Butternut squash mac and cheese has become something of a staple around here. This time of year especially, our kitchen is overflowing with squash donations from local farms, and this is one of our favorite ways to use it...
FeedBack Nashville: Building the Steering Committee and Community Leadership
Changing our current food system into this better food future is not a simple task. It is a long-term, relational process that requires all of us—from nonprofits and corporations, to public offices and individuals—to share our experiences and perspectives with one another and work together to identify and co-create many different transformational actions.
Apple Joe's Giving Trees
Anyone who has walked into the kitchen since August has probably noticed the crates and crates of apples stacked anywhere we can find room: under prep tables, along walls, on carts and racks. Anyone who has walked into the kitchen has probably touched one, too — whether it’s our meals team unloading them from a truck, staff juicing them for warm apple cider, volunteers blending them into applesauce or touring visitors indulging in a snack.
In fact, since the beginning of apple season, apples have been diluted into vinegar, chopped into salads, baked into muffins and pies, and served whole alongside a hearty lunch. The 5,000 pounds of apples we have stewarded this year are thanks to our dear friends Joe and Penny Hodgson, who tend a vibrant orchard and donate a large majority of their yield to our kitchens.
The Hodgsons’ orchard has about 575 trees of many different varieties, from classics like Fujis and Galas to lesser-known varieties like Jonagolds and Arkansas Blacks, that produce fruit from August to October each year. Tucked in the hills of McMinnville, the orchard is a haven that feeds plants, animals and people alike.
One of our favorite things about being connected with the Hodgsons is how they use their land to cultivate community. Picking 3,000 apples in a weekend is no small task, but when a group comes out to help, this laborious work transforms into time to build connections, share stories, and participate in a timeless fall tradition. This year, our team got to make two different visits to the orchard to join in the fun!
As the fall winds down and our team prepares for a season of rest, we cherish these memories from sunny days at the orchard with the Hodgsons. We’re already looking forward to next apple season!
Mill Ridge Park Makes Its Public Debut
If you’ve been following along with the Food Project over the years, you’re probably familiar with what we mean when we say the Community Farm at Mill Ridge. Together with our community of gardeners, we have been growing food on about three acres of land at Mill Ridge Park since 2019. But earlier this fall, the park — all 622 acres of it — officially opened to the public.
The mayor, city council members, park leadership, students, artists, and community members gathered to commemorate the park’s opening on August 16 with a bell-ringing ceremony. Different stakeholders spoke to a large crowd about the history around, development of, and vision for the park. Each of them noted the ability of green space to bring people together and create community connections.
“With so many impressive tangible assets here, we find the greatest delight in using those assets to create intangible assets: things such as a healthier and safer outdoors, bringing a diverse group of people together, having a sense of unity and belonging in southeast Davidson County,” said Wesley Trigg, Friends of Mill Ridge Park board president. “It’s what we like to call at Friends of Mill Ridge Park a quality of life.”
“This is a place for our entire community,” added Joy Styles, the council member representing district 32, where Mill Ridge Park is located.
The morning included a brief history of the land, including an acknowledgement of the seven indigenous tribes native to the area and the vision of Mary Moore, whose family had run the property as a family livestock farm since 1919. In 2015, Metro Parks of Nashville purchased the Moore Farm and six other properties to create what is now Mill Ridge Park.
“It was incredibly important to Ms. Moore that the land we’re standing on today be returned to the public for community use,” said Darrell Hawks, executive director of Friends of Mill Ridge Park. “She wanted her family’s memories to be preserved, and future generations to have a place to make their own memories.”
After the remarks concluded, a group of students rang a bell placed in the center of the park, while guests of the ceremony chimed in and rang individual bells handed out at the entrance. The moment marked the opening of the park to the public! Folks dispersed to check out the space’s hiking trails, a musical art installation in partnership with the Cane Ridge High School marching band, and the park’s centerpiece: a playground with a five-story enclosed slide.
