THURSDAy, MARCH 19 , 2020. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
world — in Puerto Rico, in the
Bahamas, even in Washington
during the partial government
shutdown — has put Andrés in a
unique position to know how to
serve food under trying circum-
stances.
“World Central Kitchen has
proven, every time, that we can
adapt to every circumstance,
from fires to v olcanoes to polit-
ical situations to earthquakes
to typhoons to tsunamis to
places where that there is noth-
ing left, like the Bahamas,”
Andrés said.
Ye t the coronavirus presents
a different set of challenges, the
chef noted. Because of the way
the virus spreads, you can’t
mobilize relief efforts as you
would in disaster zones. You
can’t have a line of 200 people
making sandwiches ready to
pass out to another line of
hungry people, each group
crowded together in a tight
space. feeding operations have
to be small, targeted and oper-
ated in a way to keep both
workers and the public safe.
Independent restaurants are an
ideal outlet for this approach,
Andrés said. With a small menu
and limited hours, they can be
run with only a handful of
people, and they can organize
the line in a way to make sure
there is six feet between each
person in it. The signs on the
ground at Zaytinya are evi-
dence to it.
If the coronavirus gets worse,
and parts of the country are
forced to g o on lockdown, restau-
rant operations like these could
feed a city, Andrés said. “I’ve
made it very clear that what I’m
doing here is the blueprint for
what maybe will have to happen
if things get very bad,” he said.
The truth is, Andrés and his
two primary workplaces,
ThinkfoodGroup and World
Central Kitchen, are preparing
for the worst. World Central
Kitchen is already feeding peo-
ple in Arkansas and the Bronx,
with plans to open sites in
Washington. The nonprofit or-
ganization is even looking at
large-scale operations, perhaps
taking over a convention center
or stadium and staffing it with
chefs who pass a coronavirusvirus strangles a service industry
that employs millions of hourly
American workers. So Andrés,
the face of ThinkfoodGroup and
the man who leads a small army
of chefs and volunteers in hu-
manitarian efforts around the
globe, has decided to forge ahead
and do what he always does:
feed the people.
ThinkfoodGroup’s communi-
ty kitchens are the chef and
restaurateur’s latest efforts to
keep the food flowing. He and
the ThinkfoodGroup team are
mobilizing the otherwise-
dormant kitchens at Zaytinya,
America Eats Ta vern, oyamel
and several locations of Jaleo
and using them to serve the
public a rotating menu of soups,
salads, entrees and more from
noon to 5 p.m. daily. Andrés is
doing this despite critics who say
any public gathering, no matter
how noble, can contribute to the
spread of coronavirus.
“People have to eat,” Andrés
said at a news preview of the
community kitchens. “Not every-
body is going to be able to go to
the supermarket. We have areas
in America that are food deserts.
We have millions of Americans
that, if you go to their kitchens,
their kitchens are empty. Not
everybody has money to fill up
for a month. That’s the reality.
What are we going to do?”
The food from these commu-
nity kitchens is not free. The
prices range, for example, from
$6 for pork-and-hominy soup at
oyamel to $12 for a plate of
hanger steak and fried potatoes
at Jaleo in Crystal City. But a
representative of Thinkfood-
Group said that anyone who
can’t a fford a meal w ill be given a
free one; the public can also
purchase meals to be donated to
others.
In this way, the community
kitchens are a ThinkfoodGroup
project — staffed with salaried
employees who volunteer for the
gig — but one steeped in the
spirit of Andrés’s other work
with World Central Kitchen, his
relief nonprofit that feeds people
in times of disaster, whether
natural or political. World Cen-
tral Kitchen’s efforts around the
Andres from C1
‘People have to eat,’ says
restaurateur José Andrés
away, I’m very happy. But I’m
sorry, winter is c oming, and what
I’m trying to do is make sure that
we’re ready to confront that
situation.”
[email protected]from “Game of Thrones,” one of
his favorite TV series.
“Tell people ‘winter is coming,’
and we need to be ready for
winter,” he said. “If at the end,
spring shows up and winter goesworst and hope for the best,”
Andrés said.
make no mistake, though. An-
drés thinks the worst is yet to
come. During his news event, he
borrowed an ominous phrasetest. The chefs would remain on
site for a month, with no
contact with the outside world,
and cook for teams to distrib-
ute.
“We need to prepare for thePHOTOS BY MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POSTAt top, people stand at the recommended distance in line to get a meal from Jaleo, one of the restaurants in the district owned by celebrity
chef José Andrés, above. “we need to prepare for the worst and hope for the best,” Andrés says.and co-owner of the company in
an interview. rutberg, along with
other local investors, bought the
Eagle and its sibling papers in
2016 from Digital first media — a
hedge fund-owned publishing
group that has been widely criti-
cized for ordering deep cuts at t he
Denver Post and others of its pa-
pers — returning the papers to
local ownership.
