Through his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, Andrés has built a decentralized approach to disaster relief that activates local resources, such as restaurants and food suppliers, to quickly provide food and water to people in need.
During an on-stage conversation at a Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability event, José Andrés shared his view that the world would be safer and more peaceful if countries invested more in making sure people have enough to eat.
Stanford Sustainability Forum
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The following conversation with Andrés, held after his panel discussion, has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
You have a way of framing issues that people usually see as problems as opportunities. How does that perspective shape your view of climate change and environmental challenges?
We are talking in this forum about sustainability, which covers so many areas. Let me tell you about an area where I don’t think we go deep enough.
What is the most important source of energy we have on the planet? Some people will say the sun, obviously – the chlorophyll that creates life on Earth. But you might say fuel, especially with an ongoing war that is putting in jeopardy the energy source that moves our cars and our factories.
But if you tell me those are the most important sources of energy, I will say no.
The most important source of energy is food, because food is what moves every one of the 8 billion people on this planet. That should be priority number one: the energy that feeds every human. But then the question is how we produce it.
You’re talking about energy for cooking. What does that look like globally?
Humans need to cook. For that, you need heat, you need energy. What is the source of this energy and how much does it cost? At home, if I’m hungry, if I have an electric or gas stove, I turn a knob. I can cook in an instant. I have heat. Or a microwave: My god, in 30 seconds, you can cook a whole meal.
We’re lucky. I want to light my cigar? One second. I have the energy in my pocket. And how much does it cost me? A very, very, very small fraction of what I make every day. Now let’s go to places in the world like Haiti.
Close to 3-4 billion people in the world use charcoal or wood to cook. That, for them, is highly expensive. In the process, [it] creates fumes, creates smoke, and can lead to respiratory disease. Usually it’s women doing the cooking. Many women die much younger than they are supposed to because they take the responsibility to feed the world. If they cannot buy charcoal, they use wood. Young girls, instead of going to school for a good education to give them a future, are sent to the forest to pick up wood and help with the laborious task of cooking.
We started out talking about how you see opportunities where others may see only problems. What’s the opportunity you see here?
We are focusing on technologies that blow everyone away. But we have billions on the planet Earth that still are trying to feed their families the way the first humans to control fire did. For them, all this amazing, advancing technology has not improved their lives. Therefore, one of the biggest low-hanging-fruit opportunities we have is to provide clean energy for every single person in the world to feed their families – 3 billion plus who depend on fossil fuels.
The most important source of energy is food, because food is what moves every one of the 8 billion people on this planet.José Andrés
In the process of feeding their families, they become poorer. Not only because of the money they spend doing it, but because their environment that surrounds them becomes poorer. They get into a hole that they can never escape. They say, when you are in a hole, stop digging. We need to help those people to stop digging, because they don’t realize what we need to provide them is a staircase up. Clean cooking will be the staircase to give them a chance.
They don’t want our pity. They want our respect. They have their own dignity, but we need to be smarter about investing in providing clean cooking technology to millions of families around the world. We do that, we help a lot of people move out of poverty with that very simple thing.
What needs to happen to scale this?
We need more people thinking about how to turn this into a true investment. We need to try harder. My dream is that not long from now, a place like Haiti will have clean energy that will help move many Haitians out of poverty. I may fail, but at least that’s my mission – one of my missions. I hope that here at this forum, more people will join this effort because it’s very focused. It’s very clear. We only need to put the resources to make it happen.
What is giving you hope right now?
What is giving me hope is that when I go to emergencies in the worst moments of humanity, the best of humanity shows up.
I think we need to restructure the meaning of leadership in a much more meaningful way. It’s becoming way too pyramidal and needs to be flatter.
If we are all led by one wise person, if the person is full of goodness, that can be positive, but it still is one person, and everyone else is under. But if that one person at the top is not full of goodness, that creates a lot of mayhem.
These pyramidal structures, they are so top-heavy – heavy for the people underneath that sometimes have a hard time bringing good ideas up, and heavy to the person above that feels alone and also feels the heavy weight of, “Oh my god, I’ll be right or wrong.”
Just disperse that weight across more people, into a more flat organizational style, where still everybody knows who is the boss, because eventually somebody has to always make the final decision, but make it flatter and don’t create so much space between the top and the bottom: Bring them closer together.
We will be able to deploy ideas quicker, faster. I think this is very important, and I hope this is the type of conversation we will be having in the years to come here at this forum.
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This story was originally published by Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
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Danielle Torrent Tucker
