Why José Andrés Says We Need Leaders Who Believe in ‘Longer Tables’

0:01DC politicians want to enact harmful credit card mandates that could take away your cash back and rewards points. perks that stretch your budget and make life a little easier. Losing these benefits means less money for your family's everyday essentials like gas and groceries. The perks you rely on could disappear, leaving you with higher costs and fewer options. Tell Congress to guard your card and oppose the Durbin Marshall credit card mandates. Paid for by Electronic Payments Coalition. Hey, Mims. We've got something special today. It's a bonus episode. and we've got a guest who maybe is not traditional for us, but I think is a bold name nevertheless.

0:41Bill Nye, the science guy? No, we got somebody from your neck of the woods, celebrity chef Jose Andres, who's going to talk to us about what it's like to make food in outer space, how he is doing things in the diplomatic world, and his new book. Incredible. Any friend of Martha Stewart's is a friend of mine. That's next.

1:05Jose Andres is a bold name in both culinary and diplomatic circles. The famous restaurateur built an empire from a tapas place in Washington, then pivoted to apply his culinary skills to disaster zones. 15 years ago, he founded World Central Kitchen, an organization that rushes into chaos to help feed survivors. Now, he has a new book about his life called Change the Recipe, and he tells us that he thinks food is the cure for what ails us all. We need leaders that believe in that, that believe in longer tables. It's so simple to invest in peace. It's so simple to invest in a better tomorrow. Andres says the kitchen is a good place to learn how to deal with drama because there's no shortage of unexpected problems and last-minute emergencies.

1:58That's why restaurant business is so good for getting not only chefs, but anybody in the restaurant world. Highly adaptable creatures. That's what the restaurant people are. Highly adaptable creatures that do amazing things sometimes in the middle of chaos. He's not content to do the same thing over and over. Andres likes to try new things. He's invested in companies developing lab-grown meat and has worked on recipes for the International Space Station. So the astronauts will be able to only open a pack and squeeze something into their mouth, but actually be cooking food that looks like real food.

2:40From the Wall Street Journal, I'm Tim Higgins. And I'm Christopher Mims. This is Bold Names, where you'll hear from the leaders of the bold-named companies featured in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Today we ask, how do Jose Andres' lessons from the kitchen shape his approach to food policy and large-scale disaster relief? Jose, welcome. Sorry to interrupt you. Did we have to pull you away from the beach in Spain? Well, I'm near the beach, but I'm not the beach guy. Yeah. You're not a beach guy because you're always working. Not always, but I don't think a lot of things happen in the beach.

3:25Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm excited to talk to you about your new book. change the recipe. And let's just start off. This is a serious conversation. Yeah, well, it won't stay serious. It'll be serious. It'll start serious, though. I think we want to start off a little serious because I'm interested in kind of pulling some of the management lessons out of the book that I took away from it. And I want to start off, early in the book, you write, in the middle of dinner service in a restaurant, the computer crashes or the dishwasher breaks, you need to roll up your sleeves. After a hurricane or a flood or in the middle of war, you rarely have everything you want.

4:06Food supplies are disrupted. Communications may be down. Kitchens may be destroyed. That's when you change the recipe. And I'm curious reading that, what being a restaurateur for so many years with your incredibly popular restaurants, first in the Washington DC area, now around the US and and international what being a restaurateur taught you about crisis management well i don't know if it taught me anything i mean obviously i've written this book and i i share some moments but i have a feeling like in in proper education when you go through kindergarten and then first grade and then high school and then university in in the lessons of life is far away more interesting in the university of problem solving it's a far way more interesting moment of developing the learning skills of everybody everybody has them everybody has resolved an issue in front of them big or small.

5:15The restaurant is full of those. And you learn that one day you run out of bread in the middle of service. What do you do? You close the restaurant. You tell everybody to go. You tell them it's no bread. Well, it's not possible. It's a restaurant that is popular for dunking the bread in the sauce. So you go and you send somebody in the middle of service to the bakery you buy from or any other bakery. This seems like very simplistic, but you think about it. Somebody has to leave the restaurant to solve that little problem in the scheme of things, but that for that night, that restaurant, that service may not be the full good experience that every guest should get.

