They just said, do you want to come talk to Jose Andres?
And I said "yeah".
What else do I do?
I mean, I'm a chef. What do you expect to find in my...
I have a baloney from two parts in California.
Mic check 1, 2, 3. Mic check...
To laugh, to cry, to dream.
You feel pain, you feel hope.
This interview just got very interesting, very quick.
It's okay if I smoke a cigar or looks bad?
Should we do our thing?
Okay, let's go.
So thank you for doing this.
It's a pleasure to talk to you.
And we're approaching a year.
I mean, we're basically at a year of living in this pandemic
and I know you spent much of the year traveling
and doing work with World Central Kitchen.
But if you don't mind kind of walking us back
to where you were a year ago
and how it first dawned on you,
that this was something that was going to change all of us
for a long time.
So I am a cook that I'm always fascinated
by obviously my profession, feeding the few,
feeding the many...
but beyond that,
also in...
Emergencies,
the strange moments of humanity...
I am always trying to learn the role that food place.
I think around 6th of February is when
the wall becomes smaller,
when we get the phone call,
that is a cruise ship coming to Yokohama, Japan.
And they were asking us to help them feeding
the first cruise ship with official COVID cases.
That's what we did.
That obviously followed
with a very good response.
Thousands of meals,
three meals a day in a foreign country that we never
really responded before yet.
But we put into action our know-how,
which is... We are a small organization
but it's created by chefs.
Obviously I'm one of them
and it's restaurants and chefs everywhere.
So technically we have no infrastructure anywhere
but then in my eyes, we have infrastructure everywhere.
Before we knew, we were tackling the issue in Japan
feeding people, keeping our team safe,
keeping the people delivering the food safe,
and keeping the people inside the cruise ship.
Why we were the right organization to fight the pandemic
through food?
Because we handle moments in Haiti and Mozambique
where was an issue.
And our teams always Excel providing food, keeping everyone
of our teams safe, but keeping the calms
and the places we were feeling safe.
Why? Because we had good protocols.
Simple, but good protocols.
We were part of the solution, not becoming part
of the problem.
Because I think at the end we are all learning
that the pandemic is not the pandemic
of the few. It's the pandemic of everybody.
We need to see that it's not them versus us.
We are one country, we are one planet.
We are all together on this.
World Central Kitchen and you were working
all over the world during this pandemic,
when so many of us have been stuck in our homes,
you all were out there doing the work, feeding people
in all these different countries.
And it's remarkable to think
how you've built this organization.
This was an idea you,
your wife had had, to start a food organization, to think
about how we feed ourselves, how we can feed other people.
The earthquake in Haiti happens.
And all of a sudden that ideas put to the test very quickly.
Can you talk about what you learned on that first mission
and how you have...
Built your organization based on those lessons?
Obviously the Haiti of 2010 was the main reason
why the Central Kitchen was created.
But obviously we have to go before.
My wife very much was like,
"what are you waiting for? You know you love this thing.
Stop talking about the missed opportunities
and you just go and make them happen".
But sometimes we talk too much quite frankly
about food waste.
What the heck about food waste?
What about people waste?
What about people feeling that they don't belong?
The conversation is not about food waste anymore.
The conversation is about the lives
of people on planet Earth we are wasting.
Stop talking about food waste.
This is the wrong conversation.
These must be a given.
That should be the solution.
It's like you say, "oh, Jose, make a great dish today".
Sure, I'm a good cook.
Sure, the leads you're gonna expect from me
is making a good dish.
The leads you can expect
from humanity is making sure that we don't waste food
when we have hungry people.
You want us to raise our collective expectations.
Totally. We are bringing them down completely.
So let's not waste people's life in our own communities.
Forget about another country, 5,000 miles away.
So Robert Egger... I was 23,
he told me, "charity and philanthropy CMC is
about the redemption of the giver,
when philanthropy should be about the liberation
of the receiver.
It's nothing wrong that you give.
You should feel good about it.
How do we value success on philanthropy?
By lifting the lives of people up,
by making real change in real time
that you can see, you can touch,
you can smell, you can sense.
That's the only way to value return
on investment in philanthropy.
We've seen many moments
that my profession like September 11, the chefs came out
in the streets and they start feeding anybody
that was in need of a plate of food.
Random moments of empathy,
beautiful moments of love and finding that solution.
But what if we put all that together
and we start making a powerful team
of people that can have a very powerful response.
Haiti, I went there not to help.
I went there to learn.
Obviously I was feeding people and I fed thousands.
But for me was not about who I was feeding.
But unfortunately, it was in a good way I said,
"it's about what I was learning".
The problem, when you look at international organizations,
international aid organizations, they do a lot
of very important work.
But you know very well that they can be mired in bureaucracy
and money can get spent where it shouldn't be spent.
And there can be waste.
And... In the end, people suffer
because they're not getting what they actually need.
In all your experience now,
for all these years and over all these countries,
how have you been able to avoid those missteps?
Or have they happened and how have you learned from them?
Obviously wasn't World Kitchen...
We are far away from a perfect organization.
In part, because we are a new organization.
We are a young organization,
but we're good people that we try to learn.
And we learn from organizations of the past,
of mistakes of the past, but also
of good efforts of the past.
