Fiona Govan
CELEBRATED chef Jose Andres, whose fame is as much for his humanitarian efforts as his cuisine, has made an emotional plea for peace as his charity provided meals to refugees flooding into Poland from Ukraine.
The 52-year-old chef from Asturias has shared videos from the border at Medyka where long lines of Ukrainian refugees have been arriving since Putin’s forces invaded last Thursday as well as outside a bakery in Lviv within Ukraine itself.
“Why do we put young men and women in this situation?” he said in a video uploaded on his social media. “We didn’t learn enough from the horrors of the past.”
Andres arrived with volunteers from his charity, World Central Kitchen, which moves to trouble zones around the globe to help provide food for those in need.
“People just keep on coming,” he said in a video uploaded soon after his arrival in the area last Thursday.
“It is below freezing tonight and I am meeting so many refugees, families who are escaping and don’t know what’s next…we will do our best not to let them down,” he wrote.
“These families are cold. They’ve brought with them whatever they can carry, which is normally just a suitcase. There are children coming. All I see is people trying to escape the war.”
The charity, which received a €85million donation from Amazon boss Jeff Bezos last year, is now operating at various points along the border in Romania and Poland as well as within Ukraine itself.
The NGO was founded in response to the crisis that befell Haiti when an earthquake hit in 2010.
Since then, World Central Kitchen has delivered millions of meals to people around the globe and most recently to those left homeless by the volcano on the Canary Island of La Palma.
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