A chef's mission
NOT MANY PEOPLE WERE GETTING ON AIRPLANES IN THE U.S. ON March 12, and even fewer were heading for the Grand Princess cruise ship. COVID-19 was discovered among the ship’s 2,400 passengers after it set sail from Hawaii, making the vessel about as popular as the Flying Dutchman; the Grand Princess had to loiter off the California coast for days before being given permission to berth.
But here was José Andrés, marching down an air bridge in Newark, N.J., for a 6:30 a.m. flight to San Francisco. His beige, many-pocketed vest and matching cap put out a vaguely fisherman vibe, but anyone who placed Andrés—he’s a celebrity chef—might also recognize the gear he changes into when he’s racing to the scene of disaster. The flight was long, and there was plenty of time to contemplate the dimensions of the catastrophe already silently spreading across the country below.
“I feel like if something major happens, the America we see from this window …” he says, trailing off as he looks out over the Rocky Mountains. He had mentioned the shortages of surgical masks and coronavirus tests, and now let the next thought remain unspoken. “This is like a movie, man. Maybe we’re overreacting. But it’s O.K. to overreact in this case.”
Andrés’ rapidly expanding charity, World Central Kitchen, is as prepared as anyone for this moment of unprecedented global crisis. The nonprofit stands up field kitchens to feed thousands of people fresh, nourishing, often hot meals as soon as possible at the scene of a hurricane, earthquake, tornado or flood. As a global public-health emergency, COVID-19 hasn’t been limited to any one place. But it pulverizes the economy as it rolls across the world, and people need money to eat. World Central Kitchen already is distributing meals in low-income neighborhoods in big cities like New York, and monitoring the globe for food shortages elsewhere, some sure to be acute.
In the meantime, Andrés has real value as an example. In a catastrophe in which the response of the U.S. government has been slow, muddled and unsure, his kitchen models the behavior—nimble, confident, proactive—the general public needs in a crisis (and, so far, has provided it more reliably than the federal government). Consider the President Donald Trump made crystal clear he would have preferred that people remain on the vessel so the infected passengers would not increase the tally of cases he appeared to see as a personal scoreboard (“I like the numbers being where they are”). Then, a few breaths later, the President said he was deferring to experts, which made life easier for the quarantined passengers and crew who disembarked, a few hundred at a time, over a week, but harder for Americans looking for the clear, unambiguous instruction that’s so essential to public health. “We have a President more
