Chef José Andrés Is Ready to Help
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Chef José Andrés (center, in white) teaches a cooking class at one of his restaurants.
When a devastating hurricane hit the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico in 2017, thousands of homes were destroyed and even more had no electricity to cook food. Immediately after the storm, Chef José Andrés arrived with other volunteers to cook and deliver food to anyone who needed it. Andrés’s nonprofit organization, called World Central Kitchen, provided almost four million meals to people affected by the hurricane.
Andrés, an award-winning chef and an immigrant to the United States, is now dedicating his life to feeding people when disaster strikes. June is National Immigrant Heritage Month in the United States. It’s a time to celebrate the heritage of immigrants in America and honor their contributions. Immigrant stories like Andrés’s show how much one person can affect a country, and the world.
“My story is like the story of one more immigrant,” said Andrés in a 2020 interview with the Tufts University podcast Tell Me More. “To a degree, I believe we are all immigrants in more ways than we think.”
Andrés learned to cook as a young man in Spain before moving to the United States in 1991 with only $50 in his pocket. After working in several restaurants, he helped open some of his own in the city of Washington, D.C. These largely Spanish- and Latin-inspired eateries made him famous as a chef and earned him several top awards.
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In this 2019 photo, José Andrés carries a box of food for survivors of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas as part of his work with World Central Kitchen.
Amid his success, Andrés desired to find ways to help people. He began working with a local nonprofit that provided food to people in need. He also began advocating for better working conditions for fellow immigrants in the food industry.
“Because sometimes being American or belonging to a country is not by the passport you own, but by the heart you put in the every day in your community. That’s what makes a person belong to a place,” he said.
In 2010, Andrés founded World Central Kitchen with the goal of bringing emergency food relief to people who survived natural disasters or live in war zones. To date, chefs with World Central Kitchen have made 600 million meals for people around the world.
“I’m so proud that today we have these men and women that when something happens, we get in a plane, we land, and with one plate of food at a time, we start building a better tomorrow,” said Andrés.
