A Person for Others

José Andres, the restaurateur and social entrepreneur, yesterday gave the 2024 Tanous talk, which was organized around a set of questions posed to him. Most of the questions concerned his leadership of the World Central Kitchen.

The World Central Kitchen provides meals and nurturance in response to humanitarian crises. Sometimes the crisis arises from natural causes (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes); other times there are the results of human behaviors (e.g., forced migration because of conflicts, destruction of infrastructures in war). The Kitchen is working in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Lebanon. He arrived in Gaston Hall fresh from work in Asheville, in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

In addition to being a great humorist, Mr. Andres (who can be referred to as “Dr. Andres” given his Georgetown honorary degree in 2018) was fully evident as a man of the people.

Part of his story was an immigration story, clearly part of his identity. A funny anecdote was an early arrival in New York City, when he observed the night sky and the stars, while seeing the US flag. He concluded that the stars on the flag represented the unlimited capacity of the skies with its stars, the unlimited ambitions of the country. (Only later did he realize that each star represented a different state of the union.)

He told his story as an immigrant to the United States in 1991. He described his early volunteering in helping in food service for needy individuals. It inspired the World Central Kitchen.

One of the attention-grabbing assertions that he forwarded was that the World Central Kitchen was the largest organization in the world. Larger than the US government. Larger than the United Nations. Larger than Walmart or Amazon. As the listeners’ skepticism grew, he then said “Yes, it’s the largest but many of the members of the World Central Kitchen don’t know about their membership. His point was elaborated by noting that the horrors of the situations that they enter almost always are accompanied by a rallying of people around the crisis. Restaurants and chefs are willing to drop everything to help. Transport groups volunteer equipment and staff. Requests for the World Central Kitchen are almost always granted, given the clarity of their mission to feed and care for those harmed by a crisis. In that sense, we are all members of the World Central Kitchen.

While José Andres did not use much of the nomenclature of the Jesuits, he enunciated their values clearly. One of his expressions, repeated several times, is that the measure of our values is what we would do for people we don’t even know. It’s too easy to help those in need in one’s family or neighborhood, but the greatest needs arise in people we’ve never met. Helping them is the true test of whether one is living their values.

He asserted that plans are not useful to his work. He sees that other service organizations become highly articulated structures, with operation manuals that specify the behavior of their staff. In Andres’ experience, those plans, when faced with a crisis and the chaos of disasters, threaten success. Speed and flexibility succeeds when plans are faced with unanticipated realities.

If the Kitchen arrives on scene and witnesses other groups serving a need that it might normally offer, the staff identifies gaps that still exist and tries to fill those gaps. They quickly change what they do. If they arrive as the first responding group, they may have to reset their expectations to the impediments that the situation presents. What the Kitchen does is dictated by circumstances in the locale in need.

Chaos is unpredictable. What is needed can rarely be fully predicted. If one is not nimble, one fails. The focus must be on the people one is helping, both to save them from immediate peril but then to consider how they themselves might build more enduring solutions. So he told stories of teaching cooking skills to those affected by crises, so that they could build job-related capacities for the post-crisis period. For example, the World Central Kitchen has built food producer networks to address chronic food insecurity.

Each story José Andres told illustrated a driving force to reduce suffering. It is difficult to have experienced this event without concluding that this is what “people for others” really means.