The Nashville Food Project’s Blog
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.
In front of her home on Jo Johnston Avenue, Samaria Leach is setting out a stack of chapter books. “Especially during the summer, I like to make sure the kids have something to read when they come to get their food,” she explains. “They seem to really like it.”
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.
Eventually, schools resumed for the fall semester, as did regular school meals for the kids who had become frequent visitors to the Window. But the question stuck with Samaria: where were these kids normally getting food during the summer months, or even spring break? She knew that Window of Love needed to stretch beyond those lonely pandemic months.
“God placed on my heart to continue and continue, so that’s what I did: continue and continue and continue.” —Samaria Leach, Window of Love
With support from her neighbors and a network across the city, Samaria was able to continue, opening the Window three days a week during the summer and other school breaks. Now, she shares food with between 50 and 75 kids each week during the summer months, in addition to educational resources and even the occasional field trip!
The gap that Window of Love fills is one that affects thousands of children every summer: local school systems provide a reliable source of nutrition for families that are impacted by food insecurity. In fact, every school year, Metro Nashville Public Schools serves around 4 million breakfasts and 8.4 million lunches. But during the summer months, without these daily meals, many youth are at risk of hunger. The Nashville Food Project is proud to work alongside partners like Window of Love through our summer children’s meals program, Sweet Peas, sponsored by Jackson National Life Insurance Company (Jackson®) for the fifth year in a row. This summer alone, the program distributed nearly 11,500 meals to kids across Nashville.
Through Sweet Peas, The Nashville Food Project was able to help Window of Love scale up their efforts to build community and alleviate hunger this summer by supplementing the snacks Samaria was already making with 90 additional nutritious snacks full of hard-to-come-by fruits and veggies each week. The partnership made it possible for kids in Samaria’s North Nashville neighborhood to try new foods, too.
“One day we had salads,” explains Samaria, “and one of the little boys was like, ‘I don’t eat salads!’ I said, ‘what if I add something special?’ So I put some turkey on there for him, added a little cheese, and he asked for a salad again the next day. It’s life-changing for the kids.”
It takes a lot of collaboration to get salads like this one in front of — and in the bellies of! — these kids. And Window of Love isn’t the only place it’s happening. In addition to Window of Love, funding from Jackson® made it possible for us to share meals with children at 18 other sites this summer.
“It takes a community,” says Samaria. “It’s not just about me. The Window is about everybody — communities working together — because our goal is the same thing: to make sure no child is going hungry.”
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.
By Arianna Nimocks, Volunteer Engagement Manager
“I HATE possums, which Amy knows very well. She gleefully had her husband and sons leave a very-much alive possum in a bucket on my front porch. When I screamed, slammed the door and locked it, her family mocked me further by letting the nasty creature swing by its tail from their finger outside my living room window!”
(Direct quote from Denise Sesler.)
Amy Lee and Denise Sesler go together like… peas in a pod. Sisters from another mister. As Amy puts it, “Denise is an extrovert who will talk to anyone. I’m pretty much the opposite. She makes friends wherever we go; I make jokes.”
Amy and Denise have been friends since their kids started kindergarten. They didn’t realize they had lived on the same street until then. They clicked, and for the past 20 years have been pretty much inseparable friends. They go on family vacations together, go to concerts, plays, and author events (Michelle Obama twice!), and volunteer together at St. Luke’s Kitchen as a Cook Team on a regular basis. Denise says, “we have survived fighting like sisters, because that’s what we are. Deranged, high-maintenance sisters.” (Correction, from Amy: “one deranged, high maintenance person and one normal functioning person.”)
Over the months I’ve worked with Amy and Denise, I have learned so much (is there a thing as too much?) from their hilarious back-and-forth.
One of Amy’s favorite stories to tell about Denise is this one: “I broke my finger and asked her to take me to the ER. She had to finish drying her hair and applying makeup and didn’t pick me up for almost an hour. Then the nurse asked if she was my mom so there was karma.” Amy adds: “Denise says this an exaggeration, [but] Denise’s husband is on my side.”