6:06Multiply this by hundreds of things may be happening. the computers the POS the points of sale that now restaurants and many other businesses we cannot operate without them and and in the old days was never there like a book of what happens if the computer crashes managers myself my fellow managers where I remember working in the front of the house in 1994, 1995. I did it because I wanted to learn how to. When that moment happened, already the first day was chaos. The second day was less chaos. By the third time, you kind of learn how to adapt, but already you had kind of a preset possibilities and rules of engagement because life experience, sometimes in the hard way, show you how to adapt to a situation that you never experienced before.

7:11That's why restaurant business is so good for getting not only chefs, but anybody in the restaurant world, highly adaptable creatures. That's what the restaurant people are, highly adaptable creatures that do amazing things sometimes in the middle of chaos. Do you think that that is why you've been able to transition so well to the World Central Kitchen, which really is shown an ability to adapt on the fly to address natural disasters, man-made disasters? Does that explain how you've done so well in that world? so Wilson Dragician really was something that was created in the glimpse of a moment but obviously some thinking happened many times before when Katrina destroyed parts of New Orleans and Louisiana forget about the entire emergency FEMA response and everybody else let's concentrate on the super dome How did we leave 10 ,000, 20 ,000 people in the Superdome for days without food, water, functioning, bathrooms, things happening to people inside the Superdome?

8:32You know, everybody thinks like a stadium or an arena is a gigantic venue that their sole mission is entertaining with sports or music. Actually, I will argue it's a gigantic restaurant that entertains with sports and music. And therefore, if you are able to pivot, all of a sudden, that venue can become the most powerful, fitting place, not only for the people on that stadium, but maybe to do 100, 200, 300 ,000 meals out of that amazing stadium. So this is the way I began thinking in my brain, which is not a great idea. It's not a brilliant idea. The only idea is let's feed people. Let's not talk about doing it.

9:33Let's just do it. And that's what you did 15 years ago after the earthquake in Haiti. You just did it. You essentially launched what would become the World Central Kitchen. This organization now has fed something like more than 450 million meals, has become a major player in disaster recovery. I'm curious, in a world full of chaos and disasters, how do you pick which one you personally are going to be involved with? yeah well we we done many much more than than four or five hundred million i mean you know ukraine alone like 300 million uh uh gaza alone is 100 130 140 million so the number is much bigger so like a billion meals i mean you're feeding it's way bigger because also i count personally the direct the indirect influence sometimes we have in places that even people that are not working with us, they somehow go and they do it too.

10:37And which ones I go? Well, at the beginning, you know, used to be me and whoever friend was crazy enough to come with me. The learning was Haiti. I landed in Dominican Republic. We were able to cross through a beautiful place called Malpass, the main intersection between Dominican Republic and Haiti, and thanks to a Spanish NGO that had a long presence, many years in Haiti, and they were taking care of the camps that were created when thousands died, hundreds of thousands lost their home. And they just began cooking. It was no more than that. But the long story short is that by starting responding to them, the learning began happening, not by reading, just by being there.

11:33And by taking care of, can we take care of this camp? How many people? A thousand. Hey, can you take care of this other camp? 5 ,000 people. You talk about how people often ask you, how do you feed so many people in your restaurants or feed so many people in disasters? And you write, quote, complex problems often have simple solutions. And listening to you here, it seems as if the simple solution often is perhaps food. It is a meal with each other. Is that the takeaway? Take a look at the Middle East. Man, Israel and Gaza, they love hummus. How people that love hummus, they can have this situation.

12:13I had people in Gaza, mothers, women making bread. moments that you had of closeness that they were telling you what Hamas did was wrong. I wouldn't anybody do this to my children. And I had Israelis that even lost family members. They say, I would love to go to Gaza to be next to the people to show them that we respect that we don't really have them. And this to me is very fascinating is the reality. Maybe some people call me naive. The vast majority of the people are good people that very often are not served well by their leaders. And the simple reality of recognizing that many truths can be true at the same time in the same phrase.

