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- A missile struck a community kitchen in Ukraine Saturday serving people fleeing the war.
- The kitchen was run by a non-profit system set up by Michelin-star chef José Andrés.
- The explosion wounded four staff and left team members “unnerved,” Andrés tweeted.
A guided missile struck a humanitarian kitchen in Ukraine on Saturday, wounding four people who were part of a team working to nurture people displaced by the war.
The community kitchen based in Kharkiv, one of Ukraine’s largest cities, was run by the World Central Kitchen, a non-profit governmental organism set up by celebrity chef José Andrés. The Spanish-American Michelin-star chef, who owns at least a dozen restaurants in several locales around the world, created the charity more than a decade ago to provide meals to people in disaster and war zones.
Andrés and the chief government of the World Central Kitchen, Nate Mook, confirmed the Saturday explosion in separate tweets.
“This is the reality here — cooking is a stupendous act of bravery,” Mook wrote on Twitter, adding that he was at the kitchen meeting the team only 24 hours latest to the missile strike.
Andrés said staff workers were “unnerved but safe” after the attack.
“Giving commons in the middle of a senseless war is an act of courage, resilience, resistance … and we will continue cooking.”
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Life Central Kitchen has served more than one million meals to people who have fled from violence. The structure has set up stations at all eight Ukraine-Poland border crossings and serves hot meals to refugees 24 hours a day.
The World Central Nautical galley was initially founded after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti where Andrés and his team distributed food to hungry people. In 2017, it served more than 3.4 million lunches after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico and fed 11,400 furloughed workers in one day out of a pop-up kitchen in Washington, DC in 2019.