there, and it’s a lot,” he warned. “You need to be careful about the conversations because of word of mouth. The rumor mill here in Puerto Rico is the worst I have ever seen. And I have worked everywhere in disasters since Katrina, and this is the worst.”

  Gill also made it clear there was nothing we could do to recoup our costs for the lost week between our two FEMA contracts. They would not make the new contract work retroactively and we weren’t willing to count our numbers inaccurately. The gap between the two represented more than half a million meals, or $3 million at FEMA’s latest price. We would just have to swallow those costs ourselves. We were lucky that our work was getting such wide attention—through social media and traditional media—that we were attracting enough small and big donations to cover the shortfall.

  For his part, Gill was mostly concerned with avoiding traps that could cancel the contract. He had visited a shelter and watched the delivery of our meals, which included donated pots of yogurt. “Are you sending utensils with the meal?” he asked. �
�I was watching people eat yogurt with their fingers. FEMA has in the past had a contract representative who goes out looking undercover. Little things like that matter. I just want to make sure someone doesn’t go into a shelter and see people eating yogurt with their fingers.”

  FEMA was still insisting that we provide a bottle of water with each meal, but getting water bottles was difficult and expensive for everyone. “I saw a contract for 178 million bottles go out two weeks ago,” Gill said.

  I wanted to know if we could write a contract that said “up to 240,000 meals a day” instead of saying exactly 120,000. If we specified a high number, but took a few days to ramp up to that amount, we would be in breach of the contract unless the wording explicitly gave us the room to grow. Perhaps that could be the language of a third contract, if it materialized.

  It was time to talk about Gill’s fees. I needed to make it clear that his cap of $250,000 was for all his work, not for each contract. On a 14-day contract of 240,000 meals, he would otherwise take a huge fee of $1.68 million, even at the lower rate we negotiated of 50 cents a meal.

  “It’s not like every contract gives you a new one,” I said. “I told you very clearly: you are going to cap at $250,000 for the entire amount. I think this is very fair.”

  “It’s not fair,” said Gill. “We have burned an exceptional amount of political capital.”

  “We can increase it maybe a little more. But we are just asking to be capped at 250. We negotiated before,” I said.

  “We also shook hands on the first one,” he insisted, sounding increasingly aggrieved.

  The first contract had already netted him $70,000. If we didn’t cap him now, he could take home close to $1 million even with a smaller contract. Besides, there might be a third contract.

  “You don’t know there’s going to be more contracts,” Gill said. “You understand the political capital we burned. It’s a lot. That’s fine.”

  “You got me into this trouble,” I teased him. “You know I was a good assist for you.”

  “You know we were a good assist for you,” he shot back. “FEMA turned you down on the last email. They turned you down. I’m not going to argue because this wasn’t the conversation that we had.”

  “For me, it’s immoral,” I said. “Too much is too much for everybody.”

  “It was 250 per contract,” he insisted. “I need to discuss it with my team.”

  Gill walked off, leaving me with my team. We were arguing about Gill making an extra $70,000 from the two contracts, and my team feared that Gill would cause trouble at FEMA for me. Why take that risk for that relatively small amount of money? For me it was a matter of principle.

  “It’s a lot of money,” I insisted. “It’s money for doing nothing.”

  “For fifteen million dollars you can feed a lot of people,” said Kimberly, my CEO.

  “Is this the only guy who knows how to close the deal? It’s like a bad movie,” I said. “This meeting was supposed to happen in a dark alley.”

  WE DROVE TO THE HEART OF THE ISLAND FOUR WEEKS AFTER THE HURRICANE, and green shoots were just beginning to show on the otherwise bare trees. It felt like early spring in the mid-Atlantic; a seasonal change you never normally see on these green, tropical islands.

  We were heading to Naguabo, on the other side of the El Yunque rain forest from San Juan, where we had opened our most unusual kitchen: in a church, not a culinary school or restaurant, staffed entirely by volunteers. One of the reasons for opening there was its isolated location, which meant that its meals could reach towns that would otherwise be hard to serve. That also meant a long drive for us, up and down single-track roads that scaled impossibly steep slopes.

  After an hour of climbing and winding along narrow roads whose borders had collapsed into mudslides, we reached an octagonal church in the town of Peña Pobre, perched between several windswept peaks, overlooking jungle, lakes and small concrete homes. The eye of the hurricane had passed directly over these mountains.

  On the lower level of the church, tucked under the main entrance, was a small kitchen where elderly volunteers stirred giant pots of rice, vegetables and meat over nine gas burners. The kitchen was lit by a single lightbulb from the ceiling, and one window to the outdoors. A serving hatch opened up to a long room with folding tables where other volunteers served cooked food from our aluminum trays. Supplies of ingredients—cans of peas and beans, bags of rice—were stashed in every corner and along every wall. The air was heavy with the sweet smell of broth, rice, chicken and vegetables.