The group prides itself on its
local ownership and its dedica-
tion to the community, said mo-
ran said. “Everyone here realizes
the importance of what we are
doing here for all of journalism in
general, but especially at a time
like this with the coronavirus,” he
said.
[email protected]
[email protected]advertising, ticketing fees, and
our own events — is directly tied
to people getting together in
groups. The coronavirus situation
has virtually eliminated this in-
come all at once.”
A similarly grim scenario is
playing out at t he other end of the
country. New England Newspa-
pers on Tuesday instituted a one-
week furlough for all of its staff,
essentially paralyzing a string of
community papers that includes
the Berkshire Eagle in Pittsfield,
mass., and the Bennington Ban-
ner, Brattleboro reformer and
manchester Journal in Vermont.
“We have taken the action nec-
essary to protect our company
from a lot of the uncertainty that
this situation has created,” said
fredric rutberg, the presidentnancial fortunes of those media
organizations — because it re-
mains unclear whether their key
advertisers will be in a position to
support them.
And the picture for the news
industry is more dire elsewhere,
especially on the local level,
which was financially troubled
long before the new coronavirus
made its way around the world.
faced with an abrupt halt by its
advertisers, Seattle’s alternative
weekly newspaper, the Stranger,
laid off its 18 employees on friday.
It posted a plea for donations the
same day, r eading: “We need your
help.... We pride ourselves on
having navigated many storms in
the world of independent local
media, but this time is different.
Ninety percent of our revenue —live reports from midnight to
4 a.m. It w ill also produce a nightly
three-minute news report for fox-
owned and affiliated broadcast sta-
tions, anchored by Bill Hemmer.
for mSNBC, the virus story has
led to a brief boomerang in its
daytime audience. The network
was alone among its cable news
peers in losing viewers compared
with last year between the end of
January and mid-march. Be-
tween march 6 and monday, h ow-
ever, the network said its daytime
audience grew 31 percent, to 1.3
million viewers, over the previous
month, an increase it attributed
to interest in its reporting about
the coronavirus.
Ye t it’s simply too soon to say
whether the increased Web traffic
and viewership will float the fi-speculation but couldn’t resell
them. The story and a continu-
ously updated “live” briefing
drove “a substantial surge in read-
ers” t o the paper, said E ileen mur-
phy, a spokeswoman.
on cable, the perpetual ratings
leader, fox News, said its audi-
ence averaged nearly 2 million
viewers per day since february, a
31 percent increase compared
with last year, and 3.4 million in
prime time, a 36 percent increase.
With the exception of Tucker
Carlson, fox’s prime-time pundits
had played down the seriousness
of the pandemic — and spread
misinformation about it — until
friday, w hen President Trump de-
clared a national emergency.
Like others, fox is expanding its
news coverage of the virus, addingfor the paycheck but because we
give a damn, and that’s why we do
the journalism we do,” said Kevin
moran, executive editor of New
England Newspapers, which on
Tuesday announced a one-week
furlough of its entire staff.
for the moment, national news
providers have seen a steadily
building wave of public interest,
as major developments arrive
multiple times per hour — r eports
on the spread of the virus, stock
market crashes and recoveries,
actions by the federal govern-
ment.
Newscasts rarely lead the TV
ratings or even come close. News
programming was the most-
watched on TV following the ter-
rorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but
that was driven, in part, by the
relative lack of alternatives. Unlike
2001, when news reports preempt-
ed regular programming around
the clock, the networks have so far
maintained their regular enter-
tainment and prime time sched-
ules.
Ye t last week, in addition to its
ratings-leading broadcast on
Thursday, “World News To night”
had four other weekday broad-
casts among the top eight most-
watched programs on the air. And
“CBS Evening News” saw its big-
gest viewership in more than two
years.
online, CNN.com, one of the
world’s most-viewed news sites,
had six of the seven busiest days
in its history during the past
week. It has averaged more than
50 million daily unique visitors
over the past six days. on monday,
that figure hit 55.4 million, just
short of the record 58 million on
Election Day in 2016. NBC-
News.com also said it has record-
ed four of its top five days in
march.
Traffic to The Washington Post
and New York Times’s websites
has also grown, though spokes-
men for both organizations de-
clined to provide details.
A data-visualization article
published by The Post on Satur-
day that illustrated various sce-
narios for the virus’s spread
quickly became the most-viewed
article ever on The Post’s website.
The Times had its own traffic
magnet: A feature piece pub-
li shed Saturday about a man in
Te nnessee who bought thousands
of bottles of hand sanitizer on
news from C1
Smaller news organizations grapple with financial woes
KENA BETANCUR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
A screen in new York’s Times square relays news about the coronavirus outbreak. national media outlets have seen an increasing wave of public interest in the pandemic.