José Andrés, acclaimed chef and founder of the NGO World Food Kitchen, offers this lively first-person account of how he and a cohort of local and visiting chefs and other volunteers provided millions of freshly made meals to Puerto Rico’s inhabitants after the devastation of Hurricane Maria in 2017. Contrasting his own successful efforts with the limited efficacy of giant relief organizations like FEMA and the Red Cross, Andrés forcefully advocates for his vision for a new kind of disaster relief and food aid, focusing on localized efforts to prepare and provide food made with locally sourced ingredients with an emphasis on jumpstarting a damaged economy as well as feeding the hungry.
Andrés, who founded World Food Kitchen in response to his experiences in Haiti following the cataclysmic 2010 earthquake, arrived in Puerto Rico on one of the earliest commercial flights into the island just days following the storm. Frustrated with the apparent lack of urgency from officials to address the island’s food crisis, Andrés and a friend and fellow chef started the effort known as #ChefsForPuertoRico in the kitchen of the friend’s restaurant. From that restaurant kitchen, powered intermittently by a diesel generator, #ChefsForPuertoRico would grow to include other restaurants, food trucks, school kitchens, and even churches. Andrés sourced ingredients locally to contribute to restarting Puerto Rico’s stalled economy, connecting local food suppliers with chefs and other volunteers who could prepare and deliver what would turn out to be millions of meals across the island.
Mixing in a review of Puerto Rico’s history and his own experiences with disaster relief, Andrés points out the shortcomings of FEMA and other big relief organizations to argue for his new aid model with a greater emphasis on what disaster victims truly want and need to recover and feel whole again. Starting from the premise that food provides much more than physical fuel, he chastises FEMA’s practice of distributing military MREs and bottled water, noting that seven years after Haiti’s earthquake, that country still has a problem with leftover plastic waste from the quantity of water bottles distributed. Andrés contends that feeding people real, hot food is not only possible but preferable, from both a nutritional and psychological standpoint, as part of a disaster response incorporating localized decision-making rather than top-down management. More than just the story of what happened in Puerto Rico, We Fed an Island is a call for governments and NGOs to completely rethink and retool their relief protocols and practices, prioritizing the empowerment of aid recipients in disaster zones and long-term community building after the immediate need has passed.
It’s worth noting that as of now, a little over a year since Hurricane Maria, Andrés and World Food Kitchen currently are active in the Florida panhandle, feeding thousands of victims of Hurricane Michael. The increasing frequency of these no longer once-in-a-lifetime storms adds urgency to the government’s and nonprofits’ need to embrace complexity and change to better serve the communities who bear the brunt of our world’s worsening natural disasters.