José Andrés probably has the best reason ever to cancel an interview.
The Michelin-starred celebrity chef and humanitarian is no stranger to feeding people when they need it most. Weeks before our scheduled call on Halloween, Andrés was in a helicopter, delivering food with volunteers from his nonprofit World Central Kitchen to communities affected by the devastating floods in western North Carolina. There, they mobilized to get thousands of gallons of clean water to residents in the heavily impacted town of Swannanoa, and teamed up with local chefs in Asheville to set up relief kitchens.
Once the volunteers in North Carolina had what they needed to sustain their operations, Andrés returned home to Washington, DC, to decompress — but then heard the news of yet another awful climate disaster. On October 29, the region of Valencia, Spain, experienced unprecedented flash floods. More than 200 people died, but there was little support at first.
Andrés, of course, got on the first plane he could. What’s the point of talking about alleviating hunger when you could be doing it?
“Obviously, I went there very quickly,” Andrés, who was born in northern Spain, told me over Zoom last week. Within days, volunteers with World Central Kitchen — which Andrés founded in 2010 after the Haiti earthquake — were operating in about 70 towns in the region. They delivered meals, brought water pumps and Starlink satellites for internet access, and helped repair more than a dozen fruit shops so they could reopen their doors. Weeks later, there are still volunteers on the ground helping people rebuild their lives.
Andrés attributes World Central Kitchen’s rapid response to what he calls a “software, not hardware” mentality. His team takes a people-first approach to collaboration, which has allowed them access to heavy-duty kitchens and construction materials alike. It’s rare, Andrés said, for people to tell someone they can’t do something when taking care of others.
“We are the biggest organization in the world, even though we only have 140 people in the organization full time,” Andrés said. “Every person, every cook, every driver, every logistics person, every car, every truck, every helicopter, every boat, every water filtration system around the world belongs to us. It’s ours. What happened? They don’t know it yet.”
But the world is a very different place than it was a decade ago. A spike in conflict, from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan, is driving a rise in world hunger. The consequences of climate change on both food production and extreme weather have only accelerated. And if we don’t prioritize how to feed people in ways that generate life and well-being, any chance of eliminating world hunger — a goal the UN wants to achieve by 2030 — becomes much harder to reach.
“I’m very worried that we don’t have smart people who are focused and understand that food is the most important source of energy we have,” Andrés told me. “Because even if we cannot drive and we cannot move, still we need to eat. We need to drink in order to keep humanity moving. Food should be given a much higher role. Let’s make sure that our food systems are strong in the right way.”
I spoke with Andrés about the possible challenges of humanitarian work under a second Trump administration, the moral calling to help others, and why food is an extension of love and mutual respect.
You’ve been in restaurants for almost three decades. At what point did you realize that you also wanted to enter the humanitarian space?
Across the street from my restaurant, I discovered the house of Clara Barton. She was a nurse like my mom. Clara Barton was the woman who founded the Red Cross. I have a feeling that discovering across the street — 20 meters away from my first restaurant in DC — her home and her office, and seeing how this woman, like my mom, was not only taking care of the few, but created these organizations that could take care of the many, I think in a very strange way had a bigger impact on me than I realized.
And with [Hurricane] Katrina, I saw the lack of response to a massive event. You realize that the plans don’t work, and you need to adapt, and that we left tens of thousands of Americans [behind]. We forgot people in the [New Orleans] Superdome — when actually feeding the people in the Superdome was the easiest thing ever. Because a Superdome and an arena is not just a venue for sports — it’s a gigantic restaurant that entertains with sports or with music, if you go to see Taylor Swift. So there’s no reason why anybody was supposed to be hungry in an arena.
At Future Perfect, we write a lot about how to do humanitarian work better. “Better” tends to be subjective depending on who you ask. Is it more lives saved? Is it about not having so much overhead? For World Central Kitchen, specifically, how do you measure success?
Obviously, we keep learning. At times we’re quicker, at times we are becoming a little bit slower. Sometimes [being] more organized makes you slower. Sometimes looking for more perfection makes you slower.
I think quickness is the key for humanitarian emergencies because people are gonna go thirsty very quickly. People may last even longer without food, but not much longer either. But at the end, food and water for me is a no-brainer.
You can deliver MREs [meals ready to eat, a kind of pre-packaged emergency food] to a fire station. And you can go a month later, and they are still in the same place behind the fire station. It’s not about bringing the assets. It’s about delivering the assets to the people that need them.
