DURING his March 7 State of the Union Address, President Joe Biden proudly told listeners that the United States would “establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine and temporary shelters.”

The project, said the Pentagon, which plans to deploy 1,000 troops to construct the dock, would take at least two months. It was met with scepticism, viewed as a slow, inadequate and expensive response, far removed from what is really needed — the opening up of routes to aid trucks.

A week later, a ship carrying 200 tons of supplies for starving Palestinians docked on Gaza’s northern shore. 

The ship did not belong to the US navy. It was dispatched from Cyprus by a charity, World Central Kitchen, established by a US-based Spanish chef, Jose Andres. The charity used its own personnel in Gaza to quickly build a landing jetty out of war rubble.

“This is very complicated. This is highly challenging,” Andres told a group of US senators in a private meeting. “But at the same time, I’m tired of waiting.”

But even Andres agrees that maritime deliveries and air drops are not as effective as trucks. “People are suffering. But by road is the way. New route must be open in the north. A ceasefire asap,” he wrote on X.

Andres is sometimes described by the US press as a “celebrity chef,” but that moniker greatly diminishes his contribution in feeding the desperate and war-torn. World Central Kitchen — and Andres himself — was on the ground in Ukraine within a week of the February 24 2022 Russian invasion and early on lost six of its volunteers to the conflict.

“As a cook, as a chef, when I founded this organisation, I never expected that this will happen,” Andres said recently. “And I almost wanted to pull World Central Kitchen immediately out of Ukraine. But the locals told me, Jose, you cannot leave. We need you.”

World Central Kitchen has now provided more than 260 million meals to Ukrainians. It also has 65 kitchens across Gaza that have served 32 million meals since the war there started. 

That number will now be boosted by another 37 million meals from Andres’s food-laden ship, an effort conducted in partnership with Open Arms, a Spanish search-and-rescue group. Preparations are under way in Cyprus to dispatch a second aid ship with an even bigger cargo of at least 300 tons of supplies.

Andres first made his name on the US culinary scene with a Spanish tapas restaurant in DC, since branching out to other venues and cuisines. World Central Kitchen was founded in 2010 to answer the immediate post-earthquake crisis in Haiti. Andres has spent time there as well as in Ukraine and Gaza under their current wartime conditions.

The chef has also taken on Donald Trump, pulling out of a restaurant deal at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, after Trump’s anti-immigrant remarks on the presidential campaign trail, that included describing Mexicans as “rapists.” 

A legal battle ensued that was settled amicably, but Andres soon distanced himself from the Trump campaign and ensuing presidency. In 2017 he tweeted: “Thank you @realDonaldTrump for showing me everyday that we did the right thing pulling out of your hotel.”

With the world’s eyes on Gaza, Andres tweeted to Biden: “I respect you  … but the ‘better tomorrow’ you are talking about starts by demanding @netanyahu to stop killing children, targeting humanitarian volunteers and press! To open more routes by road into Gaza to feed everyone […] the effort required to build docks and bring aid by boat vs pushing to allow in the thousands of trucks full of aid waiting at checkpoints! Military intervention even for humanitarian purposes, is not the answer nor welcomed by the people of Gaza…or myself.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.