José Andrés is a bona fide culinary star whose passion is feeding a world of hungry people.
Andrés’ cowboy approach is inspiring: Ignore rules and conventions, to hell with credentials, and if you can set up a bunch of wood stoves and make
sancocho (a hearty Caribbean beef stew) for whomever you find starving by the road, just do it. Of course, this is made easier by his connections and status. He was on Time magazine’s 2012 list of 100 most influential people, listed as an activist rather than a chef, his blurb written by none other than Anthony Bourdain, whose imprint also published
We Fed an Island. The culinary world is surprisingly small sometimes, and Andrés describes how his friends and business colleagues in the food industry helped him to overcome barriers, sometimes wiggling around them, sometimes smashing them outright, all in the name of getting disaffected Puerto Ricans a hot plate when FEMA and the Red Cross dragged their heels in the muck and mire of the Trump administration. FEMA was, in fact, not too keen on Andrés’ efforts in Puerto Rico for whatever reason (he finds this bewildering as well), but the chef gave exactly zero shiitakes about that.
“If FEMA and the Red Cross didn’t need us or want us, because they were feeding the island without us, that was fine with me. We could pack up and go home,” he writes. “But if they weren’t doing that essential job, then we needed to stay.”
We Fed an Island reads like a humanitarian Indiana Jones tale laced with bureaucratic red tape and institutional frustration, with the availability of food supplies hinging on chance meetings in bars and culinary heroes navigating flooded streets and fallen trees to bring soup to geriatric hospitals. Andrés cajoled food distributors and restaurants into opening their kitchens and larders, and made volunteers and first responders out of victims simply, in some cases, by feeding them a hot meal and thus enabling them to soldier on. Because while MREs and emergency rations are useful in a pinch, Andrés feels that nothing can bring people back to life like real, authentic, hand-cooked food. “Yes, we need water, food, and shelter,” he writes ,“but we also need that food to represent something more than food, if we are to rebuild our lives.” — Tantri Wija