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

As I looked up to the stars, I began to cry. I thought the one star that was missing was the Puerto Rican star on the American flag.

There is no recovery to manage, and no citizens to govern, if we cannot get water and food to the people.

Too often charity is about the redemption of the giver, not the liberation of the receiver. (Said to José Andrés by Robert Eggers)

We needed leadership to feed the people of Puerto Rico, but we had a leader who was more interested in patting himself on the back than the difficult work of disaster recovery.

Today most Puerto Ricans are unhappy with their current political status, and the most popular alternative is statehood, while a minority prefer more autonomy. The most recent poll, just three months before the hurricane, showed a 97 percent majority for statehood, although opponents said the vote was rigged and refused to take part in the poll. Five years earlier, statehood won 61 percent of the vote. 10 Yet Congress will not grant statehood to the island in the foreseeable future because, as with the District of Columbia, Republicans oppose what they see as the creation of two new Senate votes aligned firmly with the Democrats.

Even the measures of food were confusing and FEMA had no way of understanding what was going on. The Red Cross talked about pounds of food, while others were talking about pallets. We preferred to talk about meals, which was actually what FEMA’s contracts specified. All these counts went into a big Excel spreadsheet that FEMA maintained and emailed every day. At the bottom of the spreadsheet, the total count of food was supposed to be there for everyone to see. Instead, the count was a calculating error because there was no standard unit of food that everyone used. If FEMA couldn’t manage a spreadsheet, how could it manage an emergency?