Santa Barbara Restaurants and Relief Agencies
Rally ‘Round Superstar Chef José Andrés
Founder of World Central Kitchen Brings
Message of Disaster Aid Through Food to
Arlington Theatre
By Matt Kettmann | April 18, 2024
[Updated on April 18 at 9:30 p.m.]
From UCSB Arts & Lectures:
Due to unforeseen and extenuating circumstances, José Andrés is unable to join the UCSB Arts & Lectures series this Sunday. Mr. Andrés’ ongoing commitments to World Central Kitchen as they mourn the loss of their team members have made his attendance at the event impossible at this time.
We have worked closely with his team to reschedule his appearance for Thursday, May 23 at 5:30 PM at the Arlington Theatre. We offer our sympathies to José Andrés and the entire World Central Kitchen organization during this incredibly challenging time.
Dates in this article have been revised to reflect this change.
An additional note from UCSB Arts & Lectures, updated on April 19 at 8:42 a.m.:
Now more than ever, we feel the work of José Andrés and World Central Kitchen deserves close attention, acknowledgement and recognition.
This weekend’s free screening of We Feed People and free Community Food Solutions Showcase will continue as scheduled on Sunday, April 21. Join us on Sunday for the screening and to meet local organizations addressing issues of food insecurity and sustainability in our community.
It’s hard to believe that José Andrés is just one person.
Since leaving his homeland of Spain for Washington, D.C., in 1990 as a 21-year-old chef with $50 in his pocket, he’s launched 31 restaurants, written six books, and starred in at least 20 television shows and films. In 2010, he put a simmering dream into action by launching World Central Kitchen as a disaster relief food nonprofit to help with the Haitian earthquake. He’s since served critical meals to hungry masses in more than a dozen crises, from hurricanes and quakes across the world to the pandemic and wildfires in the United States, including in Ventura during our very own Thomas Fire.
Today, as Andrés launches his brand-new book, Zaytinya: Delicious Mediterranean Dishes from Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon, and prepares for the release of a Prime Video celebrity-stocked special called Dinner Party Diaries, his World Central Kitchen is a front-line force feeding the war-ravaged peoples of both Ukraine and Gaza. Given such experience, Andrés himself is now called on to discuss global disaster and war relief policies, and he’s not afraid to share his opinions loudly.
At the same time, he’s a husband to fellow Spaniard Patricia “Tichi” Fernández de la Cruz and the father of three daughters. If the engaging and informative Ron Howard documentary We Feed People is to be believed, his family doesn’t just love him — they actually like him, too.
Given his schedule, I wasn’t too surprised when Andrés was unable to do an interview on the phone or even answer any of the five questions I sent via email. I was hoping to get his insights in order to preview his talk at the Arlington Theatre on May 23, which is being hosted by UCSB Arts & Lectures. But even my relevant personal experiences as a journalist in disaster/war zones and eating at a couple of his restaurants — including China Chilcano in D.C. where my son, then 7 years old, ate duck tongue and spilled his Mexican Coke everywhere — weren’t enough bait to lure him away from focusing on Gaza and promoting his book.
Instead, I turned to hunger-relief experts from Feed the Valley and the Santa Barbara County Food Action Network for their thoughts on Andrés, World Central Kitchen, and the current state of affairs in Santa Barbara. Their efforts — along with the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County, the Santa Barbara Certified Farmers Market Association, and the UCSB Associated Students Foodbank — will be highlighted following the free 1:30 p.m. screening of We Feed People on Sunday, April 21. I also picked the brain of philanthropic-minded restaurateur Sherry Villanueva, of Acme Hospitality (The Lark Loquita, etc.), who’s hosting a big-ticket fundraiser that evening at The Lark.
Our Own Food Insecurity
“The need is real in Santa Barbara County,” said Andrea Davis, who is the operations and people manager for Companion Hospitality (Bell’s, Bar Le Côte, etc.) and manages Feed the Valley, which serves chef-made, ready-to-eat meals around the greater Santa Ynez Valley to those in need. The organization sprung out of pandemic needs, then established itself as a primary regional tool in the fight against food insecurity.
World Central Kitchen was a “massive influence” on its creation. “The model of activating kitchens to produce ready-to-eat meals hit home,” said Davis. “We knew we had the facility and the skilled team to produce and send out wholesome meals beyond the four walls of our restaurants.”
Feed the Valley works with nonprofit partners to identify people who are having trouble finding their next meal, including many elderly, homebound folks but also those who live in situations without access to cooking equipment or grocery stores with fresh produce. “Running Feed the Valley has exposed us to the intricacies of food insecurity and that it is not one-size-fits-all,” said Davis. “Feed the Valley aims to meet folks where they are at.”
