Chef José Andrés

Hey everybody, good to be with you. I'm going to very quickly give you a couple of quick updates and then we're going to bring on Chef Jose Andres. This is so exciting and I'm so excited to get a chance to listen to him and have him answer your questions and just tell us about the amazing work that he's doing for this country right now. He's literally helping America feed itself and inspiring all of us by his example. So I want to get him on as soon as we can. I'm just going to start with some numbers so that we're consistent in tracking the course of this pandemic across the world and across the country. Globally, we're over two and a half million cases. 175,000 human beings have died officially. This is what's been reported but because we don't have enough tests, we don't really know what the real number is but certainly much higher than that. In the United States, 814,000 cases. Nearly 44,000 people have officially died of COVID-19. Again, we're not testing anywhere close to enough people to know what the real number is. In fact, it's somewhere close to one percent of America has been tested so far. In Texas, 20,000 cases, 528 deaths. And again, Texas has tested fewer people than any state in the country. So we really, really don't know. Those very frightening numbers, the fact that we have 20,000 more deaths in America than the next closest country, which is Italy or Spain, the fact that we don't have enough tests, enough personal protective equipment, enough ventilators for those who are having a hard time breathing on their own might explain some of the president's tweets lately, one of which he claims to have the ability to completely shut down immigration in the United States. The legality of that claim is dubious at best and certainly he seems to distract us from the real problem at hand, saving the lives of our fellow Americans and feeding our fellow Americans at this time of extraordinary need. And immigrants have routinely been the consistent scapegoat for this president. If he's performing poorly, if he doesn't want you to look at the real problem, he's going to start talking about immigrants and blaming our problems on them. But I just want you to remember the people who are producing the food that we eat, by and large, are immigrants. So many of the doctors and nurses and the cleaning staff in our hospitals and clinics, they are immigrants. They came to this country for a better life and they also came to this country to make our lives better, and in this case, to literally save our lives, and they are. Those who are cooking in the restaurant kitchens that are still open right now for delivery meals or pickup meals, very often are immigrants. Those who are going to come up with the cures and the vaccines for COVID-19, I guarantee you a lot of them are going to be immigrants. So let's just remember who we are as a country, who we are at our best, and the kind of moral stain we will carry with us for the rest of our history if we close the doors completely to this country and deny who we are and any chance we have for success against this virus in the effort to feed ourselves or anything else that's important to us. Last point, there are these fake protests going on all over the country, a very small number of people paid and bought by far-right organizations, folks showing up with AR-15s and AK-47s. This is the kind of stuff that you bring on a battlefield to kill people. That's what it's designed for, and they're bringing it to the statehouse steps to try to intimidate lawmakers into opening up our economies and getting people back to work. What could be wrong with that? Well, first of all, we don't have tests to know who does or who does not have COVID-19. It's already killed almost 45,000 people in this country, and it shows no signs of stopping. And disproportionately, black and brown Americans are the ones dying. Disproportionately, those who are forced to work to feed their families on minimum wage jobs in a state like Texas, where the minimum wage is $7.25, those are the folks that we'll be sending back to work and into harm's way. Too many of them will become sick. Too many of them will die. So when folks are saying, get back to work, or when you have our Lieutenant Governor in Texas, Dan Patrick, saying, life is overrated, or we place too much value on life, let's make clear who we're talking about that's going to have to die and who we're talking about that's going to have to be sick. So my message to you is stay at home, wash your hands religiously, keep six-foot distance from anyone when you are out, and then do everything within your power to help those who cannot help or feed themselves right now. Okay, on that theme, I'm now going to introduce our guest, Chef Jose Andres, who is a rock star in this country and around the world right now, in part because of his work with World Central Kitchen. So wherever there is a disaster or a catastrophe around the world, so often Chef Jose Andres and World Central Kitchen show up to help feed people who otherwise would not be able to feed themselves or their communities. He's done this in Nicaragua, in Cuba, in the Dominican Republic, in Zambia, but he's also done it in the United States, in Puerto Rico. He just did it in National Stadium