Denise responds with, “Amy’s broken finger time frame is a complete exaggeration and I want an attorney!” and “Sadly, the nurse thinking I was Amy’s mom is not an exaggeration, and she has often called me ‘Mom’ ever since.”
Most importantly, I’ve learned about friendship through them and their joint support for the mission of The Nashville Food Project.
Denise began volunteering soon after her friend Tallu Quinn started the organization, and she “has been an enthusiastic supporter ever since.” Denise recruited Amy and they have both been volunteering together for 10 years.
Amy says that her favorite part of volunteering with The Nashville Food Project has been “the camaraderie over the years at St Lukes.” She notes that, “while the staff and volunteers have changed some, the general atmosphere has been a constant. It has always been a group that is working hard, all while having fun, laughing, and enjoying the fellowship of each other. It's good people, doing good work, for a great cause.”
A tight community at St. Luke’s is the “magic sauce,” as one of our evening volunteers, Andrea Pruijssers, put it, of why growing, cooking and sharing is so inextricably woven together with relationships. Volunteers don’t just prepare food together, they become friends and build bridges together.
Denise’s dedication to the Food Project’s mission is profound. She says, “When we share a meal, we share love and community. When we have access to a warm meal, we are strengthened to meet the hardships that come our way. When we prevent food waste where possible, we lessen the growth of landfills and toxins that are released into our air, and we facilitate growth of more food for those in need. When we volunteer with others to bring these things about, we are blessed beyond measure. Good things happen around the table and in the breaking of bread. The Food Project proves that every day.”
Here’s to seeing if Amy and Denise will ever record themselves during one of our prep sessions and create a podcast out of it…! Oh, and, next time you see them, ask them about how they “run” the Nashville marathon. You won’t be disappointed.
Recipes from the Growing Together Farm: Lu Ja's Fried Rice
By Gabby Raymond, AmeriCorps Food Justice Storytelling Content Leader
Lu Ja, Growing Together’s newest farmer
"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
Mary Susan is one of those people that light up a room as soon as they step in. With an incredibly witty and fun sense of humor, storytelling that you could listen to for hours, and a laugh that feels like a warm hug, Mary Susan is an integral part of our community.
By Arianna Nimocks, Meals Volunteer Coordinator
Mary Susan is one of those people that light up a room as soon as they step in. With an incredibly witty and fun sense of humor, storytelling that you could listen to for hours, and a laugh that feels like a warm hug, Mary Susan is an integral part of our community.
Mary Susan first got involved with The Nashville Food Project after noticing The Nashville Food Project’s trucks at Woodmont Christian Church while running errands, soon after she and her husband moved to Nashville. Coincidentally, soon after, she attended a luncheon where Tallu gave a talk about the Food Project. She says she had wanted to volunteer with “an organization that focused on the hunger issue in our community,” and this talk “convinced [her] that this was what [she] wanted.”
Over the years, Mary Susan has delivered meals as a food truck volunteer and prepped meals at our St. Luke’s Preschool Kitchen. When Covid-19 came around, Mary Susan notes how difficult it was to have to take a step back from participating at the Food Project, especially as she “was very connected with the staff and fellow volunteers.” She says “[volunteers] were all delighted when [they] could return to [their] ‘jobs’.”
Mary Susan now volunteers on a bi-weekly basis at our Monday afternoon St. Luke’s prep sessions, and has stepped up to help on Tuesday afternoons with fellow volunteer friend, Caren.
Mary Susan has made the Food Project feel like a home since my very first prep session at St. Luke’s. She immediately greeted me with a warm welcome and we talked about our shared love of living in the hill country of San Antonio, Texas.
“The Nashville Food Project is special in my life,” Mary Susan says. “It allows me to work with uplifting people who remind me of the goodness in our world.”
We are grateful for Mary Susan’s warmth and heart she brings to our organization. We could not do the work we do without volunteers like Mary Susan!
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.
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.