At the end of the day,
we are really a marine sea organization.
I mean the marine sea is...
I only know that quite frankly, it's not very complicated.
Pure emergency means the emergency is now.
The urgency of now is actually yesterday.
And that if you don't provide for them water today,
you are failing.
On that, I think we've been highly successful.
Obviously we have many stories.
When Haiti receives... What I believe was a great support
from the Obama administration.
But then we saw that the international community brought
so much food.
We brought so much rice from America and other countries
that the rice producers of Haiti,
nobody was buying from them anymore.
We almost put them out of business.
By the time the international aid kept coming
and Haiti didn't have the same rice production.
And rice had to be imported,
and rice all of this time was much more expensive
than before the earthquake.
They are used so the damage,
then their response is to the humanitarian needs
of a country, especially of a poor country,
how they can have negative connotations,
influence and repercussions.
So we all need to be learning from those moments.
That's why for us, every time we go somewhere
as soon as we can, we try to buy from the local farmers.
You saw us doing this in places like Guatemala.
You saw I was doing this in places like Venezuela.
You saw us doing this in places like Columbia.
You saw us doing this in places like Indonesia.
This is very much on the DNA of World Central Kitchen.
It's not what we claim. It's what we do.
And I think this is putting us
in a good path of good learning;
of lessons learned what really works or what doesn't work.
And hopefully make more of the good decisions,
what really works.
And as we grow, concentrate more on those areas
that we know work for us
but more important, for the people that we want to help.
Even before the pandemic people were fleeing countries
that were beset by civil war.
The ravages of climate change or just looking
for a better life, right?
For them, for their families.
And I know you've spent a lot of time
with refugees in particular, in Colombia and Venezuela.
And I just think back to what you said earlier
our need to kind of raise our collective expectations
about taking care of one another.
Can you just give us a sense of what you saw there
with the people in those particular camps?
So in Cucuta in Colombia, we saw
in a way, sadness
because people were leaving the places
they were coming from.
In a very bitter sweet moment at the same time,
we were seeing hope because people were coming
from such a dark place that they were moving
into what we will call, hopefully the light
at the end of the tunnel.
Even the light is still seems very far away
but nonetheless, humans, we are all about light.
Humans, we are not about darkness.
Even in the most beautiful dark night,
we love the beautiful the stars
or the moon lighting our way somewhere.
And that's what we saw in Cucuta, Venezuela,
that there is a lot of hope
but we need to make sure that that hope is supported.
If not, even hope can get into darkness
and we cannot afford.
This is not a moment to allow hope,
especially a woman of young people go into darkness.
We must be there keeping that little light abreast,
that little light shining.
And if we don't do that, we're failing as humanity.
We are totally failing.
How do you do that for yourself?
How do you keep focused on that light?
There's so many moments in my life that I go to a place
and I tried to keep going back
and back and back to the same communities,
because obviously if you keep going back two or three weeks
doesn't mean you are part of the community.
But to a degree, I dream that I am part becoming
a little bit part of the community.
And when I see especially children
and especially young girls...
I have three daughters on my own,
and I cannot tell you how fine I am on them three
and how much wisdom they give me
even in the process of learning themselves.
And when I see those young girls like
these little village 30 minutes,
45 minutes away from San Juan,
a beautiful place,
a village created over a hundred years ago
of Afro-Americans were hoping
to find their own community to build.
And those two amazing
as Margo's very young, probably eight, nine,
that when I will get sometimes late, they will come,
"come on Jose, come on.
Quick, quick, quick, let's do the food".
They will always be on their bikes.
And "quick, quick, quick."
Like, why are you shall rush today?
And because... "We are hungry".
When they told me "we are hungry",
They didn't mean they want their food first.
What these two girls told me when they were hungry,
meant that before they will eat
because they will never do it before.
They had to serve the 200, 300 elderly homes
in their community,
which them two personally, with two,
three other friends will bring home to them.
And this were taking them over an hour to accomplish.
And when they were rushing me
is not because they were going to eat before.
It was because they were so hungry
that actually they wanted to make sure they
will accomplish their mission before.
And if I'm here for it for those, yes.
That they know they are everywhere,
in Venezuela, in Colombia, Guatemala,
in Lebanon, in Mozambique,
and you name it.
I know that once you meet some of those people
in some parts,
almost I feel like, those experiences are
the same experience that keep moving on around the planet.
So here we are, in this moment.
And I wonder if you see it as an opportunity
that can be leveraged
or lost.
So we need to make sure that we take this opportunity
of the lessons learned in the 2020 pandemic and beyond.
And see what we can really build by the wall,
where food is at the heart,
food is at the center.
That people don't want our pity, people want our respect.
That we should stop throwing money at the problem,
but investing into the solutions.
That if we have people that...
We're talking about the minimum wage,
maybe that's the wrong conversation,
but should be able... Was the living wage.
That we cannot have people working,
that they are the working poor.
If they're working, why are they poor?
If we are able to understand
that the very big problems we face,
they actually have very simple solutions.
People are hungry, feed them.
People are thirsty, bring them water.
I think everybody will agree with that simple premise.
So let's make that happen.
Chef, thank you very much for talking with us.
It was a pleasure.
Thank you.