The Nashville Food Project’s Blog
The Table Was the Point
In 2013, a Tuesday night meal at Trinity United Methodist Church offered an early lesson in what hospitality could become when everyone had something to give.
On Tuesday evenings in 2013, volunteers loaded prepared food into The Nashville Food Project’s trucks and drove toward the intersection of Trinity Lane and Dickerson Pike.
Inside Trinity United Methodist Church, the fellowship hall was being made ready. Tables were covered with cloths and flowers. Real plates replaced disposables. Cups, forks, and knives were set in their places. At 6:30, neighbors gathered for a blessing, and the meal was served family style.
The room held children eager to finish dinner and reach the basketball court, babies watching the commotion from highchairs, families, older neighbors, church members, people living outside, people in recovery, volunteers, and staff. It was loud. It could be hectic. More than anything, people felt welcome.
The meal was nourishing, but the arrangement of the room mattered just as much.
Community members greeted people at the door, hosted tables, helped with setup, and stayed to clean. The Nashville Food Project arrived with food, but the evening did not belong to any one organization or group. Its success depended on many people deciding that the gathering was theirs to shape.
In a reflection titled “Breaking Down the Barriers,” The Nashville Food Project’s founder, Tallu Quinn, wrote about what these evenings were teaching her. Those accustomed to thinking of themselves as the givers had to learn when to step forward and when to step back. Around the tables, the distinction between those who had plenty and those experiencing poverty became less certain.
Everyone arrived needing something. Everyone arrived carrying something to offer.
That idea challenged a familiar model of service, one that divides a room into helpers and people being helped. A shared meal offered another possibility. A person might arrive hungry and still be the first to welcome a newcomer. Someone who helped set the table might later need food placed before them. The host could become the guest, and the guest could become the host, sometimes in the course of a single evening.
The table made room for both.
More than a decade later, Tuesday meals continue on the same property, now known as Trinity Community Commons. The name reflects a larger transition. Trinity Community Commons began within the active church in 2013, growing from a question posed by United Methodist pastors and members: What might happen if the property were reimagined as a place of radical hospitality for all its neighbors?
Trinity United Methodist Church closed in 2022, following a fire that had badly damaged the sanctuary the year before. The congregation transferred the property to Trinity Community Commons, an independent neighborhood nonprofit carrying the work forward. The historic site is now being reimagined as a community hub with gathering spaces, food access, gardens, services, and affordable housing.
The building’s future is changing, but Tuesday evenings remain.
Today, neighbors gather for a weekly potluck. It is a contemporary expression of the lesson Tallu observed in 2013: hospitality becomes something deeper when it is not performed by one group for another, but practiced among neighbors.
Over 15 years, The Nashville Food Project has prepared and shared millions of meals. Those numbers help convey the scale of the work, but they do not fully explain what a meal can hold.
A table can hold dinner. It can also hold the person who cooked, the neighbor who arranged the flowers, the child already thinking about basketball, the volunteer learning to listen, and the guest who notices that someone new has entered the room.
It can hold hunger without reducing anyone to it.
It can hold the possibility that giving and receiving are not fixed identities, but ordinary parts of belonging to one another.
In 2013, the tables at Trinity were dressed with flowers, real plates, and silverware because the meal was worth taking seriously. The people gathering around it were worth taking seriously, too.
That is still the point.
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What Took Root at McGruder
In the spring of 2013, every garden bed was claimed. What grew next would help shape The Nashville Food Project’s understanding of community agriculture.
In the spring of 2013, after a winter of waiting, neighbors gathered at McGruder Community Garden for opening day. The garden occupied a modest patch of North Nashville and contained 17 raised beds. By the time the season began, every one of them had been claimed.
The gardeners called themselves the Green Thumbers. They were families with children, older couples who had lived in the neighborhood for years, participants in a local wellness program, and people who arrived knowing no one. They came carrying different experiences and expectations, but all of them came prepared to grow something.
The usual rituals of a community garden followed. Plots were assigned. Seeds and tools were discussed. Wooden signs were set out for gardeners to paint with their names. Yet when the paintbrushes appeared, no one hurried forward.
The hesitation was not shyness. No one wanted to claim more than they needed.
Some gardeners offered to share their plots so that space would remain for neighbors who might arrive later. Others explained that they intended to grow food for people around them and would keep only what no one else wanted. Reverend John Beach, who had cultivated every bed the previous year, declined a plot of his own. Surprised by the number of people who had come, he chose instead to share a bed with his wife.
It was a small act of hospitality, expressed in square feet.
Community gardens are often described through what they produce: tomatoes, peppers, greens, herbs, pounds harvested. The measurements are useful, but they rarely capture the whole purpose of the place. A garden may be shared without becoming communal. People can work in neighboring plots and remain strangers.
McGruder was different from its first spring. Before there was anything to harvest, the gardeners had begun making room for one another.
The Nashville Food Project’s garden coordinator observed that the most meaningful gardens contain “layers of community,” a fabric of relationships extending beyond the fact that people happen to grow vegetables beside one another. Gardening skills could be taught through workshops. Seeds could be planted at the correct depth. Weeds could be identified and removed. But no lesson plan could manufacture the generosity the Green Thumbers brought with them.
That had to come from the gardeners themselves.
More than a decade later, the work of community agriculture has grown considerably. Today, The Nashville Food Project’s Community Agriculture Network connects farms and gardens across the city through shared tools, infrastructure, education, volunteer support, and relationships. More than 100 neighborhood growers participate across the network, bringing their own knowledge, traditions, and reasons for cultivating food.
The scale is larger, but the central idea is familiar.
A garden is not simply a place where food is produced. It is a place where knowledge moves between generations, where someone lends a tool without keeping track of the favor, and where a harvest can travel beyond the person who planted it. It is a place where people practice the quiet work of belonging to one another.
McGruder offered an early picture of what this could look like. Seventeen beds were enough to reveal that abundance is not only a question of how much space, food, or money is available. It is also a question of how people choose to use what they have.
The Green Thumbers chose to share.
As The Nashville Food Project marks 15 years of growing, cooking, and sharing nourishing food, we are looking back at the places and people who helped form this work. Much has changed since that first spring at McGruder. The network has expanded. New growers have arrived. New farms, gardens, markets, and orchards have taken root.
Still, the lesson remains: community begins when someone decides there is room for another person.
Sometimes, it begins with a garden bed.