In the warmest, busiest months, the Growing Together farm is overflowing with handmade trellises of tomatoes, towering okra plants, and bright red Dalle Khursani, Nepali hot peppers. The farmers, who all came to the U.S. from Bhutan and Myanmar, tend crops from their home countries alongside Middle Tennessee favorites. Cabbages thrive next to creeping vines of bitter gourd. Many languages echo across the field as farmers trade jokes and bits of advice.
“Our exchange of knowledge makes me a more successful grower,” says La Sai Roi, a Burmese farmer who has been with the Growing Together program since 2021. “I am so thankful for this program and all the farmers.”
The farm is as multigenerational as it is multicultural. People of all ages cultivate thriving rows, wash bundles of spinach under tents, and pack veggie boxes for pickup. Growing traditions with origins in the farmers’ home countries, like seed saving or companion planting, are passed down to younger generations through practical experience. It’s a close-knit community where farmers continually deepen connections to their countries of origin and to each other.
The farm’s Community Supported Agriculture program extends a pathway for farmers to get more plugged into the local community, forming meaningful relationships with customers while generating income that supports family webs in Nashville and beyond. If you’re looking to cook with a wider variety of veggies, support immigrant and refugee farmers, and build community food security along the way, consider supporting Growing Together this spring by purchasing a CSA share.
Bianca Morton, Chief Culinary Officer of The Nashville Food Project
Bianca Morton was in culinary school, watching an instructor whisk together milk and flour to make béchamel sauce, when it dawned on her: she had watched her mother make the same thing her whole life. It was just mac and cheese sauce.
Bianca Morton was in culinary school, watching an instructor whisk together milk and flour to make béchamel sauce, when it dawned on her: she had watched her mother make the same thing her whole life. It was just mac and cheese sauce.
Since that day, she’s experienced the same moment of recognition many times over. In fact, it’s been a theme of Chef Bianca’s four years at The Nashville Food Project – remarkable food, without pretense — served to after-school programs, immigrant communities, homeless outreach organizations and so many others across the city.
“You can call it whatever you want, but at the end of the day, good food is good food,” she says.
Bianca was the first-ever employee of The Nashville Food Project with a culinary degree. When the organization hired her in 2018, they were just months away from moving into a brand-new building with a commercial kitchen — a pretty drastic change from their beginnings in a modest church kitchen. The meals team was trading pots and pans for shiny braising tilt skillets that could hold up to 40 gallons. And with the addition of Bianca, they were ready for it. Almost overnight, food production scaled up from 75 to 750 servings at a time.
Now, as Chief Culinary Officer, Bianca entrusts her team with the daily tasks of food preparation — the systems she put in place years ago means they can cook 1,200 meals each day like clockwork. Instead, she’s creating ways to invite Nashvillians into her expansive culinary world and finding hope in the fact that people from marginalized communities get to taste butternut squash because of the work she’s doing at the Food Project.
“I grew up in a food desert,” she explains. “I didn’t know what a butternut squash was. But this role gives me the opportunity to introduce foods like that to kids in the same situations — I get to show them that there is more out there. Your current circumstance is not a limiting factor in how far you can go.”
Her words echo the organization’s vision for a Nashville where everyone has access to the food they both need and want: a world where good food is not off-limits to certain people, in certain neighborhoods. A world in which bottle gourds and garlic cloves are the doorway to thriving communities.
“This is not just my job — this is who I am, as a chef and as a person,” she says.
Bianca has earned her white chef’s coat a thousand times over. But she doesn’t need it to validate her deep understanding of the transformative power of food. She’ll just keep coming to the kitchen with her passion for delicious, nutritious, approachable food, using béchamel sauce to make mac and cheese.
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.
Leslie DiNella’s smile is contagious.
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.
Leslie shares, “Around 2014 while searching for a volunteer project that I could do with my teenagers around the holidays, I happened on The Nashville Food Project and immediately felt embraced by everyone at the Woodmont location. The mission of growing and cooking healthful food immediately resonated (as I love cooking and eating good food myself!), but I also appreciated that I always met interesting people, was actually being well-utilized as a volunteer, and it was reliably just a joyful place to be!”