[Click to enlarge] A sampling of books by José Andrés, including ‘The World Central Kitchen Cookbook’, which attendees at the May 23 event will receive. | Credit: Courtesy
That’s very much in the World Central Kitchen style. “Chef José Andrés also has a thing or two to share about how to do this work effectively and properly: by ensuring and lifting up community agency, dignity, and cultural ways of knowing and doing,” said Shakira Miracle, the executive director of the Santa Barbara County Food Action Network (SBCFAN), which serves as the regional hub for hunger relief efforts. “World Central Kitchen doesn’t come in on a white horse with a mindset that ‘we know and you don’t,’ which creates further disruption and downstream problems.”
Like Andrés learned during the first disaster mission to Haiti, where the women in a camp taught him the right way to cook their beans, relief organizations must listen to the populations they serve. “This is exactly the message SBCFAN models within our community, inviting everyone to get involved with regional food-system resilience building,” said Miracle. “We humans are intrepid, so imagine our collective power to address seemingly impossible situations as a connected community that leverages ones’ existing assets. The more we listen, learn, and come alongside with the people who are impacted by the crisis, the more helpful, healing, and human we are to one another.”
Food Insecurity Resources
Those seeking help in achieving proper nutrition can contact:
countyofsb.org/1831/Nutrition-Services
sbcfoodaction.org/fan-resources
211santabarbaracounty.org/food
Villanueva remains shocked that one in four Santa Barbara County residents faces food insecurity daily. “For a region with such abundant resources, this is unacceptable,” she said, explaining that the housing crisis compounds the problems. Acme and its large staff partners with the Foodbank of Santa Barbara County to raise money, provide meals to people in need, and even volunteer for the Backyard Bounty program.
In José Andrés, she sees a model and a message that should inspire people everywhere to do more for their fellow humans. “José has mobilized his team time and again to go directly into regions in extreme crisis and to care for the people there by addressing the very basic need of food,” said Villanueva. “His work has no borders or politics, just the simple act of caring for other human beings. I hope José’s work will inspire others in our community to take similar action wherever they see that someone is in need.”
UCSB Arts & Lectures brings José Andrés to the Arlington Theater (1317 State St.) on May 23. His 4:30 p.m. talk ($50 ticket includes The World Central Kitchen Cookbook; students are $11). See artsandlectures.ucsb.edu for tickets.
‘A War Against Humanity Itself’
It would take the outraged horror of a global celebrity chef to budge the needle of public opinion when it’s come to Israel’s conduct of its war against Hamas in Gaza after the now-infamous attack waged on October 7. Chef José Andrés has accused the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of deliberately targeting the three cars of humanitarian aid volunteers working for Andrés’s World Central Kitchen, killing all seven.
“This was not just a bad-luck situation where, ‘Oops — we dropped the bomb in the wrong place,’ ” Andrés said immediately after his workers were killed on April 1.
His crew was in Gaza providing humanitarian aid to displaced Palestinians when they were killed. Andrés charged at the time the IDF knew who his workers were, why they were there, and what they were doing.
Israeli military leaders apologized profusely for the attack, expressing “severe sorrow” and terming it a grave mistake. After a subsequent investigation, the IDF dismissed two officers, suspended two commanders, and reprimanded three others for their role.
Andrés stated that the cars in which his workers were driving were white and so brightly colored they would have been visible even in the dark of night. Andrés noted the precision with which the attack was launched from nearly two kilometers away, blowing up one car after the next after the next.
“Obviously, this was targeted,” he stated in an interview published by Reuters news agency. “We could argue that the first one, let’s say, was a mistake. The second? The third?”
Andrés commands such a mass following and global regard that President Joe Biden considers him a friend. He and Biden spoke after the attack. Andrés — who embraced Israel’s right to defend itself immediately after the October 7 attack — made it clear the United States should have imposed serious consequences for the humanitarian death toll much sooner and that to threaten such consequences now is a case of too little, too late.
“America,” he noted, “is going to be sending its navy and its military to do humanitarian work, but at the same time weapons provided by America … are killing civilians.”
Andrés has questioned the motives, tactics, and strategy deployed by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “This, it seems, is a war against humanity itself,” he said. “And you can never win that war. Because humanity will eventually always prevail.”
Santa Barbara’s Congressmember Salud Carbajal has been supportive of Israel’s aim of rooting out Hamas militarily — and voted for a measure that equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism — but has also expressed concern over the large numbers of civilian casualties.
“I echo Chef Andrés’s call for an independent investigation of the tragic killing,” Carbajal stated by way of a written response. “It has long been clear that Israel is not doing enough to protect civilians.”
In the past, Carbajal has balked at the idea of placing conditions on U.S. aid to Israel, but he now appears to be shifting that position. “The Biden administration,” he said, “should make it clear that any additional security aid that might support ongoing campaigns in Gaza must come with not only with the results of an independent investigation into these recent deaths but clear and transparent reforms from Israel that will prevent future deaths of aid work and allow for more humanitarian aid to reach Palestinian civilians without threat or obstruction.”
— Nick Welsh
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