From the beginning, the park has truly been designed to meet the needs of its diverse community. An extensive community listening process, including several open houses and creative labs, allowed local residents opportunities to provide input and share ideas for what they wanted to see from the park. And the result has brought many of those ideas alive, including the implementation of the Community Farm at Mill Ridge as a response to wide interest in urban agriculture.
If you haven’t gotten the chance yet, we encourage you to go explore all that Mill Ridge Park has to offer — as the month winds down, they’re offering costume contests, trail clean-ups and more — and if you haven’t made it out yet, join us for a garden workday at the Community Farm!
FeedBack Nashville: Outlining Our Objective
On any given day, when you open a local newspaper or magazine, you’re likely to find a story about Nashville’s rapid changes and persistent challenges. From promises of a reimagined public transit system to demands for more affordable housing, we are well-aware that we have a long way to go before our city reaches its full potential as a vibrant place where all residents can thrive.
But, what about food in our city? Everyone in our city eats, yet the challenges to food security are stubbornly persistent in specific communities for all-too-familiar reasons. Obstacles to achieving community food security in Nashville are the symptoms of deeper, systemic issues that go unaddressed as we seek to confront the challenges of hunger in the present. At The Nashville Food Project, we want to bring people together more often, and more intentionally, to imagine how we might actually create a sustainable and just local food system for everyone. This food system would provide food security and food access for all, limit our food waste and environmental harm, and strengthen our local food and agricultural economy.
Alongside a network of partner organizations, we are excited to launch a new effort to bring food to the forefront of action in our city. FeedBack Nashville (FBN) is a new citywide initiative to describe the opportunities and limitations of Nashville’s current food system, and to identify pathways to build a more just and sustainable food system for the future. The initiative received its first round of funding support from Metro Nashville’s American Relief Plan Act Funds in May 2023. The first phase of the project focuses on three goals:
Analyze Nashville’s current food system, including issues related to food access, land access, food waste, and local agricultural production
Create a shared vision for a future Nashville food system that is just and sustainable for everyone, from farmers to consumers
Identify pathways and partnerships that will help bring forth the changes we need and want to see in our food system in the short and long-term
FeedBack Nashville’s approach to achieving these goals is twofold: it aims to center community perspectives and disrupt the existing system that perpetuates persistent issues. FeedBack Nashville uses these two approaches because challenges like hunger in our city are complex and require each of us to understand how our unique relationships, behaviors, and experiences may be used to support meaningful, lasting change.
As a community-based project, FBN centers perspectives and lived experiences of community members. This is because community members who are most affected by food challenges possess knowledge and ideas about how we may change the food system so that it is more equitable for everyone. By engaging residents and collaborating with specific communities to design solutions for the future, we are more likely to achieve lasting change.
As a systems change initiative, FeedBack Nashville moves our city beyond emergency response solutions to hunger and food access. Systems change approaches position us to better understand how different social, economic, and environmental circumstances interact to create hunger and other food-related challenges. They bring together individuals and organizations from the grassroots to the government to design creative solutions, from policy changes to mindset shifts.
The Nashville Food Project is honored to serve as FeedBack Nashville’s project coordinator. Our mission is to grow, cook, and share food with the goals of alleviating hunger and cultivating community. In 2023, inspired by this mission, we established a strategic priority to support systems change approaches that bring together diverse partners to fundamentally shift the way food access and hunger are addressed in our city. FeedBack Nashville offers a timely and meaningful opportunity for us to collaborate with partners and neighbors to build an alternative food future for Nashville that is just and sustainable for everyone.
As the project coordinator, we are working to ensure that the project’s Steering Committee and convening facilitator, Forum for the Future, have access to the resources, administrative support, and coordinating logistics they need to achieve FeedBack Nashville’s intended outcomes. Currently, we are supporting the project’s Steering Committee and Forum for the Future to develop and launch FeedBack Nashville’s community engagement strategy. Stay tuned for our next FeedBack Nashville blog post, which will introduce the Steering Committee and Forum for the Future, and provide more information on how you can support the effort within your community!