in Washington, D.C., turned that into a gigantic kitchen to deliver food to the people in our nation's capital, in the wealthiest, most powerful country on the face of the planet. He just wrote an amazing opinion piece in the when it comes to feeding our fellow Americans. So I could not be more grateful to have Chef Jose Andres join us right now, and to have him, in his own words, tell us what he'd like to see this country be able to do. Jose. Hello, sir. How are you? Bienvenido. Gracias por estar con nosotros. Thank you for having me. First of all, how are you and your family doing? Listen, we are blessed. My family is great. We were able to, we've been at home. My family's been home now for many weeks. You know, staying home, cooking at home, studying at home. And myself, you know, every morning I leave to support the teams here in D.C., what we're doing in Maryland, Virginia. I just came back from New York. We are in more than 96 cities across the country. We are almost reaching already close to 250,000 meals a day. Wow. And what we're doing is making sure that we prove concept. We believe this is a humanitarian crisis. There's nothing wrong recognizing that this is a humanitarian crisis, because if we recognize it, then we can ask Congress and everybody else to support the right ideas. So they become the right solutions. We stop throwing money at the problem. We only invest into solutions. And that's what we're doing, doing a lot of different things, not trying to reinvent the wheel, but try to maximize what we have around us to feed America. We have restaurants that they are out of work. We have more than 500 restaurants right now that they partner with us, where we are able to put the money that we get donated to put those restaurants running again, to hire back their cooks and feed their local communities. The restaurants know their communities better than anybody. Let those restaurants take care of the elderly homes, of the local hospitals, of the homeless shelters, of the low-income families that they're having a hard time right now. Let's make sure that food becomes part of the solution. One of the things that struck me in the excellent piece that you wrote in Washington Post today is that we have enough food in this country to feed ourselves. Right now, farmers are dumping milk. They're dumping eggs. They're plowing the produce that they've grown back into their fields. How do we connect those farmers, especially those family farmers, and pay them to provide the food for our food banks, for our grocery stores? One of your ideas is to radically expand the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, or SNAP, or food stamps. How do we bridge that disconnect that we have in the country right now? Well, number one, I think the food issue is something that we have to tackle with a 360-degree idea. Only putting money here, here, or there is not going to solve the problems. Number one, the food banks under the Feeding America, I know you've been very helpful in Texas with your food bank and helping them. Congress should be passing a bill to make sure that the food banks of America have enough money to buy food, enough money to cover the needs of many families suffering right now. And also, they should have enough money not to rely only on volunteers, but we have so many people that are unemployed right now. Why don't you hire people in the communities where they are, so they have a job, they're proud, they're helping their communities, all of the time we don't throw money at the problem, we are investing in the solution. Congress should be supporting organizations like Feeding America. Then there's a lot of NGOs, like ours, many others, that they are very small or big, but they are very deep into their communities. Make sure that those NGOs don't close and shut down. Make sure that those NGOs are part of the solution. We need to remember that NGOs in America, we like it or not, they are the third biggest employer in America. We don't see the value that they bring to run America properly. So let's make sure we keep empowering those NGOs, that they are so deep in every single community across America, and we take them for granted. In moments like this, we need to make sure that they are funded, so they can keep doing the amazing work they do. Let's not reinvent the wheel. Food waste is a problem that we had before, but now anything is just becoming bigger. Why? Restaurants like mine, that used to buy from local farmers, restaurants all across America are out of business right now. We are shut down. Where those small farmers are going to be able to sell their product? USDA, I know that Secretary Perdue today, they announced $3 billion yesterday, or today they announced $3 billion that is going to be going to farmers. I don't even think it's enough. I think this is a drop of water in a big ocean. Let's make sure that we don't make rural America poorer. Let's make sure that this is the change where rural America, that they've been having a lot of issues on their own, they are part of the solution. We are able to invest in them. They keep running their business. Rural America is thriving in the process. We are feeding America, and we make sure that we find different systems to bring that wealth of food that the goodness