Andrés, who owns more than 40 restaurants—DC’s Minibar holds two Michelin stars, and his restaurants Jaleo, Oyamel, Zaytinya, and China Chilcano have been awarded Bib Gourmands—is no stranger to speaking his mind. In 2015, following then presidential candidate Donald Trump’s disparaging remarks about immigrants, Andrés killed a deal to have one of his restaurants go into the Trump International Hotel in Washington. Last spring, amid Israel’s assault on Gaza, he posted a message to President Joe Biden on X that read, in part, “I respect you @POTUS and think highly of you…but the ‘better tomorrow’ you are talking about starts by demanding @netanyahu to stop killing children, targeting humanitarian volunteers and press!” Change the Recipe: Because You Can’t Build a Better World Without Breaking Some Eggs (Ecco), his new book, is far from a glitzy restaurant tell-all. Instead, it’s a collection of anecdotes—or what the chef describes to me as “ramblings” that coalesce into a personal philosophy of sorts. Born in Asturias, Spain, and raised in Barcelona, Andrés writes about growing up the son of nurses whose lives pivoted around food; he lovingly describes his mother’s blackened red pepper recipe, or the multiuse life lesson baked into a squabble with his dad over paella. (“If you want to cook, you must first learn how to master your fire.”) He writes of volunteering for the DC program Front Line Classes shortly after moving to the area, where he taught local families how to cook well on a budget. But the bulk of the book centers on Andrés’s work through World Central Kitchen, the NGO he founded when, during a 2010 trip to the Cayman Islands with Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert, the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti outside of Port-au-Prince. “I was watching the Caribbean sunset, drinking a great rum sour, when I decided I would stop watching and start doing something,” he writes. In the last five years alone, WCK reports, the organization partnered with restaurants across the United States to serve free meals in the early years of the pandemic, set up kitchen responses to such natural disasters as last year’s Southern US winter storm and this year’s Los Angeles fires, and has served, with the support of local volunteers, more than 276 million meals in Ukraine and 110 million meals in Gaza. The lifesaving impact has come at a cost. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Russian airstrikes have killed seven WCK volunteers. In April last year, the Israeli military targeted a World Central Kitchen three-car convoy in a series of drone strikes, killing all seven aid workers in the vehicles. (WCK had received route authorization from the Israeli Defence Forces; following an internal investigation, the IDF fired a major and a colonel and issued formal reprimands.) In November, a targeted Israeli airstrike on a car killed three more WCK aid workers and two others. Israeli officials claimed that one of the workers had been involved in Hamas’s October 7 attack, demanded an investigation in WCK hiring practices, and flagged more than 60 workers as security risks, with whom WCK subsequently severed ties. “This should not be taken as a conclusion by WCK that the individuals are affiliated with any terror organization,” the organization said in a statement. “We believe we had two options—to close operations in Gaza or adjust to [Israel’s] request. This decision protects Palestinian children and families that come to eat at our sites.” Late last month, WCK reported that Israeli airstrikes had killed another volunteer, named Jalal, who was working at a community kitchen. The nonprofit continues to operate field kitchens and Gaza’s sole remaining bakery, under what a spokesperson describes to VF as “the new normal” of Israel’s renewed aid blockade, producing 134,000 meals per day with “what stock we have remaining.” For Andrés, losing longtime friends and colleagues was, he writes, “one of the hardest moments of my life.” It isn’t a stretch to see how Change the Recipe served as a balm. “This book comes from, in a very selfish way, to push myself to be happy and hopeful,” he says. “I always believe that we can all have that power to make each other better. We can also have the power to make each other, around us, worse,” he says. But he’s seen more of the former, he adds. “Friends helping friends, fathers helping their children, grandmothers giving wisdom. If you think about it, then the world is full of those moments.” Here, he talks about everything from childhood life lessons to a new project with Martha Stewart. Vanity Fair: You have worked in such difficult conditions. You’ve seen the worst of what humans can do to each other. And yet the book is shot through with hope. Where does that come from for you? José Andrés: I remember my mom, when I was little, would tell me when I would not like to eat something: “Children somewhere in Africa