75
He also has to fight getting in too deep. “My big-
gest worry is that the dream of feeding the world
takes a toll on me that it becomes almost sicken-
ing,” Andrés says. “You become totally obsessed
with it. You’re enjoying dinner somewhere, and
you’re checking your phone. Has there been an
earthquake? What’s happening i n Syria? What the
f-c k h appened t here, how are we not there? I have
a c ompany to run. I have a family. I cannot disap-
pear from the life of other people that n eed me too.”
Patricia remembers her husband waking up one
morning anxious around three years ago, before
Hurricane Maria, when he was already a famed,
award- winning chef. “He’s like, What am I going
to d o with my life?” she says. “Am I doing enough?I’m not doing anything.” He still expresses such
sentiments. “He doesn’t look at what h e h as d one,”
she says. “He is looking at what he still has to do.”
Those closest to him worry that all the work
is wearing him down. “I wish he could lose some
weight and get fit,” says Patricia. That Nobel Peace
Prize nomination and the global adoration a re nice
and all: just imagine, she jokingly tells him, what
he could do if he were in better shape.
“The only thing I worry is, I don’t think he
spends e nough t ime taking care of José,” says Clin-
ton. “ He works a lot. I don’t want him to burn out.
I d on’t want him to drop dead someday because h e
has a h eart a ttack, b ecause h e n ever took the time
to e xercise, and relax and do what he needs t o d o.
He’s a treasure. He’s a national treasure for us, and
a world treasure now. He’s really one of the most
special people I’ve ever known.”
Andrés shoos away all calls to slim down: he in-
sists he runs 325 days a year. He allows, however,
that the suffering he’s seen up close at disaster
scenes —dead bodies, elderly people sleeping
in soiled beds, starving people eating roots and
drinking filthy water—strains his mind. To cope,
he sometimes turns to what he calls a “strange
thought” for solace. The thought is that as more
climate disasters inevitably hit both the devel-
oped and under developed worlds, poor people in
places like the Bahamas and Puerto Rico may at
least be better equipped to cope. “This gives me
a little bit of strange happiness only in the sense
saying, You know one thing? Maybe life is prepar-
ing them for a worse moment,” says Andrés. “And
actually the fittest will survive and it’s not me, it’s
not us, it’s them.”
Meanwhile, Andrés vows that World Central
Kitchen will continue to grow. Splitting time
between the nonprofit and his restaurants hadn’t
hurt business before the COVID-19 shutdown.
On the contrary, revenues had doubled in the
past t wo years, thanks in large part to the opening
of Mercado Little Spain, the food market in
Manhattan’s Hudson Yards complex, though
the goodwill Andrés has earned through World
Central Kitchen and his rising profile have also
helped. Andrés believes World Central Kitchen, at
1 0 years old, is still in its infancy. He and his team
are learning as they go, and he’s confident that
with COVID-19 threatening Americans’ familiar
way of living, World Central Kitchen will pass its biggest test yet.
“We will be there to cover the blind spots that the system will have,”
Andrés says curbside at SFO, before boarding his flight back home to
D.C. “You cannot expect in a crisis like this that the government will
cover everything, t hat t he s uper big NGOs will cover everything. We’ve
already been the first ones in the front lines. And I have a feeling we’ll be
the last ones leaving the front lines. That’s always the case.”
Let’s go. □^
André s with
displaced residents
in Puerto Rico
afte r a January
earthquakeUWR.Jose.indd 75 3/25/20 6:03 PM