José Andrés - We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time

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JOS ANDRS is the founder and chairman of World Central Kitchen, the NGO behind #ChefsForPuertoRico, and co-founder of ThinkFoodGroup, which has more than thirty restaurants around the world. Andrs is a Michelin-starred, James Beard Awardwinning chef, and was twice named among Times 100 Most Influential People. He is also the author of several cookbooks in English and Spanish.

RICHARD WOLFFE is the co-writer of Andrss cookbooks and his two PBS series on regional cooking in Spain. Formerly at the Financial Times, Newsweek, and NBC News, Wolffe is a columnist for The Guardian and the New York Times bestselling author of three books about Barack Obama.

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100% of the authors net proceeds will be donated to the Chef Relief Network of World Central Kitchen for efforts in Puerto Rico and beyond.

WE FED AN ISLAND . Copyright 2018 by Jos Andrs. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

COVER DESIGN BY SARA WOOD

COVER PHOTOGRAPHS: COURTESY OF WORLD CENTRAL KITCHEN (CHEF JOS ANDRS IN PUERTO RICO); MARIO TAMA/STAFF/GETTY IMAGES (HOUSES DAMAGED BY HURRICANE MARIA) JOSEF HANUS / SHUTTERSTOCK (TEXTURE)

Foreword 2018 by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Luis A. Miranda, Jr.

Title page photograph by Felix Lipov/shutterstock

Photograph by MaxyM/shutterstock

All photo insert images courtesy of World Central Kitchen

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-286450-5

Version 08202018

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-286448-2

To the unknown heroes: the chefs,

the volunteers, the military, the first

responders, and all the forgotten people

around the world who put their lives

aside to feed others in need.

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WE HAD ALMOST 3 MILLION REASONS TO GIVE THANKS. THREE MILLION meals prepared for hungry Puerto Ricans by so many chefsfrom the island and the mainlandand no less than 20,000 volunteers working across twenty-four kitchens and seven food trucks. We wanted to say thank-you with a special Thanksgiving dinnerthat uniquely American mealfor our cooks, our partners and as many volunteers as we could fit around several long tables inside a conference room at the Vivo Beach Club.

I introduced Eliomar Santana, from the church high up in the mountains of Naguabo, explaining how I heard about a pastor who wanted to cook and of course I would have said no, if anyone had asked me first. Now Eliomar had cooked tens of thousands of meals, and inspired us all. He said grace, giving thanks for us all, and we hugged.

I warned everyone to be careful. Okay, I cut myself already, I said, so please only let someone cut the turkey if they know how to use a knife.

I thanked as many chefs as I could name and all of those I couldnt. I thanked our volunteers and our food suppliers, especially Jos Santiago. And I gave a huge thanks to Jos Enrique and his sister Karla for starting the whole story.

You know what happened? We needed a restaurant and they gave us their restaurant, I said. We needed a car park, and he got us a car park. And we began cooking sancocho, the best sancocho in the history of mankind. And we began making sandwiches, the best sandwiches with mayo in the history of humankind. And then in the parking garage we began getting food trucks. And we began getting paella pans. Paella pans! A crazy guy called Manolo came from Miami wanting to cook rice. He and his team have done hundreds of thousands of arroz con pollo, day in and day out. Chefs For Puerto Rico were so many people, but we needed angels, and the angels we had were food trucks. They came to us and we didnt have gasoline, but we traded gasoline for food. And thats good because we were feeding people.

Above all, I wanted to thank the people of Puerto Rico: all those struggling but selfless communities who told us there were others who needed our help more than they did.

When you find people that generous, thats when you really see the real beauty and meaning of the American phrase We the People. Its not I the Person. That is the island of Puerto Rico. Thank you to Puerto Rico, thank you to the chefs for being part of this and for feeding so many people. Viva Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico se levanta!

We finished the only way I knew how: with the loudest singing of our anthem:

Voy subiendo, voy bajando

Voy subiendo, voy bajando

Tu vives como yo vivo, yo vivo cocinando

Tu vives como yo vivo, yo vivo cocinando

You live like me, I live by cooking.

HOW DID A BUNCH OF CHEFS AND VOLUNTEERS ACHIEVE SO MUCH IN such a short time? Because we werent just a bunch of cooks with great knife skills and the ability to conjure up great flavors. Restaurants are complicated businesses, and a great chef needs to be a great managernot just of people, but of orders, supplies and inventory. If you cant get the management right, it doesnt matter how good a chef you are: your restaurant will fail. Those skills, it turns out, are incredibly useful in a disaster zone. David Thomas, executive chef at my Bazaar restaurants, was a perfect example of the kind of logistical genius you need to run these relief operations. In his day job, he oversees four $10 million restaurants, managing daily orders of 10,000 or even 20,000 items. Still, Puerto Rico was something else. The sheer volume of things coming in the door was crazy, he said. And Puerto Rico doesnt have the most reliable food distribution services. Unreliability was a big challenge. Everybody wants to say, Yes, no problem, we will get the order. But then it doesnt show up, which means at some point theres a complete hole in production, which cant happen.

Chefs understand how to create order out of chaos, just as they know how to control the fire to cook great meals. There were lots of moments when we didnt know what to do in the early days. The conversation would go like this: What the fuck do we do next? Okay, lets keep cooking. Thats a good plan!

Harvard Business Review ran an article recently about embracing complexity, citing the great example of an ant colony. Each ant works with local information, and has no big picture of whats going on. It has no plan, and no obvious leadership, yet together the colony achieves incredible feats of organization and engineering. What we did was embrace complexity every single second. Not planning, not meeting, just improvising. The old school wants you to plan, but we needed to feed the people. We were sending food trucks to those who were fainting in line for food because it was two weeks after the hurricane and not even MREs had reached them. I didnt call an expert in painting or the history of the ninth century. I called the experts on how you get food to the people in very little time and on very little budget: cooks and kitchens and suppliers.

If we had a plan, it was to be united to achieve as much as possible. With El Choli, we were the biggest restaurant in the world. Period. And if we put in all the kitchens and the food trucks, we were the biggest restaurant company built in the shortest amount of time. How many restaurant companies go from one restaurant to sixteen in less than two weeks, unfunded? Everyone kept saying we needed to have a plan, but we never organized. How many days are you going to organize when people are going hungry? People were eating roots. American citizens eating inedible roots. This was not a far-away country on another continent. This was American soil. That passion to help our fellow Americans was a big reason why we stayed united against the odds, and why we cooked for so many people.