Feeding Dangerously

By Matt Peters

José Andrés is widely known as a chef and restaurateur. After immigrating from Spain to the United States, he opened multiple restaurants in the U.S. and abroad. His eateries are known for their innovative takes on a range of cuisines, including Spanish, Peruvian, and Caribbean.

Andrés is also no stranger to the world of publishing. He has multiple cookbooks and a memoir to his name. With the recent publication of Feeding Dangerously, he can also add a graphic novel to the list.

For Feeding Dangerously, Andrés collaborated with writer Steve Orlando and illustrator Alberto Ponticelli, both of whom are acclaimed veterans of the comics industry. The outcome of the collaboration is a striking collection of vignettes about a remarkable chef on an extraordinary mission.

Andrés’ work in commercial kitchens has garnered recognition from Michelin and the James Beard Foundation, but he’s just as well known for his work in non-profit kitchens. Feeding Dangerously takes readers inside many of those kitchens, which were often makeshift food-production sites that were set up in response to volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, or other catastrophes. Knowing that hunger has its own schedule—that it doesn’t wait for anyone’s safety or convenience—Andrés would often show up as fires were still burning or floodwaters were still flowing.

For years, Andrés has been setting up emergency food charities that provide aid in the wake of destruction. That calling turned into World Central Kitchen, an organization he founded to feed disaster survivors and first responders around the world.

An Origin Story

Feeding Dangerously spends very little time showing Andrés’ more glamorous life in the restaurant business. In fact, just a few panels very early in the book depict his original restaurant, Jaleo in Washington, DC, and that brief mention only serves to segue into another topic. Jaleo was established in the same part of DC’s Penn Quarter where Clara Barton, the nurse who founded the American Red Cross, had once set up shop more than a century ago. Reflecting on that historic backdrop—and his own trajectory to becoming a humanitarian—Andrés muses, “I live amongst the enormous lives that preceded my own” (page 15).

Andrés’ family history is another connection to the world of medicine. Both of his parents were nurses. But it was another parental influence that nudged Andrés toward humanitarian work. On weekends, Andrés’ father, Mariano, enjoyed trekking up some nearby hills. Mariano would bring with him the supplies he needed to build a fire and cook a meal of grand proportions. The fire that blazed at each hilltop feast served as a beacon that drew friends and strangers alike.

At each cookout, Mariano’s generosity fed the hungry and created a sense of community. It inspired his son, years later, to use the power of food where hope was needed the most.

The first four chapters of Feeding Dangerously show Andrés carrying that same generous spirit with him far and wide. He went to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria (2017), California during the Thomas Fire (2017), and Guatemala after the eruption of the Fuego Volcano (2018). With a group of volunteers at each site, Andrés took up the task of feeding people who were displaced from their homes.

In his early efforts, Andrés was mentored by Robert Egger, who had founded non-profit community kitchens in DC (DC Central Kitchen) and Los Angeles (L.A. Kitchen). With Egger’s guidance, Andrés learned to organize “food first responders” (page 50) who would work alongside firefighters, paramedics, and other emergency personnel, offering comfort and relief in the form of free meals. His operation took on the name World Central Kitchen (WCK).

As the book progresses, it takes readers to several more places, including North Carolina after Hurricane Florence (2018), the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian (2019), Beirut after the Warehouse 12 ammonium nitrate explosion (2020), and Spain after the Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption (2021). Throughout the book, the chef’s culinary creations brighten scenes that are otherwise filled with grays and browns—the stark images, variously, of rubble, smoke, rain, and flood water.

Joining Forces

Beyond showing the power of food to ease hunger and worries, the storytelling in Feeding Dangerously is effective at showing the power of starting small. At many disaster sites, Andrés would start with very simple meals, often sandwiches, that could be put together rapidly by a group of volunteers with a range of cooking skills. From there, meal plans could become more elaborate and more culturally appropriate to the population being served.

Andrés made it a point to also serve the emergency and relief workers he met, and that small gesture often paid off in big ways. In Puerto Rico, his team needed to get food to an area on the other side of a river, but they encountered a collapsed bridge that made the terrain impassable to civilian vehicles. They were aided by military personnel they had fed earlier, and their food made it to its destination. At other disaster sites, the first responders they fed became valuable sources of real-time information about rapidly evolving situations. The information helped them know where to set up and what to bring.

The work of meeting immediate and acute food needs eventually expanded into something more comprehensive. As disaster-stricken communities began to rebuild, WCK saw the need to also address long-term food needs. They began to work closely with locals to help create more resilient food systems. In the Bahamas, that meant helping a backyard beekeeper scale up his operation. In Guatemala, that meant giving similar assistance to a small tortilla factory. In many places, it meant redeveloping supply chains for fresh produce.

A Recurring Protagonist

Feeding Dangerously leaves it to other books to examine how climate change is making severe weather deadlier and more destructive. Records from the 1950s to the present show that droughts, heatwaves, tropical storms, and other weather conditions—as well as weather-related events like wildfires—are increasing in frequency and intensity.

Also absent is any mention of the historical, social, and economic forces that have made many places especially vulnerable to natural disasters. Humanitarian crises are often worsened by the legacies of colonialism and neoliberalism. Forced into centuries of subservience by wealthier nations, countries like Haiti and Honduras have often suffered under weak governments, staggering national debts, and widespread poverty. Those conditions have made them ill prepared to mitigate natural disasters with infrastructure improvements or emergency services.

Feeding Dangerously leaves those issues aside, but it’s a creative choice that works well for graphic storytelling. The destructive power of a storm or seismic event is easier to depict in a spread of panels than the destructive power of a trade policy or austerity measure.

With a keen sense for visually compelling storytelling, Andrés, Orlando, and Ponticelli have produced a graphic novel that captures the magnitude of challenges in humanitarian work. At the same time, their book provides a sense of ease as mouths are fed—and a sense of hope as people are empowered to rebuild.

In the final pages of Feeding Dangerously, Andrés looks to the future, reflecting on what he calls the “long arc of relief” (page 234). In places where rebuilding can be a slow and difficult process, World Central Kitchen has found ways to have a lasting impact, whether it means fortifying irrigation systems or supporting food producers who can boost local economies. In Haiti, the organization maintains a presence through a culinary school, Ecole des Chefs, where they’ve trained students “to lead their own locally based disaster responses” (page 235).

For Andrés, those examples show “how even a bit of help ripples outward through society” (page 242). No matter the odds, he has a steadfast optimism that communities can be stronger than their worst disasters.

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Note: Pages in this book are not numbered, so parenthetical citations above are based on a manual count starting from the introduction.

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Matt Peters is a project manager and communications coordinator at Health Sciences Design, an interdisciplinary health innovation program at the University of Arizona. He is a longtime Marvel fan whose interest in comics and health communications drew him to the graphic medicine community.