We saw this in Puerto Rico. FEMA, through the National Guard, had millions of gallons of water. Then we realized — well, I knew it, because I was very involved in [Hurricane] Maria — that they were sitting somewhere. And because people kept coming and going, somebody that came and landed and brought the water through boat or plane, but then they forgot to tell the people coming after. So there we had people thirsty and water, but nobody was delivering the water.
Emergency is not about filling up warehouses of things. Emergency is about getting warehouses empty of things. And not expecting that people are coming to you because they may not be able. It’s about you going to the people.
I’m Puerto Rican-Mexican, and I remember in 2017 how quickly World Central Kitchen navigated Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria. It didn’t shock me that you were also able to get boots on the ground in Ukraine and Gaza. What about WCK allows you to mobilize so quickly, especially in conflict zones?
Because we are not about hardware. We are about software. We own hardware, too.
But if we start just being about hardware, you have the teams in very difficult situations. They’re gonna be in the business of bringing in your super gigantic truck kitchens and the smaller food truck kitchens and maybe mobilizing them to field kitchens — if we cannot open a restaurant, a catering company, the kitchen of a hotel, or the kitchen of a stadium.
We can bring our own trucks. But let’s say in the case of Puerto Rico, if there is no airport and no port because there are no people working — because actually, the people may not be able to go to work. Because maybe their cars were destroyed, or the roads were destroyed, or maybe because they are trying to protect their family and their homes. And if people don’t go work, the system starts collapsing. So if I cannot bring anything, I have to do with whatever they have on site.
It’s very funny, because sometimes some people — some organizations, which I’m not gonna mention — they ask me, “José, where are you able to get the food so quickly?” Like in the supermarkets, man? In the food warehouses? Okay. Maybe some situations where food is hard to get, like in the middle of the desert, but still there’ll be something, but usually there is always food.
Usually, there are always people who are willing to join you. You try to bring people from the outside who are only there to help, and then you start capturing local volunteers who can and want to join you. Then you find kitchens or restaurants, you find whatever asset you can put up and running on day one. Even if we have no kitchen, we can always find bread. We can always find some food somewhere. We can always find water, and there you start.
You start delivering food, and in the process, you get information. It’s very important that your office is not full. World Central Kitchen is able to be quick because we are highly adaptable. We come with a very high willingness to adapt to whatever we have that allows us to have a quicker response.
You exist in a similar space to Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], where your mission is to save any and all lives in need of saving. How do you navigate the complexities of politicized humanitarian crises? Gaza comes to mind, with the loss of seven of your team members.
The loss of the seven this year was heavy. We lost people before, in Ukraine. They may not be people that were part of the World Central Kitchen family from DC, but they were people that were working with World Central Kitchen, Ukrainians, that they knew that they didn’t want to leave even if they could, because they wanted to be there, next to the elderly or next to their people.
They all knew the risk they were taking. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that in the last two, three years there have been huge casualties with humanitarians. I think the message is very clear: No humanitarian, no civilians, no medical, no volunteer should ever be targeted under any circumstance.
Obviously, the question will be: Why was World Central Kitchen in Ukraine? And at the beginning, it was only two people: Nate Mook, the former CEO, and myself. We didn’t let anybody in, because it was our first war zone. Gaza was exactly the same. We didn’t push for anybody to go.
It’s a conundrum, right? Because we see what’s going on in Sudan, Yemen, and Haiti. How do you take care of the people that are suffering? You cannot do it by phone. You’re gonna do it overseas. You can have a lot of systems in place, but when you are in those circumstances, things may happen.
I’m not trying just to excuse what happened in any way or form. Those people were there because they thought they could make a difference, helping children and women that they were suffering. and obviously they paid with their lives.
I say it’s difficult, because for any humanitarian organization, we can all pull out of every single complicated situation. We can all pull out, but those people are gonna be suffering. Or we can make locals take care of it. The locals can be in peril, but us the outsiders, we can’t. So it’s kind of a philosophical, complicated conundrum. Life is a beautiful place, and the world is a beautiful place, and then life is also full of horrors. We can only make the world a little bit better if we take some risks.
We all take a risk when we wake up and we go out in the world, especially in war zones. The least we can do is try to protect the people the best we can. But at the end, when you are highly coordinating with a group of people, and something like this happens, it’s almost like you feel powerless.
