Jacob & Abhinav
Community Story: More Than a Tuesday Night
As Jacob and Abhinav prepare to leave Nashville, they reflect on the friendship and sense of purpose they found in our kitchen.
On Tuesday evenings, volunteers arrive at The Nashville Food Project from work, put on aprons and gloves, and take their places around the cutting boards. There are onions to chop, meals to portion, and dishes that will continue accumulating until someone finally shuts down the dish pit.
For Jacob and Abhinav, this became a weekly ritual.
Their friendship began during Abhinav’s first shift. Newly arrived in Nashville and looking for people who shared his interests in food, agriculture, and community, he entered the kitchen and decided that the knives needed sharpening.
Standing across from him was Jacob Kim, who found this funny.
“He made fun of me the entire night,” Abhinav recalled. “That night, we decided we should be friends.”
They eventually became roommates. They also became Tuesday-night regulars, inviting friends to volunteer and building relationships with the people who worked beside them.
The structure of a kitchen shift encourages this. Two hours spent peeling fruit or chopping what appears to be an inexhaustible supply of potatoes leaves plenty of room for conversation. Small talk eventually runs out. Something more familiar takes its place.
“I think it’s reinforcing,” Abhinav said. “People come, and then we become friends with them, and then we invite others to join us.”
Jacob arrived at The Nashville Food Project by a different route. Before working in corporate sales, he had been a paramedic, a job in which the value of helping someone was immediate and clear. A mentor suggested volunteering as a way to reconnect with that sense of purpose.
“I came here, and I was like, ‘This actually works for me,’” Jacob said. “This is what I want to be doing.”
Food was a natural place for both of them to find connection. In Jacob’s Korean family, affection was often expressed through a question: “Have you eaten yet?” An apology might arrive as a plate of fruit. Abhinav recognized the same language in his Indian family, where a guest would seldom be allowed to leave without eating something.
“It is the heart and soul of how people come together,” Abhinav said.
That belief gave the work added meaning. Abhinav was especially drawn to watching recovered ingredients, food that might otherwise have been discarded, become something nourishing and thoughtfully prepared.
“What’s really special is seeing all of that food being given another life,” he said.
With each shift, Jacob and Abhinav learned more of the kitchen’s private geography: how to operate the equipment, where everything belonged, and how to close the dish pit before the evening grew too late. Eventually, they became the people showing new volunteers where to stand and what to do next.
There was satisfaction in this progression from visitor to regular, from uncertain beginner to trusted guide. There was also plenty of friendly competition, spirited debate about the fastest way to cut a mango, and pizza shared after the work was finished.
Now Jacob and Abhinav are leaving Nashville for new cities, where both hope to find places to volunteer again. They will carry with them what Tuesday evenings taught them: that useful work can steady the mind, that food can say what words do not, and that friendship may begin with something as ordinary as a dull kitchen knife.
We are grateful for the humor, curiosity, and care they brought to our kitchen. Their Tuesday-night routine is ending, but the community they helped create remains.