Celebrating Welcoming Week in Nashville
This year, we celebrated Welcoming Week by hosting two community events: a fall festival at the farm and a community conversation at our headquarters. We celebrated the diversity of our city, dreamt up ways to make new residents of Nashville feel welcome here, and as always, marveled at the power of food to bring people together.
Volunteer Spotlight: Meryl Taylor
Growing Multigenerational Community at McGruder Garden
In 2009, an advisory board for a community center in North Nashville formed, and one of the responses from the community was a desire for a space to grow. In addition to the garden being a gathering place for community and a sacred green space in a fast-growing city, it also proposed a solution to the neighborhood’s lack of access to fresh food — there was no grocery store in North Nashville.
14 years later, many of the garden’s original growers — including founders Rev. and Mrs. Beach — still come to McGruder Community Garden each week. It’s a space where people from all walks of life work together to grow whatever they want — be it okra, dill or marigolds — for themselves, their families and their community.
Check out this video and take a look at a typical morning at McGruder!
Sweet Peas Partner Spotlight: Window of Love
Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, Samaria serves lunch to the J. Henry Hale neighborhood out of her front window. It began during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools shut down, leaving children who relied on schools’ daily breakfasts and lunches without food. As 2020 trudged on, Samaria continued to spread much-needed joy and food throughout her community, becoming known throughout her neighborhood as Window of Love.
Denise and Amy: Sisters from Another Mister
Amy and Denise met each other when they were dropping their kids off to kindergarten at a local Nashville elementary school. They clicked, and for the past 20 years have been pretty much inseparable friends. They go on family vacations together, do lunch together, and volunteer at St. Luke’s Kitchen as a Cook Team.
Recipes from the Growing Together Farm: Lu Ja's Fried Rice
By Gabby Raymond, AmeriCorps Food Justice Storytelling Content Leader
"I'm already 30, I need to eat healthy now," says Lu Ja as she vigorously stirs long beans sizzling in a pot with a little oil. She is preparing fried rice homemade style, which she describes as different from restaurants because of its simplicity and lack of lots of salt or MSG.
Lu Ja has two young sons at home, and so she often cooks easy to make, quick meals at home. A go-to meal for her is steamed chickpeas sauteed with garlic and rice, which she used to eat frequently in Myanmar. When she wants to incorporate more vegetable into her meals, she will make this fried rice.
"The tongue likes sweet and spicy," says Lu Ja. "But this meal is for a full stomach."
Lu Ja’s Healthy Fried Rice
Ingredients
2 cups cooked jasmine rice
Salt to taste
Sugar to taste
Black pepper to taste
5 to 6 cloves of garlic
Cherry tomatoes, halved
Mixed bell peppers, diced
Long beans, sliced
1 bunch water spinach, chopped
2 eggs
Vegetable oil
Instructions
Add 1 tsp. neutral oil to a pan on medium high heat and cook egg until done. Transfer to a bowl.
Massage 1 tsp salt into cooked rice.
Add more oil to the pan and cook long beans until soft.
Stir continuously and add salt, sugar and pepper.
Add bell peppers and when incorporated stir in chopped water spinach and rice.
Combine, add in chopped egg and stir in any additional seasoning.
Let rice cook until you can hear it begin to crackle.
Stir and then add tomatoes and Thai basil leaves and flowers.
Stir and scrape the bottom to incorporate any crunchy bits.
Although the eggs and vegetables are flavorful on their own. if you're looking to pack a little more punch to the flavors of this dish, you can incorporate your own sauce when you add the rice.
Option 1:
1/2 tsp sesame oil
3 tsp soy sauce
Option 3:
3 tsp fish sauce
1 tsp oyster sauce
1/2 tsp sugar
Option 2:
1 1/2 tsp soy sauce
1 1/2 tsp dark soy sauce
For the best consistency when making fried rice, use cold leftover rice. Day old rice works perfectly because it will not become mushy when frying.