We need to remember that humanitarians, medicals, civilians, women, children should never be ever targeted. Ever — and especially by democracies. You can agree or disagree, but if democracies are trying to protect their citizens, and democracies are trying just to create a better world. It’s gonna be a very hard, philosophical response to our children when we tell them.
We don’t want our children to suffer. But why are we making the children of others suffer? Because the children have nothing to do with the wrongdoing of a few other adults.
This is the history of mankind. You can use any country, any religion, any color of the skin. It seems it is the very few who make the decision of doing punishment on the many. It seems we are powerless to stop them, or we wash our hands like a bunch of Pontius Pilates. And the truth is that humanity keeps repeating the same mistakes for centuries. We never learn.
When we see the horrors of the past, they belong to the past. We come to realize that the horrors of the present keep happening.
Speaking of repeating history, Donald Trump is going to be back in office. Famously, you two have clashed a lot. But given the state of the world — which has seen a spike in hunger, conflict, and natural disasters — how will you approach humanitarian work with this new administration?
On President-elect Trump, what happened between us, in part, was a way to see the world and business. Until then I was never sued by anybody, and until then I never sued anybody. So that was the first time in my life. I couldn’t open a restaurant in a property owned by a person that is against the core of what I believe the foundations of America are. I think it was the right thing to do.
That said, when he became president, I was in the White House, meeting with Ivanka Trump, trying to see ways that we could put systems to feed people in the middle of the pandemic.
In the end, I put country above politics. I did that in the past. I’m doing this in the present. I will do this in the future. But obviously I will always stand for what I believe is right, not what I believe is right for me. I will not want for others what I don’t want for me. I believe that’s a better way to be in the world.
We are going through a difficult time in the world. We see global food systems and we’re taking them for granted. And I’m usually an optimist. But I’ve seen, in one year, wars that decimated the total production of countries like Ukraine. Ukraine has more food than they need to feed countries in Africa and other parts around the world. I’m an optimist, but we are creating this in our lifetime as we speak. I’ve been in all these places over the last few years, and I’ve seen the fish wash up on beaches in the Gulf of Mexico, and I’ve seen destruction in fields and droughts in fields, and we’ve seen pests in the heart of Africa.
That’s why I created the Global Food Institute. One day, I want there to be a national food security adviser next to the president. We need the right regulations and, more important, the right enforcement of those regulations. I want everybody to take food seriously, where children are well fed, where school systems are strong because the way we feed our children, that our farmers are able to feed themselves.
[We also need to understand] that immigrants work the fields of the richest countries of the world. We have this amazing moment that nobody wants immigrants, but then those rich societies will not work, and I will not be able to feed my children without those immigrants — that some call illegal, and some of us we call undocumented — the issue is that those economies will not properly function without those people. Immigration reform has all to do with food systems.
What are your biggest hopes for WCK, in its effort to make food a universal human right not just in theory, but in practice?
Well, listen — I always give my speech on longer tables and longer tables is something very simple to understand in a way. Thanksgiving is when I came up with this idea of the longer tables.
I’m a Christian boy myself. When you’re a cook and you grow up as a young, Catholic boy, and you hear that Jesus was able to multiply loaves and fishes… even if you are not religious — or you are not Christian or whatever — it’s a beautiful thing, right? The idea that we can multiply fish and loaves to feed everybody.
I think something that brings America and the world together is understanding … It seems a very big percentage of Americans believe that every child and every person in America should have the right to a plate of food. In the worst moments of humanity, I learned through food that the best of humanity shows up. People that may be different skin, color, religion, or political inclination and party. They put everything away, like almost naked, and they become one with the people. That’s what gives me hope.
When we invite strangers to our home, to sit at our table, to meet our family, it’s one of the biggest moments of truth, love, and respect that you can show a stranger. Food is love. I do believe a world that everybody is fed and well fed will be a safer and more peaceful world than one that is not. Food is what we are and what we work for.
It’s what I work for.
To feed our loved ones, provide comfort, to provide the table in a home … that’s what humanity has been driving around. Let’s hope that’s not what creates wars, but that’s what ends wars, that’s what brings the best of us, not what brings the worst of us. And usually it brings the best of us. We need more of that.
The post Chef José Andrés knows how to feed people in a crisis appeared first on Vox.
