71
of work and itching to help.
“My friends,” Andrés told his
staff, “maybe this is why World
Central Kitchen was created.”
It was during Hurricane
Maria that Andrés learned to
cut through government bu-
reaucracy to fill a leadership
vacuum and feed the masses.
From a niche nonprofit supporting sustainable-
food and clean-cooking initiatives in underdevel-
oped countries like Haiti, World Central Kitchen has
become the world’s most prominent first responder
for food. In some ways, the face of global disaster re-
lief i s a b url y man fond of shouting “Boom!” when
he h ears s omething he likes, a nd l eaning h is b ody
into yours when he wants to make a point. Andrés
and his field workers flock to disaster sites across
the world, often acting as some of the first on-the-
ground social-media reporters. They’ve deployed
to wildfires in California, an earthquake in Albania,
a volcanic eruption in Guatemala.
When Hurricane Dorian made landfall in the Ba-hamas last September, World Central Kitchen com-
mandeered helicopters and seaplanes to take meals
to the Abaco Islands, which lay in rubble. “In the
end, we brought hope as fast as anybody has ever
done it,” says Andrés. “No one told me I’m in charge
of feeding the Bahamas. I said I’m in charge of feed-
ing the Bahamas.” This year, World Central Kitchen
workers went to Australia to help residents affected
by the bushfires, and to Tennessee after t ornadoes
in the Nashville area killed at least 25 people.
It was not caught flat-footed by the corona virus.
In February, World Central Kitchen forklifted food
onto another infected Princess cruise ship, the Dia-
mond P rincess, d ocked off Yokohama, Japan. Field-
operations chief Sam Bloch had flown from the bush-
fire mission in Australia to Los Angeles and rerouted
himself back across the Pacific. On March 15, as states
ordered public spaces closed, Andrés announced the
conversion of five of his D.C.-area restaurants, and his
outlet i n New York City, into community kitchens.
As of March 25, World Central Kitchen has worked
with p artners t o c oordinate delivery, via 160 distri-
bution points, of more than 150,0 00 safe, packaged
fresh meals for families in New York City; Washing-
ton, D.C.; Little Rock, Ark.; Oakland; New Orleans;
Los Angeles; Miami; Boston; and Madrid. Across the
country, the organization’s “Chefs for America” on-
line map pinpoints 346 restaurants and 567 school
districts p roviding meals. On March 23 and 24, An-
drés drove around D.C. to give out more than 13,000
N95 respirator masks, left over from prior World
Central Kitchen cruise feeding operations, t o health
care workers fighting COVID-19 on the front lines.
“We need to make sure we are building walls that
are shorter and tables that are longer,” Andrés likes
to s ay, making explicit his difference with Trump.
He pulled out of a restaurant deal at Trump’s D.C. hotel a fter t he c andi-
date a nnounced h is c ampaign by referring to Mexicans as “rapists.” ( The
Trump Organization sued; ThinkFoodGroup counters ued; t he c ase was
settled.) During the government shutdown in early 2019, Worl d Central
Kitchen and partners cooked 300,000 meals for furloughed federal work-
ers l iving p aycheck to paycheck. On a plane to Las Vegas recently, Andrés
told me, a Trump supporter said to him that a lthough h e k new t he c hef
didn’t like “my boy,” he still considered Andrés a good guy.
“What we’ve been able to do,” says Andrés, “is weaponize empathy.
Without empathy, nothing works.”Andrés wAs rAised in the north of Spain, the son of nurses. Cooking was
always alluring. “The touching, the transformation of things, the smells of
it, t he t astes o f i t, i t b rought people together,” Andrés says. “ I l ove clay. I<
In January, André s
stirs a pan in
Puerto Rico afte r
an earthquake‘We n eed t o m ake
sure we a re b uilding
walls t hat a re
short er a nd t ables
that a re l onger.’UWR.Jose.indd 71 3/25/20 6:03 PM