Vegetable fried rice can also be garnished with chopped scallions or cilantro and served with tomatoes and cucumbers on the side. You can also add chicken or shrimp if you don't want a strictly vegetarian dish.
Recent Favorites from the Kitchen
Lately in our kitchen, we’ve been getting creative with the gifts of food we steward! Here are a few of our favorite meals to come out of the kitchen as of late:
Julia’s Monte Cristo Bake
In January, we gratefully received a huge donation of hams from Aldi. We relied on a few classic ways to incorporate it into meals — carbonara, pineapple glazed ham, pork fried rice — but 1,800 pounds is a lot of ham! Luckily, our meals director Julia is always thinking creatively about how make the best use of our resources and dreamt up this Monte Cristo bake.
A Monte Cristo is a ham and cheese sandwich dipped in egg and fried up like french toast. Julia deconstructed this beloved sandwich into a casserole and topped it with homemade strawberry sauce and powdered sugar! To round out the breakfast-for-dinner theme, it was delivered alongside roasted breakfast potatoes and fresh fruit smoothies. A nourishing new favorite!
Mary’s Muffulettas
Ever had a New Orleans muffuletta? They're made by layering traditional Sicilian sesame bread with olive salad, salami, ham, mortadella, provolone and swiss cheese. Mary Elizabeth leaned on her Cajun roots and prepared a bunch of these delicious sandwiches to help our partners celebrate Mardi Gras, which fell on the very next day!
She made the best use of what we had on hand and put the Food Project spin on this sandwich, down to an olive salad that mixed traditional ingredients like olives, carrots, celery, red wine vinegar, and oil with some flavorful additions like hearts of palm, artichoke hearts, and banana peppers. It was a tasty lunch right in line with those hearty, rich Mardi Gras flavors!
Six-Layer Thanksgiving Casserole
Who says we have to wait until Thanksgiving to make — and enjoy — dressing? A massive turkey donation and some lingering cans of cranberry put us in the mood for some classic Thanksgiving food this Presidents’ Day, so we decided to combine all of our favorite flavors into one dish.
We started with turkey, pulled by the hands of faithful volunteers, and then topped it with cranberry sauce, mixing it up so that every bite of turkey included that bright, tart cranberry marinade. Then we added green beans, fresh veggies, scratch-made gravy and dressing with all the fixins and baked it into a casserole! It was like the classic Thanksgiving “perfect bite” over and over again.
Reminding Each Other of the Goodness
Growing Together to Build Food Security
Can you imagine 27,000 pounds of produce? Now picture that being grown by the patient hands of just four families on less than a single acre of land. This is the work of Growing Together, an urban farm in southeast Nashville jointly stewarded by immigrant and refugee farmers and The Nashville Food Project.
Bianca Morton, Chief Culinary Officer of The Nashville Food Project
Leslie’s Reliable Joy
As soon as Leslie steps foot in the kitchen, she is ready to help. She has been volunteering at The Nashville Food Project since 2014, and has since become an integral member of both the tight-knit community in our satellite kitchen at St. Luke’s Community House as well as our lively headquarters kitchen.
Feels Like Home: A Welcoming Week Event at Mill Ridge
By Elizabeth Langgle-Martin, Director of Community Engagement
Nestled on just three acres of Metro’s Mill Ridge regional park, the Community Farm at Mill Ridge is wrapping up its fourth growing season in this sacred place. A space for connection: connection with culture, community, land, and food cultivation, the Community Farm at Mill Ridge was a connecting point for almost 80 families of growers this year. Whether engaged in communal production as part of our Full Circle communal growing programming, or by stewarding and harvesting from an individual plot, this community continues to be a space of shared learning and liberation.
The Community Advisory Council of the Community Farm and the staff of The Nashville Food Project co-hosted a community event inviting both farm participants and the wider community to connect over food in this shared space. This gathering took place as a part of Welcoming America’s Nationwide Welcoming Week. Through Welcoming Week, organizations and communities nationwide bring together neighbors of all backgrounds to build strong connections and affirm the importance of welcoming and inclusive places in achieving collective prosperity.
