Monday, December 11, 2017

Caring Chefs Develop a New Model for Delivering Emergency Meals to Survivors of Catastrophes



Illustration by Edward W. Tyszkiewicz
A terrorist event, an active shooter, a serious accident, a natural disaster, or other high-stakes crisis can affect anyone, any time. The good news is that you don’t need to have super-human strength and abilities to help yourself and your community in a high-stakes crisis. If you want to help and are ready to improvise in small groups with other people on the scene, you can act heroically with others to save lives. 

Through studying case studies of rapid rescues and instant innovations in accidents, disasters and emergencies, I uncovered the improvisational abilities that people in small groups can use to address high-stakes crises with other people on the scene. in what I call the Heroic Improv Cycle©. In this article, I present “ripped from the headlines” case studies of ordinary people following what I call the Heroic Improv Cycle© to save lives and what you can do, if you are in a similar situation.

For more information on how the Heroic Improv Cycle© works and the Heroic Improv Program© training: check out www.heroic-improv.com.
“Who else can take raw ingredients that are seemingly unassociated and make them into delicious food and do it under extreme pressure?” Chef José Andrés, quoted in New York Times, Oct. 30, 2017
When Hurricane Maria blasted Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017, it destroyed buildings, knocked out the island’s power grid, decimated crops, and left many of the island’s 3.4 million people struggling to survive. Five days later, DC-based Chef José Andrés arrived in Puerto Rico and his nonprofit World Central Kitchen (founded after the 2011 earthquake in Haiti) arrived to help cook hot emergency meals for survivors.

Chef Andrés expected that he and World Central Kitchen volunteers would do what they had after Hurricane Harvey in Houston—help prepare a few thousand emergency meals, donate some money, and head back home after a few weeks. He never imagined how the scale and accomplishments of the undertaking in Puerto Rico would evolve. Within just a few weeks, Chef Andrés and other World Central Kitchen volunteers had developed an island-wide network of kitchens, supply services, and food delivery services and created a whole new model for preparing and delivering food to survivors after a devastating natural disaster.

When he first arrived in San Juan, Chef Andrés connected with his friend and fellow chef Jose Enrique. Mr. Enrique’s small restaurant in San Juan had rain coming through the roof and no power. Nevertheless, the two chefs and their helpers pulled out food in the freezer, located a gas generator, bought up aluminum pans, and with the help of volunteers started preparing large batches of a hearty Puerto Rican stew on the street in front of the restaurant. “We decided we would just start cooking,” said Mr. Enrique. They recruited the owners of a few food trucks to help in deliver food to the neighborhoods that needed them most. Every day, the number of people they were feeding doubled, and more cooks arrived to help.

As the number of survivors in need of food aid became apparent, Chef Andrés and World Central Kitchen formed partnerships with other aid groups and large food companies. In a short time, they had taken over the biggest indoor arena in the country (the Coliseo de Puerto Rico) in San Juan to build out a central kitchen to feed more people. They got a chain of vocational schools to open their kitchens to become 18 satellite feeding kitchens and coordinated meals for survivors in far-flung places outside of San Juan with satellite phones, Whatsapp, and paper maps. Chef Andrés’ Twitter feed became a source of news and commentary about what was going on in Puerto Rico.

At the height of their food operations, volunteer crews catalyzed by World Central Kitchen were preparing and delivering more than 120,000 hot meals and sandwiches every day to survivors in all 78 of Puerto Rico’s municipalities. The cost of $300,000 to $400,000 per day (including transportation and hotel costs for chefs and staff members, as well as payments to food truck owners who took meals into isolated neighborhoods) was covered through donations to World Central Kitchen and Federal Emergency Management Agency contracts.

At the end of October 2017, World Central Kitchen began scaling back their feeding operations in Puerto Rico. They closed down the main cooking operation in the coliseum in San Juan and several other kitchens. “At this point in Puerto Rico’s recovery, cooking and distributing too much free food could swamp the emerging economy,” said Andrés. For the foreseeable future, the organization will use a more strategic approach aimed at feeding the elderly, the sick, and people in remote communities of the island.

World Central Kitchen’s ability to scale up an emergency feeding operation for the survivors of a catastrophic hurricane in Puerto Rico follows the Heroic Improv Cycle© . When Chef Andrés arrived on the island five days after the hurricane, he immediately recognized that the scope of the need in Puerto Rico was vastly greater than he had anticipated. There was no power on the island, and the government’s response was slow. Many hurricane survivors lacked clean water and food. (Step 1: Alert: Sharpen perception and awareness of problem at hand.). Chef Andrés reached out to local San Juan chef Jose Enrique and scoured the area for resources like volunteer cooks, pans, and generators (Step 2: Ready: Find resources and overcome communication barriers to address the problem.). The two chefs gathered volunteers to help cook hot meals for survivors on the street in front of Enrique’s restaurant in San Juan and met with the owners of food trucks about possible deliveries (Step 3: Connect: Form a team quickly.). The volunteers in initially focused on providing freshly cooked meals to hurricane survivors in San Juan or nearby (Step 4: Focus: Aim attention to solve the problem.). The team of volunteers provided hot meals to hurricane survivors who showed up at the restaurant or to whom they could easily deliver food (Step 5: Move: Shift into action together.). As the huge number of Puerto Ricans going hungry after the devastating hurricane became apparent, Chef Andrés and other World Central Kitchen volunteers continued to rapidly prototype solutions until they were able to scale up operations to provide hot meals to hundreds of thousands of hurricane survivors, including survivors in remote areas of the island.
Chef Jose Andrés expressed the spirit of Heroic Improv with this quote in the New York Times article of October 30, 2017, “At the end, I could not forgive myself if I didn’t try to do what I what I though was right. We need to think less and dream less and just make it happen.”

More about Chef José Andrés and the World Central Kitchen’s activities in Puerto Rico and elsewhere here:
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