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FOOD AND DRINK

José Andrés: Who is the Spanish celebrity chef feeding people in need?

World Central Kitchen, which is mourning the deaths of seven employees in Gaza, was founded by Spanish-American celebrity chef José Andrés, who began cooking for people in crisis zones after the Haiti earthquake of 2010.

Published: 2 April 2024 16:45 CEST
José Andrés: Who is the Spanish celebrity chef feeding people in need?
Spanish-American chef José Andrés. Photo: Jason Méndez/Getty/AFP

The US-registered NGO has been feeding Gazans displaced since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas six months ago.

Last month, it organised the first maritime aid shipment to reach Gaza in nearly two decades, working with the Spanish NGO Open Arms to send 200 tonnes of food to the territory amid UN warnings of an impending famine.

The two organisations built a jetty southwest of Gaza City to deliver the aid, which was followed by a second shipment on Monday.

The dead aid workers had just unloaded the second consignment at the warehouse in central Gaza where WCK has set up a giant kitchen when they were killed in an Israeli strike.

In an interview with US talk show host Jimmy Kimmel in November 2023, the gregarious 54-year-old chef hailed the bravery of the organisation’s volunteers.

“When others are moving away from disaster we have amazing individuals who move into the disaster (zone) to help people,” Andrés said.

He said that in most cases, the NGO obtains food directly at markets or shops in the affected areas and cooks using local infrastructure.

The volunteers “make magic happen, literally”, he said.

Born in 1969 in the northwestern Spanish town of Mieres, Andrés trained under Catalan chef Ferran Adriá, the famed creator of so-called molecular cuisine.

He moved to the United States in the 1990s, opening a string of restaurant that blend Spanish cuisines with flavours from Latin America and Asia.

One of his Washington restaurants, the 12-seater Minibar, has two Michelin stars.

In 2022, he turned his American fame into a CNN travel show, “José Andrés and Family in Spain”, featuring him and his three daughters on a gastronomic tour of his homeland.

In February that year, WCK was on the ground at Poland’s border with Ukraine within hours of Russia’s invasion, feeding refugees fleeing bombardments.

“I am and will be an emigrant all my life. That’s why I try to work on their behalf,” Andrés told Spanish daily El País in a May 2022 interview.

From Haiti to Ukraine

Andrés threw himself into humanitarian work in 2010, when Haiti was rocked by a devastating earthquake that killed around 200,000 people and caused extensive damage.

In his November interview with Kimmel, he said that was when he decided he was “not going to stand watching on TV thinking about what we can do.

A man carries a cardboard box of food aid provided by non-profit non-governmental organisation World Central Kitchen in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo by MOHAMMED ABED / AFP)

“I’m going to show up and start learning how cooks like me, if we come together with volunteers, we can start feeding anybody.”

He travelled to the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince and began cooking local staples such as black beans and rice for families in camps for the displaced.

Since then WCK has dished up millions of meals to people impacted by natural disasters as well as migrants arriving at the US border, hospital staff working nonstop through the Covid-19 pandemic, Venezuelans in the grips of a severe economic crisis and war-scarred Ukrainians.

In 2015, he had planned to open a restaurant in the Trump International Hotel in Washington but pulled out after Donald Trump disparaged Mexicans as “rapists” who were “bringing crime” to America.

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CLIMATE CRISIS

‘Extreme’ climate blamed for world’s worst wine harvest in 62 years

World wine production dropped 10 percent last year, the biggest fall in more than six decades, because of "extreme" climate changes, the body that monitors the trade said on Thursday.

Published: 26 April 2024 08:48 CEST
'Extreme' climate blamed for world's worst wine harvest in 62 years

“Extreme environmental conditions” including droughts, fires and other problems with climate were mostly to blame for the drastic fall, said the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) that covers nearly 50 wine producing countries.

Australia and Italy suffered the worst, with 26 and 23 percent drops. Spain lost more than a fifth of its production. Harvests in Chile and South Africa were down by more than 10 percent.

The OIV said the global grape harvest was the worst since 1961, and worse even than its early estimates in November.

In further bad news for winemakers, customers drank three per cent less wine in 2023, the French-based intergovernmental body said.

Director John Barker highlighted “drought, extreme heat and fires, as well as heavy rain causing flooding and fungal diseases across major northern and southern hemisphere wine producing regions.”

Although he said climate problems were not solely to blame for the drastic fall, “the most important challenge that the sector faces is climate change.

“We know that the grapevine, as a long-lived plant cultivated in often vulnerable areas, is strongly affected by climate change,” he added.

France bucked the falling harvest trend, with a four percent rise, making it by far the world’s biggest wine producer.

Wine consumption last year was however at its lowest level since 1996, confirming a fall-off over the last five years, according to the figures.

The trend is partly due to price rises caused by inflation and a sharp fall in wine drinking in China – down a quarter – due to its economic slowdown.

The Portuguese, French and Italians remain the world’s biggest wine drinkers per capita.

Barker said the underlying decrease in consumption is being “driven by demographic and lifestyle changes. But given the very complicated influences on global demand at the moment,” it is difficult to know whether the fall will continue.

“What is clear is that inflation is the dominant factor affecting demand in 2023,” he said.

Land given over to growing grapes to eat or for wine fell for the third consecutive year to 7.2 million hectares (17.7 million acres).

But India became one of the global top 10 grape producers for the first time with a three percent rise in the size of its vineyards.

France, however, has been pruning its vineyards back slightly, with its government paying winemakers to pull up vines or to distil their grapes.

The collapse of the Italian harvest to its lowest level since 1950 does not necessarily mean there will be a similar contraction there, said Barker.

Between floods and hailstones, and damp weather causing mildew in the centre and south of the country, the fall was “clearly linked to meteorological conditions”, he said.

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