13:10That what happened on October 7th was horrendous and was never supposed to happen. And that's why Wilson Dragicchi was there. next to the people in Israel feeding in the kibbutz from day one. And at the same time that I defended, obviously, the right of Israel to defend itself and to try to bring back the hostages, equally, what is happening in Gaza is not supposed to be happening either. One thing is going after Hamas. Other thing is going up against children and civilians continuously. You see, all this truth can live all in the same sentence. And we need leaders that believe in that, that believe in longer tables.

13:55It's so simple to invest in peace. It's so simple to invest in a better tomorrow. The only reason we are not able to be feeding with a system that we created in the middle of chaos, where we lost seven people in the effort of trying to bring food. It's so simple to do good. It's so simple to invest in a better tomorrow. Food is a solution to many of the issues we are facing. Let's hope that food one day, this is very soon, tomorrow, is what gives hope, that one day in the Middle East, it'll be people just celebrating the cultures that sometimes if you look at what they eat, they seem old to eat exactly the same.

14:37I wonder, one of the challenges, and I think that this is probably a lesson for other folks, is this is a massive supply chain effort. How do you set up in an area that has been devastated and get these foods and help the local economies the way you do? It's got to be a massive undertaking, and you never know where or when it's going to happen. Well, I'm not going to be talking about today because today Woodcent Drug Kitchen has amazing individuals, but I'm going to tell you the early days, which this is something I personally like to do, even when you are scaling to do like we reach half a million meals a day in Gaza to do half a million meals you need warehouses you need a lot of drivers you need an amazing team from ordering to bring it to the warehouses to distribution, to crossing the border to redistribute inside warehouses the logistics are beyond unbelievable but the essence is this one when it's a major event obviously we have teams right now that will put the machine if we have an assessment that we have to feed you know Bahamas after Dorian category 5 80 ,000 people a day it's a big number and you're in islands food takes longer to come to the island so you cannot just order food for tomorrow you have to order food for tomorrow and the day after and the week after those things take time but then if you make a order that is too big depends what company they collapse and if they collapse you will not have food you will have food for today and tomorrow but not three days from now so you need to start the system slowly but surely meaning you don't wait until you have everything in place before we went to meet the chefs when there was no communication after we landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico what is the first thing you do?

16:45You go to the food warehouses it's always food warehouses somewhere identify them you cannot call because cell signal is down electricity is down and you're going to have people with frozen foods that without big generators is not going to last long But food is somewhere. You only need to find it. At the same time, you find the chefs. It's always chefs. So once you have the food, you identify the helpers. You find the kitchens. What do you need? Water. Somebody knows where to find water. What do you need? Generators. Somebody is going to help us with generators and with the fuel. And you start solving the problems.

17:26But that's only the first part. The most important thing World Central Kitchen does, because this is what we do. Cooking for us is natural. But there is no humanitarian aid without proper distribution. You cannot wait for the people to come to you. We go to the communities. We establish contact. It's almost like a Star Trek. You know Star Trek looking for new worlds? You make first contact. But we make first contact that in real time, the communities tell us what they need in terms of the quantity of food and water. But then once you have the distribution system and the trust, all of a sudden they begin asking you for, hey, it's three people here that they have needs with a special medication.

18:17Can you get it? More important, scouting for the people that need your help. I love people of FEMA. I think they are people that give their lives and they are away from families. And sometimes I think America, we need to be showing more love and respect for FEMA. Myself, I complained about FEMA back in the old days. Even to this day, I will think that FEMA should be improved. Not cut down, should be improved. Because it's great experts at FEMA that they know what to do. The issue is that so much red tape, real red tape, they are almost handcuffed from making sometimes simple, smarter decisions.

19:03We reached out to the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., and to the Palestinian Authority. Neither responded. When we come back, Andres shares more of his thoughts on FEMA, including his worries about the nation's ability to respond to disasters as the Trump administration makes dramatic changes to how FEMA operates. I think FEMA has a very big PR and marketing problem. I would love to help them solve it. Stay with us.