“When plans were underway for the California kitchen, I decided to try St. Luke’s since we were all going to have to move and once again I felt like I had landed in a community that was so happily passionate and I am still thrilled to be a part of that.”
Leslie has stepped up into a leadership role as part of a Cook Team at our headquarters kitchen in addition to a prep volunteer at St. Luke’s. From helping us with roasting veggies to making mummy hot dogs, Leslie is always uplifting everyone in our spaces and leading by her example.
Apart from volunteering, Leslie is a talented cellist, playing with the Nashville Philharmonic Orchestra (“Shameless plug,” she says, “Free concerts! See nashvillephilharmonic.org”). “Otherwise,” she says, her time is spent “playing tennis, walking my sweet dog (Olive), traveling with my also-sweet husband (Tom), reading, cooking, volunteering at Norman Binkley Elementary, and waiting for those teenagers-now-young-adults to answer my texts.”
Leslie's passion for good food impacts not only the people she's cooking for, but the people she's cooking with. Anyone who has had the privilege of chopping fruit or making salads with her over the last eight years already knows about her infectious enthusiasm! We’re grateful that after all this time, she’s still making our kitchen a more joyful place to be.
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
We often say that many hearts and hands go into this work. But what exactly do we mean by that? Follow us while we make a beef lasagna to find out!
We often say that many hearts and hands go into this work. But what exactly do we mean by that? Follow us while we make a beef lasagna to find out!
Food Donations and Recovery
When most people cook, they decide on a recipe and then go grocery shopping for the ingredients. But for us, it’s the other way around. At any time, our walk-in refrigerator, freezer and dry storage may have thousands of servings of meat, pasta, beans, assorted veggies and more — and most often, it came from generous donors or was diverted on its way to the landfill. In fact, about 65 percent of the food we prepare in our kitchens comes from donations or recovery efforts. When it comes time to plan our menu for the week, we begin by taking stock of what we have and leaving room for any fresh ingredients that may be coming later in the week. This week, our first step is evaluating our protein supply…
Every Tuesday, a few of the fine folks from Porter Road Butcher pull up at the freezer behind our headquarters to drop off a weekly meat donation: usually some combination of ground beef, bacon, sausage and steaks. Always, they’re donating in quantities of hundreds of pounds at a time. If we’re cooking with meat, this is often where our meal begins. This time, we’re using ground beef!
Then comes produce! For something like a beef lasagna, the vegetables we need are fairly basic — mostly tomatoes for the homemade marinara sauce. Besides, all meal recipients will get a veggie side; in this case, it’s a roasted veggie medley. During the summer and fall months especially, we often receive gracious donations from local farms with a bumper crop. These particular tomatoes came from Cul2vate and Bells Bend Farms, with a few cans of recovered Costco tomatoes thrown in to thicken up the sauce a bit.
We round it out with cheese recovered from Whole Foods and lasagna noodles donated by a recent local food drive. From there, we’re ready to start cooking!
Food Preparation and Assembly
A huge branch of our volunteer program is processing donations. Usually, that means getting the bulk food that has been donated or recovered into manageable pieces for our kitchens to cook with. Whether a team of volunteers is chopping veggies or shredding chicken, there are always extra hands around here.
A few days before it was time to put together this meal, volunteers cut up huge chunks of cheese into easily meltable blocks. This ahead-of-time preparation makes it easy for our meals staff to get to work making cheese sauce! Meals Coordinator Bryan cooks off the beef and blends up the marinara sauce. At this point, everything is prepped and ready for assembly.
Food assembly is a little more detail-oriented and labor-intensive than processing, so the volunteer group that helps us put together our lasagna is one that has been around a while. Led by our friend Ann, this group of women comes in a few Thursdays a month to help us cook — a task almost always reserved for Food Project veterans. They do an amazing job!
Food Distribution and Delivery
We always prepare meals at least a day in advance. After this one is baked, it spends the night in our walk-in refrigerator and is reheated the following morning before our share team loads the vans and leaves for their meal distribution routes! Our food access partners include after-school programs, immigrant communities, homeless outreach organizations and so many others in Nashville.