have nothing to eat today.” I believe that came out of care, but the way she delivered it was maybe not the best. But nonetheless, I wanted to take the good side of what she would tell me: Give value to this because you are lucky to have it. I remember being with these children in Gaza in a Qatari hospital building that was never finished. I went up to the roof to see from Rafah, everything going north, and a lot of bombs and fires in the distance, and explosions sometimes not too far from where we were. But the children were smiling. The children were in a very hard situation, still hopeful. They were living their lives. When you see people like that, the same in Israel or in Lebanon or in Ukraine or after a hurricane… when you see situations that you can argue are on the edge of what humans should be able to go through, and still see people that are hopeful, it’s very hard to come back home and complain about anything. I can cook whatever I want right now in my fridge and have every piece of equipment, and hot water, a garden. Not like I’m not entitled to complain—and I’m more the grumpy type—but that’s where the hope comes from, to try to fight against looking to the side when there is a problem. Trying to be a voice of trying to solve the problem. We all have that opportunity and responsibility. You work across the globe, but you live in Bethesda, Maryland, and have strong ties to DC. How does the capital feel to you right now? For me, DC right now, politically, we’re going…but I’ve been here since 1992, through different presidents, you know? I’ve seen Bush’s and Clinton’s and Obama’s and Trump’s and Biden’s, and at the end, things keep going on. Obviously it’s a feeling right now that something dramatic is in the air, change is in the air. I wrote the entire book about change, and about why we had to improve FEMA and why we had to improve the Red Cross and others. I tried to do it with constructive criticism. I’m still trying to improve FEMA and improve USAID and improve the World Food Program. But one thing is working to improve, another thing is working towards complete breakdown. During Trump’s first full day in office, he tweeted that you and three other presidential appointees were fired. What did you make of that personal call out? Number one, I had already resigned. I was very nice, saying, “Mr. President, I’m sorry you were not informed.” I’m just one more person in a very long list of people that has been totally degraded with words, including people who are in the Trump cabinet, like Marco Rubio. The message I want to send is, I may disagree with you, but there are ways you can do this, not bullying people. There are ways to do this without calling names. You can do this without trashing the lives and the careers of journalists trying to inform about you. I applaud the initiative of the first lady opening this “don’t bully” platform, whatever she calls it—Be Best. I would sincerely tell the first lady that I applaud the initiative, and I want to be on her team if she needs help, because she needs to start at home. In the book, you refer to Zelenskyy as one of the world’s great leaders. You met with him in Kiev in 2022. World Central Kitchen has been in Ukraine since the start of the war. Have you seen changes following his interaction with Trump and JD Vance at the White House? Are you worried about the work that you're doing? President Zelenskyy is the most respectful man—I’ve seen the love people have for him, even people that didn’t vote for him, even people that politically may disagree with him still have high respect for him. I’ve seen a man that has not used words disparaging even the people killing his people. He didn’t have words of insults towards Putin or anybody else. I arrived in Kiev when the Russian tanks were still in the north of Kiev. That’s a moment I will always remember. In the interactions I had with him and his team and the different team members, I only see people that have a mission, which is saving their country, fighting for freedom, democracy. I love that President Trump wants to end the war, but we cannot forget who the aggressor was. And we cannot forget who began the war. I hope America and Europe and the rest of the world will be on the right side of history on this one. You included, in the book, the heart-wrenching memorial speech that you gave honoring the seven World Central Kitchen workers who were killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. You wrote that it was one of the hardest moments of your life. How have you been working through that grief? Well, I’m [just] one more guy [grieving them], right? There’s family members of those people. Zomi [Frankcom] I was very close with. We’ve been on many missions together. She had such a big smile and she was so beloved everywhere. She’s the one that told me—because I’m the one that has no patience for things—“José, there are other ways we can say things or do