of the earth is able to provide for America all across. We transform a problem, milk being dumped, vegetables going to piles of food in the middle of the farms, and all of a sudden we find this distribution is key. Every time it's an emergency, if we don't have proper distribution, the emergency exponentially grows. Distribution is everything. If we are able to distribute the food accordingly through supermarkets, small NGOs, community kitchens, food banks, all of a sudden we're not wasting food. We're making sure that people don't have to worry about what they're going to be feeding their family. We give time to the economy slowly to reopen. The health crisis hopefully will be behind us a few weeks, maybe a month from now. In the process of feeding America, we put America up and running again. I think this is a win-win for everybody. People are hopeful. People are part of the solution. The chefs, cooks, restaurant farmers, community of America feeds America. We are all empowered and looking forward for a better tomorrow. That's what we should be doing as a whole. I love the idea of turning to rural America and asking rural America to lead on an issue that they know better than any other part of the world, really, considering the fact that we feed America and we feed so much of the rest of the globe right now. If we are seeing lines for food that are reminiscent of the Great Depression, in El Paso, the line to get to the front at the food bank is two to three miles long. That's not unusual throughout Texas. I wonder if we shouldn't be thinking in the kind of big way that we were thinking in the 1930s. One of the things you've talked about is modeling something on the Works Progress Administration, the WPA, that employed more than eight million Americans in the 1930s. You talk about a program that you call America Eats Now. There'd be a food czar in the National Security Council. We'd make food a security priority and a public priority for this country. You talk about repurposing a lot of what we have right now. One of the ideas that I love is, my kids are now at home. They're not in the public schools. They're doing distance learning, but the kitchen at our public schools is there, and the cafeteria is there. That could be a site where we make meals and distribute meals, and maybe give them to the bus drivers to deliver on their bus routes. Tell us a little bit about what America Eats Now would look like. You mentioned the schools. I was many weeks ago on CNN, and I remember that at World Central Kitchen, we began feeding Americans in Yokohama, in Japan. Me, because it's my hobby, it's something I follow very closely. I began following what was going on in Wuhan, in China, especially how the Chinese were feeding millions of Chinese that were staying at home. We began learning. All of a sudden, Yokohama happened. We went to Yokohama to feed 6,000 people, 18,000 meals a day, during almost four weeks, helping the Japanese government. Then Governor Newsom called us. We went to Auckland. We did the same. Even there, it was handled much better because they didn't keep everybody inside the cruise ship. They moved everybody that was sick out of the ship. They put them in the hospitals, everybody else in quarantine. World Central Kitchen began thinking very early on, this is not going to be a problem. This is going to be a problem that we are not even talking about it. We began saying, this is going to become a humanitarian crisis before we know. Many of the issues we see are the same issues that America, we've been facing over the last many years. We need to remember that it was after World War II that Pentagon and the generals asked Congress for passing what became the school lunch program, because after World War II, the military had a lot of issues bringing in young Americans, that they were malnourished, malfed. Here, the military saw that this was, to a degree, a national security issue. Thanks to them, the school lunch program, in very big part, was passed. Thanks to the school lunch program, we've been able to feed many children in low-income neighborhoods, in low-income districts. This is something like, right now, we saw across America, many school districts, because the money's already been approved by USDA, school lunch, through the states. If the schools close, it was a waste of money, no use in that money, to feed the children. Many schools, they've been feeding the children by having their parents driving to the school every day, or yellow buses will distribute through other states, maybe more rural states, and they will use the yellow buses to bring the food to the same place they will pick up the children. In a moment like this, we'll be very smart that Congress, White House, passes an increase on the school lunch program, and increase through the summer, probably through the rest of the year, to make sure that we don't only feed the children, but we also feed the families. So, in one trip to the school, you don't feed one children, you feed the entire family. School lunches is a great way to be, you're talking about lines. Why we have lines? Because we have only a few points of food distribution. Let me tell you what I did very early on in my restaurant. We transformed my restaurant into what we call community