I’d like to share my favorite quotes from We Fed an Island by José Andrés with Richard Wolffe. I enjoyed learning how the chefs employed a variety of resources from school kitchens to food trucks to effectively respond en masse to the food and water crisis in Puerto Rico just after Hurricane Maria. From a management standpoint the lesson I learned was to utilize any material resources you have, communicate your needs to any existing partnerships you have, endear then recruit people to your cause, and keep plugging away by creatively improvising as the situation demands.
“With a couple of pieces of bread, you can easily put something in between and make a good sandwich. In a moment of real need, a simple sandwich looks like heaven. And if you feed the people, you are creating an army of first responders. If you look after people in their time of need, they become the most important and effective response: they become volunteers.” (Page 77)
“Our expertise was not just in cooking, and we couldn’t be the only ones to cook the food if we truly wanted to feed the island. Our expertise was in the whole food chain: from understanding what people wanted, to establishing where hungry people could find the food; from securing reliable supplies of ingredients, to distributing that food to the kitchens. We were matching supplies with needs, on an island where power and communications were still very unreliable. We had no idea how anyone had done this before, or how the official powers were planning to do it now. But we solved the problems as they popped up, as chefs do, and we just started cooking.” (Page 124)
“Our solution to the challenge of creating a meal that was easy to transport and stayed edible for long periods was a simple, old-school idea: the ham and cheese sandwich. I have created many avant-garde dishes as a chef but there are few meals I’m prouder of than the hundreds of thousands of sandwiches we made in Puerto Rico.” (Page 136)
“Whether the meals cost a few dollars or a few hundred dollars, you do your best with the ingredients you have. In the end, it’s the same thing.” (Page 196)
At the end of We Fed an Island, on page 235, is a reference to Tim Sullivan’s article in the Harvard Business Review entitled, “Embracing Complexity,”. Sullivan’s example of an ant colony is briefly discussed on page 235. “Each ant works with local information, and has no big picture of what’s 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.”
“If we had a plan, it was to be united to achieve as much as possible.” (Page 236)
“What works in a disaster is localized decision-making.” (Page 240)