things.” She’ll be the one that will always do it with a beautiful smile and keeping everybody around her calm. I’m still coping with it myself, personally. That’s why, maybe, I didn’t address it more, because I wanted it to be a book about hope. One day I feel I’ll be like Bilbo Baggins, writing your memoirs before you go to the land of the elves. One day I’ll write this bigger book about my life moments. Obviously it’s a bleak thing, but out of that we keep going. And when that happened, some humanitarian aid was allowed to go in again, more countries put pressure on Netanyahu, stopping the massive blockade. I know great people in Israel trying to do the best they could to bring humanitarian aid. This has to be told too. [The World Central Kitchen workers] didn’t have to be there. They decided to go there. We are not going to change the world without taking some risks. At the end, the only way that any of these people were to be protected is if we were not there. The same in Ukraine. If the Ukrainians that perished feeding others, if they were not there feeding, they wouldn’t be attacked by drones or bombs. Humanitarians should not be targeted. Civilians should not be targeted. Ambulances should not be targeted. Hospitals should not be targeted. Press should not be targeted. I think that’s something everybody should be agreeing on. What happened happened. Obviously life must go on, but in that moment I thought, Let me move away from everything and just retire from the world. But if anything, it’s like, I think Zomi will be saying, “Are you kidding? Now you’re going to quit?” When that happened we were trying to bring food by boat. First time in almost 20 years that anybody arrives by boat to Gaza. And that cost the lives of the seven. But I thought it was worth the effort. The truth is that those kitchens don’t belong to me, don’t belong to World Central Kitchen. They belong to the people of Gaza. To talk about a very different project: You’re cohosting Yes, Chef!, which is about chefs with hot tempers? Can you tell me a little bit about the show? Yes, Chef! is great. Partnering with Martha Stewart is amazing. This is exactly what you see in many of the reality-type of shows, competition or not: these tempers…things happen. I guess it’s because it’s good for ratings, but sometimes it just happens, right? Humans, we’ve all had that moment. This show was this opportunity of bringing chefs, talented chefs, but instead of putting aside the imperfections that all humans [have], it’s just recognizing them and bringing them front and center. [There was more than one] time I raised my hand in the show and said, “Well, I’m guilty of that.” But this is about that, about becoming the better person you can be. Bringing out the best angels you have within you and putting inside those little demons we all have sometimes, that in some people explode bigger than others. Martha and I, we’re hosts, we’re judges, we are life coaches, sometimes sharing our own experiences, learning from moments we lived before. In an interview, Martha said that you’re a little bit of a prankster on set; that you hid rubber ducks. Listen, you spend a lot of hours on set for a few weeks. They become your family, everybody there. This is not just Martha and I and the 12 chefs. It’s 170 people in the production. You don’t have time to meet everybody. But it’s to make everybody feel more at ease. I always was the little boy that was the troublemaker. A good troublemaker. Do you ever have downtime? What do you do to relax? Oh, yeah. I’m a very blessed guy. You can look to the other side and go play golf, which I do, or go scuba dive, which I do. Or test the new kitchen that will allow humans to cook in the space station or on the surface of the moon. For me, everything is downtime. I find my time to collect cookbooks, to read, to listen to music, to watch movies with my wife, to play darts with my daughter. Now that I’m finishing with you, I’m going to go plant radishes, because my wife loves radishes and it’s the best gift I can give her. I’m going to plant them so in 40 days I can give her fresh radishes. So I find my time. But everything I do always is connected with food, believe it or not. It sounds like it. When I go scuba diving, I love to hunt for lionfish. It’s a great way to fight an invasive species. But then I do photography, and then I can tell the stories of why we need to preserve the ocean. [There’s] always a reason to be out there in the world and involved with the world, because again, everything is connected. And for me, that’s the fun. That comes through in the book. Did you enjoy it? It’s inspiring to see the infinite ways to help other people. I wrote this book in a little dark hole, and even still, it’s very upbeat. Probably I needed to write something like that. I’m glad I did it—because I think it’s a moment to be opening yourself to others, right? This interview has been edited and condensed.