
I’m one of the least cynical people you’ll meet, but when I first encountered Jose Andres after he founded World Central Kitchen I was skeptical. It was 2019 and I was sitting across from him in a small press gathering at the 92Y in New York to discuss his new NGO. He promised World Central Kitchen would streamline the way food got to hungry people in crises. And it would mostly serve hot meals, not just ready-to-eat rations.
He came across as well meaning but amateur. He seemed to believe that by dint of his celebrity and exuberance, he could innovate humanitarian relief in ways that established and impactful aid agencies could not.
Don’t get me wrong. At that point, I was a big Jose Andres fan! One of my oldest friends got his start at a chef at one of his restaurants, my wife had taken me to MiniBar for my birthday a few years prior, and I even once met Bruce Springsteen at Zaytinya. But his presentation in that press conference rang all my alarm bells. I kept thinking of Sean Penn and Wyclef Jean, whose amateur relief efforts after the Haiti Earthquake potentially did more harm than good. Also, seemingly every actor who ever appeared alongside George Clooney adopted a cause, or even half a country, to little effect.
This looked to be yet another doomed attempt by a well meaning celebrity to insert himself in a crisis. And anyway, just because you are an excellent chef and restaurateur does not mean you know how to do humanitarian relief.
That was my view at the time. But I was wrong. Very wrong.
World Central Kitchen really was different.
Yes, Jose Andres was a celebrity. But his operations were professional. Furthermore, they were way ahead of the curve on key trends in humanitarianism, particularly on “localization” — a buzzword in global development that implies that operations should be directed not by people who helicopter in, but the community impacted by the disaster. World Central Kitchen practiced that far before it was as in vogue as it is today.
World Central Kitchen was not some vanity project of a celebrity chef, but an NGO that punched way above its weight. It has proven itself time and time again.
And then, the tragedy in Gaza.
Ever innovating, World Central Kitchen seemed to have solved one of the key challenges of getting volumes of food to starving Gazans: they would establish a maritime corridor in which aid could be shipped directly from Cyprus to the shores of Gaza. First, they secured the agreement of the Israeli government to inspect the aid in Cyprus. And because there’s no usable port in Gaza, they built a jetty from rubble. A vital sea-route had been opened and nearly 500,000 meals were offloaded last week.
It was in the process of managing this aid that seven staff were killed in Israeli strikes. World Central Kitchen has suspended its Gaza operations, as has its partner in this effort, a longstanding American NGO with deep roots in Gaza.
World Central Kitchen’s success in creating a maritime corridor for Gaza aid was humanitarianism at its finest. But this impromptu jetty should never have been built in the first place. There is a well-established port in Ashdod, Israel just 19 miles from the north of Gaza, where the UN warns that famine may have already set in. But that larger port has been mostly off limits for Gaza aid, despite repeated pleas from the United Nations. Denied the use of a real port just a few miles away, World Central Kitchen opted to build a makeshift jetty in a war zone.
This tragedy should never have happened, not only in the sense that Israel should not be killing aid workers. Rather, this tragedy was born from a perverse logic that has taken hold in recent weeks as famine conditions spread across Gaza: Getting aid to Gazans is seen as a logistical challenge to overcome, rather than a political problem to solve.
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