Zimmern: A chef’s dilemma as the people of Gaza starve

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of material from 11 contributing columnists, along with other commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Every day I wake up and read the news. It’s a ritual, but it’s also a risk. A scroll through the headlines often feels like staring directly into the soul of a burning house. Lately that fire has a name: Gaza.

Two million people. Starving. Children with sunken eyes and arms like twigs, parents boiling leaves and cardboard to simulate soup. I’ve read many of the think pieces, notably Jose Andres’ op-ed in the New York Times as well as David Miliband’s in Time Magazine. Two friends, mentors, moral giants, thought partners. I am sickly familiar with their heartbreak.

I’ve seen the logistics of love and the bureaucracy of indifference up close, and yet even knowing what I know, I still feel helpless. Worse, I sometimes feel complicit.

I make television shows about food. I spend part of my professional life glorifying what’s on the plate. Telling stories of abundance, creativity, indulgence. It’s beautiful work. It can be deeply meaningful. But lately, I wonder what it means in a world where people are dying because they don’t have food. What does it mean to describe the perfect xiao long bao while, on the same day, a child in Khan Younis dies from lack of formula?

This isn’t performative guilt. I believe in what I do. Storytelling changes lives. Food is culture, identity, history, diplomacy. It’s medicine. It’s memory. It’s joy. But food is also justice, and the absence of food, especially when it’s preventable, is a crime.

I am a chef, but I am also a global citizen. A father. A Jew. A human being. And I am incandescent with grief and rage.

So how do I live with that? How do I reconcile the joyful absurdity of trying 20 kinds of ramen in Tokyo with the knowledge that my tax dollars help fund weapons that crater bakeries in Rafah?

The truth is, I don’t reconcile it. Not fully. Certainly not cleanly. I have come to understand that by necessity I must live in that tension. And when it haunts me, I do something about it.

That starts with speaking out. Hunger is silent and it wants us to be silent, too. So I will say it plainly: Starving civilians is an act of war. It is a war crime, and it should offend every decent instinct we have as Americans. Our country could end hunger in Gaza today. It could end all hunger in America tomorrow. We don’t do either because it’s not politically convenient.

Statistically, we waste up to 40% of the food we produce in this country. Most of it is pre-consumer contact. That’s enough to feed every hungry person here and have plenty left over to send abroad. It has been estimated we could eliminate hunger in the U.S. for between $25 to $35 billion a year. That’s about a half percent — give or take — of our federal budget of $6.8 trillion. But somehow, we debate it. Somehow, we argue over who is deserving of dinner.

So what do we do? Here’s what I’m doing.

I’m making noise. I am very active in organizations like World Central Kitchen, the Environmental Working Group, the International Rescue Committee and the United Nations World Food Programme. I donate. I campaign. I agitate. I cook food and raise money, and I refuse to look away.

I continue to tell stories because that’s what I have. My superpower, if I have one, is narrative. I can sit across from a fisherman in Sri Lanka or a single mother in north Minneapolis and tell you why what they eat matters. Why they matter. I try to make people visible. I try to restore dignity. Because starvation isn’t just about the absence of calories. It’s about being made invisible. It’s about being told, by bombs, by embargo, by silence, that your life doesn’t matter.

Food can be the antidote to all of that.

I’ve seen it happen. I’ve watched a single plate of chicken in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan ignite a chain reaction of hope. I’ve watched meals become medicine for people’s bodies, and sometimes their souls. I believe in that.

Enough pretending that food is apolitical. Enough pretending this is someone else’s tragedy. You don’t need to be an aid worker to help; you just need to care. You need to vote like hunger matters. Actual kitchen table issues are on the ballot every year. You need to write your representatives and demand ceasefires, demand food aid and demand decency.

I’m not saying you have to stop enjoying food. In fact, I think the joy of food is part of what makes us human. But if you only enjoy it, if you refuse to acknowledge that there are people for whom food is the difference between life and death, then you’re missing the point. So yes, I’ll keep making shows. I’ll keep traveling and telling stories. But I’ll also keep shouting. I’ll keep asking why a world with so much lets so many starve.

I’ll keep believing in a simple radical idea that everyone deserves to eat, not because they’ve earned it. Not because they are “on our side.” But because they’re human.