Upon entering the farm on the day of the event, hands of all ages could be found wielding a paintbrush under the guidance of local artist Ruben Torres, who imagined a landscape where participants could be invited to paint different panels in vibrant colors before the panels were assembled to create a vivid image along the farm’s fenceline.
L-shaped tables under the toolshed sat heavy with covered dishes from the kitchens of gardeners and other event attendees. Saraí Tovar noted that she loved how the food was a perfect representation of the vibrancy of the Antioch community.
Kids ran wild with freshly painted faces, a temporary tattoo or even muddy hands from a wildflower seed ball station where Community Farm Manager, Nora, led folks in a simple method of seed saving.
Just out of sight, friends from Oasis Center led the transformation of one of the farm’s functional water catchment systems, turning it into yet another canvas for community art and inspiration, capturing portions of TNFP’s values in looping script next to bright depictions of pea pods and flower blooms.
Gardeners could be found pointing out their plots to visitors, a few friends leaving with arms filled with a hastily gifted harvest. As the afternoon wrapped up, amongst the forgotten plates and crumbled napkins, exchanged phone numbers were found scribbled on compostable table cloths, reminiscent of invitations to stay in touch.
As we continue to learn collectively about different expressions of community and belonging, we are constantly inspired and challenged by the many faces and hearts that create a place of welcome along the backdrop of a thriving community farm that often feels like home.
Photos shared with permission and courtesy of Aidan Fitzpatrick Photography. Find Aidan on Instagram here.
Anatomy of a Meal
Project Glean: A New Kind of Produce Share
Tucked on the far side of the Trevecca Nazarene University campus is a church beloved by students, staff and neighbors of the school. Behind Trevecca Community Church is Trevecca Towers, an affordable housing community of almost 600 residents positioned adjacent to Murfreesboro Pike. The closest major grocery store is over three miles away in Berry Hill, an affluent neighborhood that takes 30 minutes to reach by bus — on a good day.
A few years ago, two church members were talking about the lack of fresh food accessibility for the church’s hilltop neighbor. They decided to do something about it, and Trevecca Community Church’s Project Glean was born.
Project Glean aims to disrupt cycles of poverty by challenging many of the aspects that contribute to the existence of food deserts, including access to reliable transportation, economic disparities and educational opportunities. As they searched for more immediate ways to help, they dreamt up something now known locally as the Neighborstand.
“Part of TCC’s missional statements is our goal to ‘build bridges between our neighbors in holy love to transform the world in shape of God’s Kingdom,’” said Gail Pusey, a church leader and Trevecca faculty member. “One such bridge would be to offer a free, weekly, fresh-produce market to all interested Trevecca Towers residents.”
The Neighborstand features produce grown by the seven farmers who participate in Growing Together, an urban farm stewarded by The Nashville Food Project. But the way the produce gets from the Growing Together farm to the Neighborstand involves many hands: at the beginning of the season, Trevecca Community Church bought 26 shares of Growing Together’s community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. They sold those shares back to church members, and now, church members donate some or all of the weekly produce share to the Neighborstand.
“Many of Trevecca Community Church’s people know they are blessed, but also desire to be a blessing to others. They enjoy the interaction with TT friends who attend the church and its activities,” Pusey explains. “The beautiful residents themselves bring much to the table and enhance our congregation. TCC looks forward to increasing and promoting all aspects of Project Glean. Our motto is to ‘Love God, Love People, and Serve the World.’ Project Glean allows them to demonstrate this motto through their actions.”
Each CSA box contains 8-10 different types of vegetables and herbs. But since the seven farmers each manage their own plots, including choosing which crops to grow, one farmer’s veggie box may look completely different than another’s. Because Trevecca purchased shares from all of the farmers, the church ends up with a large variety of produce to distribute each week. The produce has been a hit, and it’s had the added bonus of bringing people together and creating connections among neighbors!
