The chef Jose Andrés and the ONG World Central Kitchen have been awarded the 2021 Princess of Asturias Award for Concord as made public this Wednesday by the jury in charge of its award.
This candidacy has been proposed by Pascual Cabaño, president of Queso Rey Silo (Asturias). Due to the situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the meeting was held via videoconference.
Having become one of the most renowned chefs in the world, in 2012 José Andrés founded, after having traveled to Haiti in 2010 to provide humanitarian aid, the World Central Kitchen (WCK), an NGO with which he carries out various cooperation projects. with the kitchen as the central element.
José Andrés and the WCK workers use their experience in the gastronomic field to develop exemplary forms of humanitarian assistance, attentive to helping the most disadvantaged in the most extreme situations, and serve as catalysts for the collaboration of agents from different fields in pursuit of a more just and sustainable society.
José Ramón Andrés Puerta was born on July 13, 1969 in Mieres (Asturias). Better known as José Andrés, he was a disciple of Ferrán Adrià at the end of the eighties. Since his arrival in the US in 1991, he has managed to become a reference among the cooks of that country. Owner of more than twenty restaurants, he has participated in numerous publications and television programs related to cuisine, thus helping to spread and popularize Spanish gastronomy.
In 2020, ‘Time’ magazine dedicated the cover of a special issue to him on the threat caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, the magazine praised his leading role in this crisis, particularly in the US, and his contribution to feeding the victims.
Andrés converted six of his establishments, in Washington DC and New York, into community kitchens, and WCK coordinated food distribution with various partners. He is an ambassador for the World Alliance for Clean Stoves, led by the United Nations Foundation, and his work extends to other initiatives, such as the Diplomatic Culinary Association of the US Department of State or the DC Central Kitchen against hunger.
He has designed courses for Harvard and George Washington Universities. Named Outstanding American in 2014 by former United States President Barack Obama, he has received, among other recognitions, the McCall-Pierpaoli Humanitarian Awards (USA, 2014), Humanitarian of the Year from the James Beard Foundation (USA, 2018), Julia Child (USA). , 2019), American Express Icon (Singapore, 2019), the Grand Prize for Gastronomic Culture of the International Academy of Gastronomy (France, 2020) and the Basque Culinary World Prize (Spain, 2020). He was included among the hundred most influential people in the world in 2012 and 2018 by ‘Time’ magazine.
World Central Kitchen
World Central Kitchen (WCK) fights hunger and poverty through better health, education, training and social entrepreneurship. Initiatives such as Haiti Breathes -which made it possible to replace charcoal stoves with gas stoves-, the construction of kitchens that guarantee one meal a day to students from underprivileged areas or the cooking school with which some forty new chefs are trained each year, are some examples.
In 2017, the WCK delivered 30,000 meals to firefighters and emergency crews who fought to extinguish the fires on the Californian coast, gave 100,000 rations to those affected by Hurricane Harvey in Houston, and, after Maria in Puerto Rico, organized twenty-two kitchens and mobilized eighteen thousand volunteers to serve more than three million meals.
In 2019, the WCK joined another private company to provide meals to US officials with salaries blocked due to the lack of a budget agreement in the US Administration. He also launched the #chefsforvenezuela initiative to help alleviate the food crisis in that country from the Colombian border city of Cúcuta and helped those affected by cyclone Dorian in the Bahamas.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it launched an aid campaign in the United States that has served more than thirty six million meals in four hundred cities and has spread to more than twenty cities around the world, several in Spain, where, under the motto #ChefsforSpain, has partnered with restaurants and other organizations (more than a dozen) to facilitate up to forty thousand meals a day.
During the last year, WCK has been present distributing food to needy people on the border of Mexico and the United States and to those affected by the earthquake in Majumu (Indonesia) and by the eruption of the La Soufrière volcano on the Caribbean island of San Vicente, among others. places.
The Princess of Asturias Awards are intended, according to its Regulations, to reward “scientific, technical, cultural, social and humanitarian work carried out by people, institutions, groups of people or institutions in the international arena.”
In accordance with these principles, the Princess of Asturias Award for Concord will be awarded to “the work of defense and generalization of human rights, the promotion and protection of peace, freedom, solidarity, world heritage and, in general, of the progress of humanity. In this edition, a total of 35 candidates from 16 nationalities attended the Concordia award. This has been the last of the eight Princess of Asturias Awards that are awarded this year, in which they reach their forty-first edition.
The ceremony for the Princess of Asturias Awards will be held, as is traditional, in the month of October in a solemn ceremony presided over by Her Majesty Her Majesties. the Kings, who on previous occasions have been accompanied by SS.AA.RR. the Princess of Asturias and the Infanta Doña Sofía.
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