We share this beef lasagna with the veggie roast and a portion of homemade applesauce with friends at Dismas House, Community Care Fellowship, FiftyForward, Project Transformation, Preston Taylor Ministries, the Martha O’Bryan Center, YWCA, Project Return and seven different after-school sites in partnership with the YMCA.
Once it gets to the sites, many more hands are involved in serving, eating and cleaning up after the meal. But that’s a story for another time…
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.
Arroz con Berenjena
It’s not only the ingredients in a meal that make a food feel like home — it’s also the way we prepare it. Meals Volunteer Coordinator Arianna reflects on her experience cooking with a special visitor in the Food Project kitchen.
By Arianna Nimocks, Meals Volunteer Coordinator
“This is so Latina of us,” I laughed.
And very TNFP, too, I thought.
My mom and I were scraping down the tilt skillet so that every little bit of our Ecuadorian Eggplant Stir-Fry (Arroz con Berenjena) could be used.
Growing up, we never let food go to waste. My mom found creative ways to use everything — salads using leftover vegetables, beans (menestra) cooked with the bits of onion we didn’t use for the main meal, and creamy soups (cremas) using the heavy cream I bought a week ago but only used a tablespoon of. Somehow, we pretty much never threw food away. I think we all understood the time and labor it took to grow food, and we blessed our food knowing it was not necessarily a given.
A few weeks back, the Food Project received a truckload of eggplants, and one of our Instagram posts included a question: “what would you make with all these eggplants?” My mom had replied, “Rice and pan fried eggplant, mixed in as fried rice,” alluding to an Ecuadorian dish called “Arroz con Berenjena.” Our Headquarters Kitchen Manager, Julia, put it on the menu for the following Tuesday. Coincidentally, during a phone call that very Monday, my mom told me that she would have a 5-hour layover in Nashville the next day. There was not a chance I was going to pass up this opportunity to cook the Arroz con Berenjena with her!
So, instead of having a leisurely wait at the airport that Tuesday, I picked my mom up from BNA and brought her back to the Food Project to cook the Arroz con Berenjena with me. If there’s one person who could cook a meal for 400 people during a layover, it’s my mother! I was happy as could be. My mom, who taught me how to cook, was here at one of my favorite places, cooking our home country’s food with me.
As we added handfuls of paprika and cumin to the over 25 gallons of sauteing eggplants, garlic and onions in the tilt skillet, immediately I was back home in our kitchen. Many Ecuadorian meals start with sauteed onions and spices, finish with a sprinkle of cilantro and are served atop rice. This dish at TNFP, though about 100 times larger in quantity than the meals we’d cook at home, was no exception. I smiled as my mom chopped cup-fulls of cilantro and added them to the tilt skillet. “Mmmm,” she said. She loves cilantro.
We typically saw a recipe as a general guideline at home, but always freely swapped ingredients for the ones we had on hand. My mom used staple ingredients we had, bought the vegetables and meats we needed, and added pinches of spices and herbs until it tasted right (delicious, actually). I remember asking my mom for her recipe for Arroz con Berenjena and she laughed, “you know Latin@s, we don’t use recipes!” Because of this, TNFP felt very familiar to me from the start — in a way, we can be very “Latin” in our cooking style. We don’t always know every exact ingredient we will have available for next week’s meal given the assortment of donated food we receive, so we get to be creative in gleaning the best use from what we receive.
Welcoming my mom to a space where I, and many others, have called home, was special. I think cooking has that unique ability to bring people together, and I’m thankful for a place that embraces that so deeply.
When Life Hands You Lemons
Sometimes on a sweltering July day, you can only beat the heat one way: with a cold glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade, made by the hands of neighborhood kids. For generations, the lemonade stand has been a quintessential summer activity. And this year, we were honored to help our longtime partner, Preston Taylor Ministries, with theirs.