One of the priorities of The Nashville Food Project’s Growing Together farm is to share fresh, culturally appropriate produce with families experiencing food insecurity. We’re floored by the way that Project Glean used our CSA program to do just that in their own neighborhood! We’re grateful to the folks at Trevecca Community Church and Project Glean for reminding us of the deep interdependence at the center of community food security.
Stronger Together: Partner Panel & Paletas Recap
Around here, we talk often about treating hunger as just one symptom of poverty. Almost always, the individuals and families who are facing barriers to food access also experience an array of other barriers. Our vision for a more just, sustainable food system relies on the critical work of many to disrupt poverty’s diverse symptoms, which is why our partnership model is essential to the work we do.
Earlier this summer, we were proud to host a panel of partners to discuss just this. Organically, it turned into a session where we dreamt together about new, deeper ways to uplift each other, with the shared understanding that we all have a greater opportunity to thrive when we are in community with one another.
When we work interdependently and freely share the resources entrusted to us, we tap into a version of community that no longer sees people as problems to solve. Instead, we move toward a system that resources individuals and families to thrive in their own way, in their own right, with their own power. This version of community affirms the dignity of every one of its members and builds a new sense of reliance on the gifts each of us have to offer.
We left the panel with a renewed sense of hope for the future of communities that have traditionally been marginalized and under-resourced. So much vibrant work is happening right here in Nashville, and the collective work that is possible through our city-wide network of partners moves us closer to a just and sustainable world.
Panel Participants
The Branch of Nashville
The Branch strives to build a community where everyone can thrive by nourishing, educating, and equipping our neighbors. In response to the needs present in the South Nashville community, The Branch has focused their programming efforts on a food pantry as well as an English Language Learning program for adults.
Older Adult Care and Community Engagement Director Sarai Tovar joined our panel to share her perspective about community power through The Branch’s unique lens. She’s been with the organization since 2017 when she became part of their volunteer force. She is passionate about cooking, serving others, and parenting her two young children.
Preston Taylor Ministries
Preston Taylor Ministries empowers children and youth to discover and live their God-inspired dreams, develop a love for learning, and build joy-filled friendships that glorify Christ Jesus. Their areas of impact for youth are diverse, and their after-school programming spans seven sites across Nashville and enriches students socially, spiritually and academically.
Executive Director Dwight Johnson has a passion for working with teenagers, specifically middle schoolers, and enjoys seeing youth reach their potential. He is the author of Black Boy Soar, a children’s book written to help inspire and encourage young people of color to dream big, know who they are and what they are capable of.
Nashville International Center for Empowerment
The Nashville International Center for Empowerment works to ensure that refugees and immigrants achieve their full potential now and for generations to come. Their goal is to empower folks with resources and opportunities that will aid them in their resettlement and equip them to be successful in the future. Their partnership model, commitment to advocacy, community-building and sustainable service programs make their programming come to life.
Director of Education Brandon White oversees programming designed to support immigrants and refugees integrating into American society. His background is education, and he has worked as a teacher across private, public and non-profit sectors.
Community Care Fellowship
Community Care Fellowship, affectionately known as Ken and Carol’s, has a mission to serve Christ by offering hope, love and resources to our neighbors experiencing housing insecurity. They meet guests’ immediate needs, and then work to stabilize them before helping them secure permanent housing.
Executive Director Ryan LaSuer is constantly turning towards servant leadership. This commitment has helped him over the course of 15 years serving nonprofit organizations, and a strong foundation in marketing, grassroots promotion, client engagement and stakeholder relations gave him a unique perspective during our panel.
With Treats from Cosecha Community Development
Thank you so much to Cosecha Community Development for providing the paletas that we shared with our guests!
As part of their youth mentorship program, they have pioneered a before-school program for middle schoolers to grow their social enterprise, Cosecha Paletas. Through this program, students are able to learn entrepreneurship and kitchen skills.