Serving Up Hope: Ron Howard Documents Humanitarian-Chef José Andrés In Emmy-Contender ‘We Feed People’
09.06.2022 - 19:05
/ deadline.com
Spanish native José Andrés became one of the most celebrated chefs in the world, popularizing tapas – small plate dining – in America. But of late he’s been focusing on comfort food. Comfort food in the truest sense, the kind the nonprofit he founded, World Central Kitchen, makes for people in times of disaster.
“Food relief is not just a meal that keeps hunger away. It’s a plate of hope,” Andrés declares on the WCK website. “It tells you in your darkest hour that someone, somewhere, cares about you. This is the real meaning of comfort food.”
Andrés’ remarkable journey from high-profile chef to humanitarian on a global scale is told in the documentary We Feed People, directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard. The National Geographic film, now streaming on Disney+, is a contender for Emmy nominations in multiple categories.
“It’s been fascinating to help share this kind of origin story of World Central Kitchen and the way it began with his drive and a good idea and a good heart and his credit card,” Howard tells Deadline. “It’s evolved into something so extraordinary.”
The idea for the documentary sprang from Howard’s earlier NatGeo film, Rebuilding Paradise, about the wildfire that destroyed the bucolic town of Paradise in Northeastern California in 2018. Andrés and his World Central Kitchen team responded to that crisis, just as they did in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, Australia after brutal brushfires, in Beirut after a massive explosion, in South Africa after ruinous floods, in Tonga after the undersea volcanic eruption, and so many other catastrophic events.
“I’m looking at that footage,” Howard recalls of working on the edit of Rebuilding Paradise. “And I thought, there he was, there