kitchens. And the community kitchens are open to the public, but then you keep six feet away from each other, but you only pick up the food and take out outside. We also do distribution for elderly and other people to Uber and Lyft, and other mechanisms of food distribution, home by home, if we have to. This way, I created also in my restaurants, many restaurants across America are doing the same, but we need more of, where the restaurant becomes a grocery, like a bodega, a grocery store. All of a sudden, you don't have to be going to anywhere driving, but you can be buying the very basic commodities, eggs, and some chicken, and some flour, and some oil, right there. So, we bring down all the lines that we see in many supermarkets across America. Obviously, the food banks, as many as we have, we cannot be expecting that they're going to be the only sole distributor of food. Let's make sure that we go community based. Schools are community based. In the process of feeding a hot meal to children, why the families don't pick up entire one week's worth of food? So, in one trip, we can be helping every single school take care of the area. All of a sudden, we are able to minimize those long lines that we see in so many food banks across America. Distribution cannot just be in a few places. Distribution has to happen across the different venues. We can be using churches. I mean, I'm a Catholic boy myself. There's many religions in America. It can be synagogues, can be the different religions. Use the churches who are vital in our society to also become part of food distribution. Let's make sure that we multiply the bread and fish. These are simple, smart ways that in a moment like this, we need adaptation to the moment. And we need to think quick because when you're hungry and when you need to provide food and water to the people that are hungry and thirsty, we cannot be giving them ideas a month from now, six months from now. The urgency of now when it's about food is yesterday. Those are the little things that without reinventing the wheel, we can be doing. Many restaurants, World Central Kitchen is hiring more than 500. I don't like to use the word hiring because quite frankly, they're partners. They are not making money, those restaurants. They are transforming themselves into community kitchens. We opened today in Newark. I was talking to Senator Cory Booker. Newark needed help in a Baptist church. We used that church to feed the more than 800, 900 people that they were in need because many of them lost their jobs, many work in the restaurant industry. So now we are able to use that church like many others across America to make sure that people in the short term, they have food. We need to open up the food distribution to make sure that we don't think that food is a problem, but actually a solution. So we can take care of the health crisis. We can take care of the economic crisis and we make sure that food will not be part of another crisis. I know we've got to let you go soon. Can I ask you one more big picture, long-term question? Are you kicking me out already? No, your team said that you would I'm here for you. From here, I'm going to cook for my family. By the way, I loved watching your series with your daughter Carlotta and what you guys cook together. It's just amazing. And that's what we're doing in our house, but not at the same level. I'm sure you're doing fine. Let me ask you this question. You have taught a course on how food shapes civilization. You quoted a 19th century French culinary thinker who said, the destiny of nations depends on how they feed themselves. So beyond this current crisis, kind of the big ideas, long-term thinking for America, how will we be different after this? You mentioned in one of your articles, the food deserts that exist, the obesity that can be an underlying condition. We're noticing that African-Americans, Latinos are dying at a higher rate than Anglo-Americans right now. And it may be, in fact is due to some structural inequities that we have in this country. We had the president tweet about immigrants today and the irony lost on him that immigrants are saving this country right now, literally. Who are we after this? How do we define ourselves based on how we feed ourselves going forward? Listen, I was in the Spanish Navy first time I came to America. I was sailing in a ship for mast, the training ship for the midshipmen of the Spanish Navy. I came to New York. I was high up in Lady Liberty on my left, Ellis Island, the beautiful Manhattan, New York, America, opening up in front of my eyes. And I always thought a night when I saw the sky full of stars before I know much about anything. And I thought that those stars were the reason of the stars in beautiful American flag. And I always saw that the flag resembled this amazing place under the stars where the American dream is possible. That ain't easy. That ain't simple. But it's opportunity for everybody to make it working hard, supporting each other, working elbow by elbow, understanding that you are only as good as the people that you have around you. It's not about I, the person, but we, the people. When I came to Washington, D.C. to open a restaurant, I was 23 years old. And my restaurant is very close to the Navy Memorial across