El Departamento de la Comida

How Puerto Rico’s Food System Is Changing, Post-Hurricane Maria | Eater

"Founded by Tara Rodríguez Besosa as one of Puerto Rico’s first community-supported agriculture programs, this sustainability-minded project evolved from aggregating island produce for families and restaurants into a vegetarian café and retail hub housed in a converted garage and later a beachfront space. It sought to prove that a local, agroecological food system was possible—offering classes, workshops, and partnerships with community gardens—before Hurricane Maria flooded and heavily damaged the restaurant in September 2017, after which the partners put the operation on pause and the shuttered site suffered repeated break-ins. The organization pivoted from a fixed storefront to networked resilience work: its leaders helped launch a Resilience Fund to send brigades to farms across the island and staged pop-up dinners to reconnect producers with diners and revive the project’s mission of food sovereignty and community rebuilding." - Martha Bayne