Vink 1

Eva Vink

Professor Collander

ENG 1103

4/17/2024

Ukraine’s Food War and WCK’s Role

World Central Kitchen does a lot of amazing stuff all around the world but I’m going to

be focusing on Ukraine and the food situation there.

The Ukraine country leader of WCK is Olah. She worked in the film industry for 15

years. She started as a production assistant and then worked her way up to producing films.

Through this process, she met a lot of people and that’s how she got introduced to WCK.During

the first invasion, one of Olah's friends asked for help. He asked her to come to Lviv because

some unknown organization was opening kitchens and feeding people from all over the country.

She said, “The gravity of the situation wasn’t fully apparent at the time.” She still recognized the

signified of the mission and wanted to help her fellow Ukrainians out.

March 6, 2022, was her first day at the Livi warehouse. From that day on she took charge

of the operations. It started as a few small delivery vehicles and soon turned into a constant

stream of trucks. In one month the warehouse had sent out 170 trucks. So many people in

Ukraine got helped because of Olah, how she made sure everything went well. That is one of the

reasons lots of people got a meal during these horrible times.

When Kherson and its surrounding communities were liberated, it had limited access to

potable water. Russian soldiers had sabotaged the energy infrastructure, polluted, and destroyed
 Vink 2

wells, leaving the Ukrainian people with barely anything. When they started delivering food Jose

Andres decided to include water as well. Before water was delivered in barrels to the city but be-

cause of the threat of shelling, water is now only delivered in bottles. Shelling is a specific type

of bombarding that involves use of artillery shells. The shells are full of explosives.

Currently, some villages have been without electricity for months, and still don’t have ac-

cess to central water supplies. Over the past seven months, WCK has delivered more than 5 mil-

lion liters of water, including weekly bottle deliveries to Kherson. These deliveries offer comfort

and hope to families.

Ukrainians are determent to grow their own food. What WCK does to support that is pro-

vide seed kits including lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, beets, dill, peas, and onions. They visited

Bilohirka, where only one house remained after the conflict. They had a garden located right on

the front line. They showed WCK how they had cleared the land of mines with their own hand to

make it safe to plant. WCK provided seeds to these people, they were happy and grateful. In to-

tal, the WCK has distributed more than 126,000 seed kits throughout Ukraine.
 Vink 3

References

“Meet WCK’s New Ukraine Country Lead: Olha.” World Central Kitchen, 2 Nov. 2023, wck-
.org/news/ukraine-olha.

“WCK’s Work in Ukraine Goes beyond Meals.” World Central Kitchen, 3 May 2023, wck.org/
news/ukraine-beyond-meals.