the street from the National Archives. I go often to their archives. In there, we have the documents of the creation of our nation. And it's three words, we, the people. It doesn't mention Republican, doesn't mention Democrat, doesn't mention religion, doesn't mention what's your favorite football team. It mentions we, the people. I hope out of this, we're going to come with this very simple understanding that we, the people. And that amazing hard belief that we, the people, together, we can overcome anything. I remember before Maria Puerto Rico, I was in Houston after the hurricane. And I saw there all the people of Houston coming together, supporting each other, rural communities supporting each other, little churches supporting each other, the big convention center downtown Houston trying to take care of more than 10,000 Americans. Unfortunately, sometimes the best of America shows up in those moments of disrepair. So what I think is going to come out of this is that empathy is going to be the word of the day. We are, as Americans, we're going to weaponize empathy, where we're going to be giving more than we can, because always we seem to be receiving more than we can give back. And it's going to be empathy all around. And food to me is, it's maybe because, you know, I fall in love when I saw, obviously, the Bible and the multiplying loves and fishes. And I fall in love when I saw that Jesus Saints made breakfast for the apostles. I'm a guy that believes that the plate of food can bring people together, of faith, of people of pragmatism. That's a mother. Food brings us all of us together around the table. So me, I love to be thinking that food can be the same that brings all of us together. Let me give you ideas. We need to stop feeling pity for people, and we should be giving them respect. We need to start coming up with ways that we don't throw money at the problem, but we invest into the solutions. We need to change the word charity. Seems a friend of mine told me, my mentor, my food warrior, Robert Egger, a guy that knows better than anybody how to fight hunger in America. He said that charity seems is about the redemption of the giver, when charity should be about the liberation of the receiver. What are we going to do as a country, from our government to the private sector, to the NGOs, to you, me, everybody is watching us right now, that we don't just feel good about ourselves doing good, but asking ourselves, I'm really liberating the person I'm trying to help. You know, food banks, I love, and Feeding America is doing great, but if we have food deserts, it's about time that food deserts are no more. Why we don't go as a government, as a state, as a city, and in the food deserts of America, we build open markets in the middle of that food desert, as more farmers can come, can stay through the entire week, and that we bring respect to the people. If people have money, they buy. If they don't have money, hopefully the government will help them through SNAPs, or other ways, so there's no food waste going in the fields of America, but the food is there to empower those families going through hardships. Everybody seems to say, listen, I don't want to be helped from the government. I don't want the government to help me either, but life sometimes is like a lottery. Some of us, we buy the right lottery ticket, and other people, for different circumstances, I just came back from feeding a group of men that happens to live in the street, we call them homeless. Sometimes, after spending hours speaking with them, after many weeks, I realized that I could be them, that I was lucky. I was, yeah, I work hard, but I work harder than others. Some of us, we got lucky. Others don't. The system, the government should be there in those moments that you and I, we could be the guys under the bridge, that the government is there, the system is there, the society is there, the NGOs, the church, to provide aid to those people that for some reason, they didn't get that same lottery ticket that you and I. That's what I hope we will see, that we create systems that they are not right or left, not Republican or Democrat, but pragmatic. Food should bring all of us together, the same way Thanksgiving table brings all of us together. And we are even able to lie. Even if the turkey was dry, we all say it was the best turkey we ever eaten. This is actually a good lie, because it creates good well-being around, good feeling. We need to make sure that the same way every American seems to be enjoying that Thanksgiving, honoring our nation and honoring the goodness of the earth, that we have Thanksgiving every single day of the year. If we do that, all of a sudden, many of the problems become solutions. And by investing in the right solutions, America shouldn't be hungry. America should be prosperous. People can provide for their own and their families. And all of a sudden, one plate of food at a time, one smart solution at a time, we don't have to have long lines. Families don't have to be thinking what they're going to be eating tomorrow. They can be just thinking about how they can be investing money in better education, in their little business, in moving their family forward. All of a sudden, the bounty of America, the American dream, is shared