Elevating Voices: Mandy
Sometimes the path into community begins with a question. Sometimes it begins with research. And sometimes, if you follow that question far enough, it leads you somewhere you did not expect to stay.
For Mandy, that path led her to The Nashville Food Project.
Mandy first came into relationship with The Nashville Food Project through her PhD fieldwork at Vanderbilt University, where she studies immigration, racialization, and community resistance in Nashville. As she followed those threads, they began to converge.
“All paths quickly took me towards The Nashville Food Project,” she shared.
What began as research became relationship. She started working alongside the Grow Team and farmers at Growing Together Farm and has remained rooted in that work ever since.
Mandy’s research is grounded in the spaces where food is grown and shared. Her work, conducted in partnership with The Nashville Food Project, centers on the lived experiences of farmers and the ways community takes shape through shared land and labor. She studies not only what is grown, but what is made possible through growing.
Across community gardens and farms, people from many different backgrounds come together, bringing knowledge, memory, and tradition with them. In these shared spaces, something shifts. Farmers are not only cultivating food. They are actively remaking their worlds. Their work reflects the layered histories of Nashville’s land and the possibilities of what it can become.
Ask Mandy about food, and she will likely bring up kohlrabi. It has become emblematic of many things in her work, from community ties through root vegetables to transnational growing traditions and evolving foodways. Through her research, she has come to understand that food is always changing, shaped by the people who grow it and the communities that sustain it.
Stepping outside of what feels familiar opens up a fuller picture of the city. It reveals a Nashville that is not singular or fixed, but diverse, dynamic, and continually emerging.
“Food is dignity,” Mandy says.
Her path into food justice began in schools, working with Latinx students and supporting food pantries. There, she encountered a reality that reshaped her understanding of food insecurity. It was not only about access to calories. It was about access to foods that nourish in every sense, including culture, identity, and belonging.
She remembers sorting through pantry items and discarding expired food that did not always reflect what people wanted or needed. In those moments, it became clear that nourishment is about more than availability. It is about dignity.
At the heart of Mandy’s work is a belief that feels both grounded and hopeful. Communities know how to feed themselves. The challenge is access.
Access to land.
Access to resources.
Access to culturally affirming foods.
This is where the work of growing, cooking, and sharing food becomes something more. It becomes about transformation and about building food futures shaped by the people most connected to them.
At The Nashville Food Project, we see this every day in the gardens and growing spaces where knowledge is shared across languages, generations, and experiences.
Last season at the Growing Together Farmers’ Market, Mandy spent time encouraging kids to carve kohlrabi instead of pumpkins. It was a small moment, but it carried something meaningful. An invitation to try something new and to see differently.
Mandy’s story reminds us that food is never just about what is on the plate. It is about who has access, whose knowledge is valued, and whose traditions are sustained.
When communities have what they need, they do not just grow food. They grow connection, resilience, and possibility.
And in that, we begin to see what a more just and nourishing food system can look like.