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20:12There have been cuts to FEMA. I mean, what do you think about all these cuts that, you know, Doge and others are making to the government organizations, which have been partners of yours? Well, we work alongside FEMA. We've never established more than that with them. Right, but FEMA's capacity, it seems like, is going to be significantly reduced in the hurricane season to come. I hope President Trump will listen to this podcast. because the simple message will be, I want to believe sincerely he loves America. The way to love America is not to be there when everything goes well in a golf tournament or in a baseball stadium or visiting states and announcing a new bill or a new executive action.

21:03But the way to love America is to be next to Americans in the most difficult hours. But to do a true organized response system, we're in the process of providing the short-term needs of the people. But doing it in a way that you invest from the first day in the reconstruction at the same time of those communities. When you don't come with that mindset, you go back to communities that years ago were hit by hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floodings, And if you don't have a strong response from the beginning, those communities never go back to what they were. And this is something that we can do better.

21:52So I hope that to come and shut down everything, that's very easy. On the emergency side, I hope that it'll be a major rethinking that FEMA didn't have to be cut completely or huge cuts, but that FEMA what had to do was let's make it the less political possible. Cannot be political. You cannot say that when you are in power the response is great but when you are not in power the response is not great. It's not true. Everybody is equally as good. Everybody is equally as bad. But we need a FEMA that is organized and the best people to do it are the men and women from FEMA's, the EOCs of every state.

22:37Florida has great ones. California has great ones. And listen to the people that know and give them the tools to do a very good response because this hurricane season is coming and I'm very worried that the federal government is not going to be answering in the same way we used to. And still, when we complain, when everything was in place, we complain that FEMA is never here. I think FEMA has a very big PR and marketing problem. I would love to help them solve it. I can tell you the things that FEMA can improve on, but the people of FEMA can tell you too. What we need to do is get that expertise of the people that know and make sure we listen to them and make the FEMA that America deserves.

23:24So the U.S. is not prepared for hurricane season? Well, I didn't say that. Well, I'm asking. I didn't say that. has been memos inside government by experts saying that they don't feel FEMA is prepared. It takes long time to prepare because it's not money, it's assets. It's the people that make things happen. It's knowing how to call. You know, it's interesting. We've heard from the statesman now, and I'm just curious how you think about using your celebrity. Is it for your business brands or is it to bring attention to these social issues that you so clearly feel passionate about and have really kind of given you a second arc to your career in a lot of ways, right?

24:14You've pulled back from being the CEO of your restaurant group a year ago to focus more on your other opportunities, whether it's in the media or your volunteer work. I'm only trying to see what I can go by. the best space that I feel helpful, that I feel I can contribute, even only being a whisperer. I like to whisper. I love to lead from the front when I feel I have to. I don't mind to lead from the back either. Food is at the heart in essence of all of this. So again, it's experts out there. That's why I created the Global Food Institute at George Washington. And I thought, let me bring this issue as close as I can to power, only to be saying, can we make sure that food is part of the presidential debates?

25:10Can we make sure that food is part of bills that are beyond the farm bill? Food is not only the Department of Agriculture. Food is way bigger than the Department of Agriculture. Food is immigration, food is national security, food science, food is culture, food is the economy. If you think about it, food is commerce, food is urban housing development. So we can be buying from poor rural communities in America to fit the school systems. The Department of Education needs to be part of. We need to be opening markets where there is no private sector investing because they don't think they can make money.

25:49The government should be there for that, to cover that need, making sure that the poor families have access to the same food, fruits and vegetables that you and I have. When I think about this World Food Institute, when I think about World Kitchen, but I think about your other efforts, too, which which seem disconnected, right? Like your television show with Martha Stewart. Yes, chef. Which which I have to say I enjoyed and I'm very jealous that you got to sit alongside Martha tasting all that food. but the unexpected connection to me is that these are all humanitarian efforts where you're trying to get people to get along it's really funny because it's a reality show but it's actually very high concept you have people who are nominated because they have some issue in the kitchen anger issues control issues and you're forcing them to get along so in a funny way it's a microcosm of what you just advocated for America's foreign policy, where you're taking all these people with these different interests and you're forcing them to collaborate or else, right?