by all people. I love your vision for America based on empathy and based on bringing people together. That's the way that we got to do this. In every division, you mentioned division of party, division of religion, division of race, sexual orientation, how many generations you've been here or whether you're an immigrant who just arrived in the country. None of that should stand between us. And the way that we're going to be brought together, you've convinced me, is through food and sharing a meal together and literally breaking bread at the same table. And maybe this moment, maybe one of the best outcomes that we could hope for is that it brings us together in a way where we're able to do that long after the pandemic has passed. But I'm on your team. Anything that I can ever help with, you just let me know. And thank you for spending the time with us. We are very, very grateful. So I only want to make sure because we've been in Dallas feeding the Cooks Children's Hospital. My friend, Paul Gasol, is going to be helping us open an operation in San Antonio. We've been in Houston, in Pepper Tree Manor, in Town Park, Town Homes, in Chelsea, San Diego community. So we are in more than 90 cities right now in America. I only tell you one thing. Every single person I know in America, every single restaurant, every single group, people like you helping your local food banks and others, we all want to be part of the solution. I do believe that if we all come together and we understand that maybe some have different ideas on how we should do this. But I want to remind everybody that those people that don't think like us, we need to move into an America that we don't see them as our enemy, but as the people that can enrich us and see things from another angle, bringing empathy, understanding that maybe I am not the only one with the truth, that the other people that think different than me, maybe they have the power of truth. And we can all find this middle ground, middle point where we can all understand to live with each other, respect each other, with a plate of food as part of the solution. That's the America I believe. I do believe that's the America that every single person I speak believe in. And let's make sure that one plate of food we hope for a better tomorrow. Amen. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for being with us. You're my hero. Six feet away. Six feet away. Six feet away. Wash your hands after this, okay? Six feet away. Adios. Thank you very much for everything you did in your campaign, for bringing your ideas forward and being such a good player. Thank you for your service to your state, to your city, and to your nation. Thank you. Thank you so much. Honored to be with you. Thank you. Te agradezco. Adios. Adios. Good Spanish. Oh my God. You cannot help but love Chef José Andrés. And everything that he just said represents the highest, most ambitious values for this country. We don't always live up to them, but we can continue to aspire to them. And we can continue to work to make sure that they are real. Everything that he's working on, I believe in. And I think everything that he's working on can transcend so many of those differences that seem to define us in this country today. That was good for my soul. I hope that was good for your soul as well. And one of the last things that he said about every single one of us, whether it's at the food bank, whether it's supporting our healthcare workers, in whatever capacity we can find, we want to be there to help right now. And it is incredibly fulfilling to be down at the food bank volunteering or to make a donation to Chef's World Central Kitchen, to know that he's going to use that money to feed people all over this country, really all over the world who are in need, who otherwise might not be able to feed themselves. Get in this fight and find a way to be useful. And that purpose that you will feel, that function as a part of a country that is healing itself and coming together in the way that he just described, that's going to be its own reward right there. So thank you all for joining us today. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to ask your questions. I hogged all the time, but I wanted to make sure that I got some of these questions that I've been working on. I mean, LisaD, I don't know if you're still watching this, but talk that tomorrow. You might very well do that. LisaD in Evanston slash Chicago, if Jose Andres is talking about how food brings us together, Lisa's going to tell us about how art brings us together and how we share art at a time that we cannot be in the same movie theater or in the same gallery or in the same concert at the same time. How do we do this at a distance and still come together? And if you watched when Lisa was on two weeks ago, you know that it is also Whiskey Wednesdays tomorrow with Lisa, where she'll be drinking some whiskey. I may have some wine. You may be using something else that begins with a W, but join us tomorrow and I'll make sure to ask your questions then. Thanks to everybody who was on today. We had a great turnout and, man, I'm just so pumped about life in this country after listening to Jose Andres. Thanks to him again and to World Central Kitchen. We'll see you all tomorrow. Adios.