Chef José Andrés says one of the world’s biggest food problems isn’t food

I moderated his keynote address at the Landmark Ventures Social Innovation Summit, where Andrés had come to discuss his latest cookbook, “Spain: My Way: Eat, Drink, and Cook Like a Spaniard” (HarperCollins, $36). But somewhere between talking about recipes and the future of food, the conversation took an unexpected turn.

I asked him what problem we keep trying to solve with food that food alone can’t fix.

His face lit up. He rose from the couch we were both sitting on and turned toward the audience.

“My father always put me in charge of making the fire,” he said.

Then he explained why that memory still matters.

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

What problem does Chef José Andrés think food alone can’t solve?

“One of the biggest problems we have today,” Andrés said, “is that close to 4 billion people on planet Earth still cook with fossil fuels.”

The World Health Organization’s current estimate is lower than the figure Andrés cited. About 2.1 billion people still rely on inefficient stoves fueled by wood, charcoal, coal, kerosene and agricultural waste. But Andrés’ larger point wasn’t about the number. It was about what those fuels cost families already struggling to put food on the table.

He pointed to Haiti, where he said families earning about $3 a day can spend nearly a quarter of their daily income on charcoal before they’ve even bought the food they’re going to cook.

“The poor are poor because sometimes being poor is highly expensive,” he said. “The percentage of earnings of every day that they spend on the charcoal to make the meal, to buy the energy to cook … can be up to 20, 25% of their daily salaries.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

Why clean cooking energy matters in the fight against hunger

Andrés boiled hunger down to simple math.

“Poverty and hunger,” he said, “it’s a formula. What is the energy you put out every day versus the energy you bring in?”

His argument was that feeding people doesn’t end with providing food. Families also need an affordable way to turn that food into a meal.

“When you wake up in the morning and you are already 25% poor,” Andrés said, “you wake up in the morning and you are already behind. You are already in the red ... Still you have to work to buy the food.”

The burden extends beyond the cost of charcoal.

Andrés said women often shoulder the responsibility of gathering fuel while also caring for their families and earning a living. Many times girls are kept out of school to collect wood. They are also the ones responsible for meals, and smoke from the fires they use to cook food creates harmful household pollution. According to the World Health Organization, that pollution contributes to millions of premature deaths each year, over 300,000 of which are children under the age of 5.

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

Credit: Miguel Martinez/AJC

José Andrés says ending hunger requires solving the energy crisis

“We need to be solving the energy problem of the poor of the world,” Andrés said. “We can be talking about the food, but one of the most important things we need to be investing time and effort at the governments’ level, at the U.N. level, at the foundations’ level, is to make sure that we will provide cleaner energy to the poor of the world.”

Near the end of the keynote address, Andrés returned to a quote from 19th-century French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin:

“The future of the nations will depend in how they feed themselves,” Andrés paraphrased.

Then he explained what he meant.

“We need to invest more in food and everything directly or indirectly related to food. That’s the best way to dream of a better tomorrow.”