26:59Do you see it that way? Is this all sort of an extension of your humanitarian impulse? Well, I could do. Number one, I still see myself as a cook. I'm not even a chef. A chef is somebody that actually runs the kitchen very efficiently every day. A cook is a guy that goes to the market and can feed anybody. I'm a cook. I have great chefs next to me. Yes, Cook doesn't have the same ring as a show name, though. Well, true, but that's why we call it Yes, Chef. Accents are important. Communication is important. Building longer tables is important. And we are all in the business of learning. In the show, you see me say more than once, I raise my hand too, I've been there.

27:40You try to learn. You try to say sorry. You try to apologize. You try to make sure it never happens again. But sometimes it happens. You try to become the best version of yourself. This show was a way for me, with Martha, her life experience, to say, we are all one. We, the people, we are all together. We made the effort to say, it's going to be more than a TV competition. We're going to be recognizing that we all have flaws. and that we recognize them and we have each other's back, we can go through them and become the best angels within ourselves. We reached out to FEMA and its press office, quote, politely declined Andres' offer to help them with their PR.

28:28A White House spokeswoman said, quote, President Trump is a relentless fighter for the American people, end quote, and that he is working with the state and local governments to invest in their own resilience. We just heard how Andres wants to build longer tables. Next, he talks to us about the future of food, whether it's grown in a lab or cooked in outer space. Let's make sure that we are able to produce enough food to feed humanity. And I will always be on the side of people that are in the edges of trying to find the next thing. That's next.

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29:51This is for an editor of mine who's a fan of yours who's writing about lab-grown meat. He wanted me to ask you, do you think lab-grown meat can close the protein gap in countries around the world and or have other positive impacts? So obviously one of the companies, I'm on the board, and they hire me to be next to them, which is great because I'm not going to be doing something only if I get paid. Okay, but you're talking about the lab-grown chicken made by Good Meat that you're partnering with, right? Yeah, but I'm an investor, and probably I lose the money, or maybe not. But the one making salmon, one that is made in Israel, which is salmon outside Jerusalem, and they are producing salmon made out of vegetables.

30:39Salmon-like is amazing. At the end of the day, I buy the best chicken available. I buy the best beef available. But I'm always going to be on the side of, we're going to be eight, nine billion even. Indication says that we're going to pick at 10, 11 billion, and then we're going to start going down. But let's make sure that we are able to produce enough food to feed humanity. and I will always be on the side of people that are in the edges of trying to find the next thing. The food talk is fascinating when you go beyond what is on the surface. Two years ago, I was able to send food. I mean, others have done it before, but I was very involved in moving forward this kind of even newer and newer way, better quality food to the space station.

31:28and I served Paella Valenciana, which for me was like, okay. We serve a Spanish dish on the space station. But now the last two years we've been working with this kitchen, this guy, Jim Sears. He gave me the two prototypes he created after he won kind of a NASA competition. So two years we've been working with those kitchens, creating gravity zero food. So one day when astronauts spend a long time in the ISS, the trip to the moon, the staying in the moon, or the trip to Mars, which will take, with the technology we have right now, three years, cooking will occupy the space of those people. So those will be the kitchens that will be used, without a doubt, in gravity zero.

32:15So the astronauts will be able to not only open a pack and squeeze something into their mouth, but actually be cooking food that looks like real food. yeah because it's like they're sending a lot of taco taco bell shells up there is what i read taco shells are complicated though because they crumble i create a lot of little particles the taco shell you have here on planet earth will be a mess i am an expert on that because the rice i sent good luck was controlled but we made it so by the book trying to be a a rice like in spain yeah that the grains are not very moist they are more on the dry side so every nice so So when they opened the bag, all the grains were floating.

32:58So I almost collapsed the space station with my paella. But anyway, I think the astronauts had a great time just catching every grain of rice. Yeah. Well, it probably tasted good. Awesome. Thank you for your time, Jose. Fascinating. Until we meet again. Yeah. Thank you, guys. And that's Bold Names. Our producer is Danny Lewis. Michael LaValle and Jessica Fenton are our sound designers. Jessica also wrote our theme music. Our supervising producer is Catherine Millsop. Our development producer is Aisha Al-Muslim. Scott Salloway and Chris Zinsley are the deputy editors. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio.