I attend the World Bank Spring meetings in Washington DC most years as part of my job. It is always interesting to see the confluence of development with new ideas and initiatives. This has often attracted diverse crowd-pullers such as the actor Matt Damon highlighting the need for safe water through water.org, or Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia on the power of tourism to activate neglected communities.
At this series of meetings held in April, there was an interesting panel on the power of new ideas to highlight the plight of those who live in fragile environments.
Jose Andres, an acclaimed Spanish chef in DC, spoke about his initiative, the Central Food Kitchen. It is a powerful example of how to crowd-source people and talent, collect people around an important issue and then create a community to tackle that.
The list of chefs is impressive; the results of this innovation outstanding. The Central Food Kitchen has served over 12 million meals over the last few years
Andres’ involvement began in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. He had gone there as part of a UN mission to install solar cooking stoves. The experience led him to create Central Food Kitchen. The concept was simple: to use the chef community to unite in an emergency situation and to cook for affected communities. At first, it was necessarily a small project. It used his name and reputation to pull in others. Soon, his idea took off. He and his volunteer chefs went to other countries including Sierra Leone, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico.
he idea is daring in its simplicity: to use food as an agent of change. The food would be cooked by experienced chefs, in collaboration with local cooks and staff volunteers who know where to source food locally. This allows people who wanted to help - and are in a position to do so - to be of service to those who need it.
Chef Jose Andres
One often sees footage of people in emergency situations - waiting for aid agencies and government programs to supply processed packets of food. The Central Food Kitchen Program does not aim to provide such instant aid. Instead it offers an alternative solution: to eat meals designed and/or cooked by chefs.
The list of chefs is impressive; the results of this innovation outstanding. The Central Food Kitchen has served over 12 million meals over the last few years. Ironically, the hungry in third-world countries and the affluent in classy restaurants now queue separately for food prepared by the same chefs. Today, that resource of talent includes a network or 140 professional chefs.
The CFK concept has evolved beyond food. It now addresses education, health and job creation. A corollary is the boost it provides to the local food industry. Activities range from securing funding for meals in Puerto Rico following the earthquake there, or setting up a culinary school in Haiti, building functional kitchens in public schools, to operating a bakery to fund a local orphanage.
Speaking passionately about his cause, Andres spoke of a liberating ethos. Chefs learned to work with whatever they could find locally. In many cases, they had to rely upon cooking fires when gas and electricity lines were disabled. Chefs could not wait for hardware or expensive equipment to be flown in. They had to use whatever was available and depended for assistance on local people who responded generously with their time, strength and resources.
In a way, movements like this reflect a broader idea of social justice and new power – they are open, participatory and equalize people. Communities come together to help and through this restore dignity at a time when people have been stripped of it. Food from Jose Andres’s Central Food Kitchen initiative has become the hallmark of such projects: a perfectly portioned and balanced assortment of vegetables, carbohydrates and protein – cooked by experts and served one plate at a time.