  At the center of it all was a young man who looked older than his years, wearing baggy jeans and a giant blue T-shirt. Eliomar Santana worked his days as a director in technical career education, but his real mission was as a pastor of this church: Iglesia Jesucristo Monte Moriah. Eliomar’s smile was so bright you could easily miss his determination and compassion. Desperate to find help for his community of 270 souls, he’d heard on the radio about a chef cooking for people in need. He didn’t know my name or anything about me, so he drove to FEMA’s headquarters and asked there. They didn’t know what he was talking about, but they told him about the chefs cooking at the arena, so he drove over there.

  “I had in my heart that I wanted to cook,” he said. “I tried to find someone to help us.”

  He first met our volunteers outside the arena, who said no. That wasn’t our model: we gave people cooked food and only supplied professional cooks with ingredients to open kitchens. We had no cash to spare and couldn’t just throw ingredients at places with no chefs, where we had no control over the quality of the cooking. Besides, we had a kitchen in Fajardo, which wasn’t too far away, and they could help out.

  Eliomar didn’t take no for an answer. “Can I talk to your supervisor?” he asked.

  Erin came outside and also told him no. “It’s a little hard to do this,” she explained, knowing I would say no too.

  But then Eliomar talked about how much this meant to his community, and how they would all work on this together. “I want to do more than just give food,” he said. “And my church will do the same. I want to cook.”

  Erin began crying and hugged him, saying she would make it happen. She didn’t ask for my permission because she knew I wouldn’t give it. Besides, I prided myself on creating a flat organization, where people could make decisions quickly. We had our way of doing things, and this wasn’t it. On the other hand, this was a moment when people were really hungry. This was a time to let the dogs out, open more kitchens, and trust in the community. It was a good message.

  Eliomar drove back to his church and found the lead pastor in the middle of a service.

  “Let’s stop the service and start cooking tomorrow,” he told his boss.

  The next day he showed up at El Choli with his entire church congregation: busloads of people who wanted to cook. That was the start of a food relief operation that brought his struggling community together. They began at 6:00 a.m. and cooked until 10:30 a.m., before serving meals every day at 11:00 a.m. They borrowed equipment from the community and they stored supplies anywhere they could find space, including in the bedroom of Eliomar’s son. When they started asking for donations, his son broke into his piggy bank to hand over eight quarters to help.

  “We take to homeless people, and we take to people who don’t have food,” Eliomar said. “We also take to other pastors to look after their community. People have no cash and no work. And the SNAP [food stamps] electronic system is broken. There’s no money for gas and the nearest place to buy groceries is thirty minutes away.”

  Even the most basic services were gone. The area had no power and no water: the church team had to drive down to a local spring for fresh water and bring it back for the village.

  We went upstairs to the sanctuary itself, where Eliomar had gathered his volunteers—around eighty people in all, many still wearing their aprons and mesh hats. They ranged from seven years to seventy years old. He introduced me to them and they started cl
apping, before he showed a video on a giant projector screen next to a sign saying DIOS ES AMOR: God is Love. I sat on the marble floor, my legs crossed, as the video showed endless photos of the church cooking and delivering food. It was too much for me to hold the feelings in. I tried rubbing my face and pulling my ears, but I started to sob. Heavily.

  “In the name of everyone, thank you,” he said. “It’s a privilege you are giving your time to come here.”

  I thanked them all for letting us serve them. I told the story of how we grew from nothing, with the help of all the chefs and volunteers along the way. “It brings out the best in people,” I said, “at this very, very hard time.”

  Eliomar then called his congregation to form a circle around me, holding hands together. “This is how we pray,” he said. They all started saying their own prayers out loud, closing with a cascading echo of gracias. We ended up applauding each other and posing for a group photo. This trip was very moving for Erin and David Thomas, who both helped Eliomar to begin cooking. I gave them both a big hug. David and I had opened high-end restaurants across America. We were feeding the few in Beverly Hills and Las Vegas. But here we were, brothers in arms, feeding the many.

  FEMA wanted to know how we could feed people and how we could deliver the food. This simple church showed how we could do it, and why we cared. It’s better to give than to receive. But all FEMA wanted to do was receive. They were so, so stupid. We could have opened a hundred of these community kitchens, and there would have been nobody hungry. We could have produced enough food for everyone, and treated people with respect. This church was special but it wasn’t unique. In Puerto Rico, you could find this kind of community spirit across the island as it recovered from catastrophe. People say that everybody in Puerto Rico wants to steal from you. That’s not what I saw, and it’s not true. It’s better to give than to receive.