Chef José Andrés on pandemic accelerating America’s food crisis

Spanish-American Chef and World Central Kitchen Founder joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss how COVID-19 is impacting food security and break down what a vaccine would mean for restaurant owners.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: There are growing fears about an unfolding food crisis in the US brought on by this pandemic, the economic downturn leaving nearly 20 million children without food on the table. Chef Jose Andres has been crisscrossing the country to address the crisis. Now he says it's time for the federal government to act. I spoke to him yesterday about this issue. We started the conversation by talking about the scale and scope of the crisis and how it differs from other disasters he's responded to.

JOSE ANDRES: We've seen that between 27 all the way to 45, 50 million Americans are having a real problem in putting food on the table. And this is very easy to understand why. Take a look at how many people lost their jobs, especially in my industry, in the restaurant, hotel, tourism, food industry. This is real. An organization like World Central Kitchen with thousands of restaurants, tens of thousands of volunteers, we are on our way to do 40 million meals. So I think so far we are 35, 36 million meals.

We are an emergency organization. But we saw that this pandemic created real emergencies where hospitals, they were shutting down their cafeterias. Why? Because people were not going to work. Because people were getting infected. Because people were afraid. Because subways shut down. That's another reason. And all of this time we were like, with all due respect to them, but like firefighters, but in this case food fighters, where there is a problem here we show up and we fix it. So food is not a problem.

So what we've seen is long lines in food banks. Food banks that received from the federal government really like $500 million a year only. This is like $20 per person that is hungry for the entire year. This is like two or three cans of chickpeas to feed yourself for a year. It doesn't make any sense. We've seen the government putting $14 billion giving to farmers to dump milk and potatoes and [INAUDIBLE] as we were having people that were hungry.

So what we see by being on the ground is that I have seen people that is not the people ever you expected even to see in a hunger line, people that lost their jobs, people that all of the sudden they had no money to take care of their rent, or their electricity, or their phone line which is important. We need to see it not as a luxury but as a necessity, and all of the sudden they had to start making very big, hard choices. Americans going hungry and nobody was there to solve that simple problem.

AKIKO FUJITA: And you've been quite critical of the government response. You recently penned an op-ed saying that there needs to be a professionalized response to the issue of hunger. What exactly did you mean? And what needs to change in a fundamental way about the way the federal government responds to this?

JOSE ANDRES: In many ways, in an emergency, hunger is just a distribution issue. FEMA sometimes, they love to put those videos and those photos of showing all the assets that they have in place somewhere. But let me tell you, you'll never see us showing assets. You only see us showing us feeding people. Assets with a good distribution equals people go hungry and people go thirsty.

So I'm putting [INAUDIBLE] in FEMA because this is an emergency. This is the biggest emergency as a country we had in 100 years. And FEMA responsibility should be put those funds that Congress empowers them to have to use that money to feed, in this case in an emergency, people in need.

So how the federal government felt? Because we're being able to do what we do, soup kitchens, Feeding America food banks, organizations like ours, because we have a lot of philanthropy dollars that have been coming our way. But this is not sustainable.

AKIKO FUJITA: You talk about the restaurants that have helped out the World Central Kitchen. Of course, they have really been struggling over the last several months. And it feels like there is this wall that a lot of these small independent restaurants will face come the end of the year because of the surge that's happening from the virus, because of the restrictions being imposed on a state by state level. What are the conversations you're having with restaurant owners right now? And what will it take for some of these restaurants to survive in terms of the amount that Congress needs to set aside?

JOSE ANDRES: Well, as you know, we've been talking about the Restaurant Act. We've been talking about the PP and the PPP. I have myself restaurants, I received PPP early on. But we need to understand that PPP actually was a good tool that was not perfect, but that we have to keep improving. PPP specifically it was great to be able to pay the most important people to me which are the workers, the employees, the waiters, the cooks. We need to make sure that Congress is there supporting those employees, supporting those businesses that they're having a hard time paying rent.

AKIKO FUJITA: And finally, chef, you talked about the importance of looking at the present. And when you look outside of the US globally, the UN World Food Program putting out a pretty staggering number, saying 270 million people are headed toward starvation. There is a food pandemic as they describe it, that certainly could be complicated by issues related to climate as well. How are you looking at what's playing out, especially in developing countries, those that don't have the kind of resources that the US does?

JOSE ANDRES: Listen, we all know that we produce enough food to feed planet Earth. I mentioned before distribution, this is a problem of distribution. We see in farming areas that while they produce food, you have people that are hungry. And this is the conundrum that we have to resolve. In this pandemic, we've been [INAUDIBLE] we've been feeding farmers in Salinas.

The same people that are putting vegetables in our shops in the restaurants or in the supermarket so you and I we can feed our families, the same people that produce food are going hungry. We need to solve this problem because it's nonsense that the food producers are going hungry. Until this doesn't happen, it's going to be very difficult to believe we can end food hunger in the world.

But it's why I'm asking President Biden and every president of every nation in the world, we need to have somebody near the president near the power centers that thinks of food as a national security issue. The same way that September 11 happened, the same way that this pandemic happened, one day we may be in a moment where all that food that looks plentiful right now is not there anymore.

I was in Beirut two or the three days after the explosion. Very much all the grain that they had to feed the refugees was in the same tower on the port next to the boat that exploded. All of the Southern Lebanon didn't had enough grain for more than two weeks to feed hundreds of thousands across Lebanon.

Let's make sure that we diversify food production. Let's make sure that we invest in big companies but also smaller companies. Let's make sure that we come up with ways to make sure that food will be plentiful. If not, one day we're going to have a drought, one day we're going to have a plague, one day we're going to have fires, one day we're going to have water. Like this happening right now all across the world at the same time on top of war, on top of inequality. One day, we may wake up and that breakfast table that was plentiful, one day many people will have a problem bringing food to the table.

So let's make sure we give the importance to food that they serve. The most important energy on planet Earth is not oil. Oil only moves my car. The most important energy on this planet is food. More food is what moves all of us.

AKIKO FUJITA: Chef Jose Andres there. The owner of ThinkFoodGroup and the founder of World Central Kitchen.