Preston Taylor enrichment camp directors Alyssa Muller and Toni Cobbins first came up with the idea to host a lemonade stand when they were brainstorming about summer programming together last spring. “We both loved the idea of giving the students ownership of something as a way to raise money, like a business,” explained Alyssa. “A lemonade stand seemed like a tangible way that we could do this.” It was a win-win: students could feel pride in getting to share their own hard work with neighbors, and proceeds would support an end-of-summer celebration for PTM students at St. Luke’s Community House and the Wilson Center.
Often, the best part of a lemonade stand is concocting your masterpiece — and that’s where the Nashville Food Project got to participate. A few days before the event, Chef Bianca and her team brought over boxes of donated lemons to Preston Taylor sites. But instead of simply donating fruit, both organizations saw the opportunity to deepen our partnership. “A big part of community is building relationships,” explained Chef Bianca. “An intentional part of the success of our meals is to connect with our partners.”
It was in that spirit that Preston Taylor Ministries invited our meals team to teach their students about making lemonade. It was the first time most of our staff had spent with PTM students, but it’s hard not to instantly connect over squeezing lemons, scooping sugar and shaking the mixture to make the delicious drink (of course, taste-tested immediately).
The relationship between The Nashville Food Project and Preston Taylor Ministries has always been one of interdependence. Over the summer, Preston Taylor Ministries supports about 220 elementary and middle school students with day programming focused on experiential learning, academic enrichment, wellness and community. Between their sites at Wilson Center and St. Luke’s Community House, we share nearly 400 meals each week during the summer months. But we rarely get a chance to work together in real time, side-by-side. “It was fun to get outside of our own kitchens and see the enthusiasm of the kids in the Preston Taylor Ministries sites,” said Chef Bianca.
After two afternoons of prep, we were ready to open for business! Homemade signs adorned the building at PTM’s Wilson Center and excitement buzzed in the air as 2 p.m. approached and a preliminary line began forming at the tent. As customers arrived with their $3 in tow, students worked together to pour the lemonade, garnish it with a variety of fruits and herbs, and top it off with a bendy straw.
“Seeing the joy and pride in their faces during prep at each site and at the actual lemonade stand was priceless and knowing they worked hard in providing this was just the sweetness we needed to bring their lemonade to life.”
The best part of the afternoon was the community that gathered. Friends, families, neighbors and strangers gathered on the lawn of the Wilson Center to cool off and catch up. Students squealed when they saw their friends in line, and there were frequent pauses in the lemonade assembly line for hugs. Being there to see it all reminded us how community is central to our work: it nourishes the spirit like food nourishes the body.
It’s like the old saying goes: When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. Preston Taylor Ministries took it one step further to take lemonade and make a community.
Calling All Architects: Design Competition!
The way we see it, a garden is more than just a place to grow tomatoes and cucumbers — it’s also a space that supports community vitality. At the Community Farm at Mill Ridge, a growing number of gardeners come together to host educational workshops, connect with neighbors over potlucks and dream about the future of growing food in our city. And while we have plenty of rows to plant seedlings, our work to expand community in our city is sometimes limited by the physical space we can offer to garden participants. With the availability of an operational on-site pavilion, local families and gardeners will have deeper opportunities to learn, grow and connect right in their own neighborhood.
The Nashville Food Project, in partnership with Hodgson Douglas Landscape Architects, is excited to announce a design competition for a pavilion and wash-pack station at the Community Farm at Mill Ridge. Use your creativity to help us improve the Community Farm!
First-place and second-place winners will be awarded cash prizes. Submit your conceptual design by September 30 to enter.
View the competition guidelines and design specifications here.
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Tips from the Gardens: Starting Seeds
Whether you’re a novice gardener or seasoned farmer, we can always learn from each other — especially when it comes to starting plants from seeds. Community Farm Manager Nora McDonald shares some tips on how to start seeds at home.
By Nora McDonald, Community Farm Manager
Containers:
Choose sturdy containers with bottom holes for drainage. These can be plastic pots from your local garden center made specifically for seed-starting, or you can get creative and recycle clean plastic containers or even egg cartons you have saved — just make sure there are holes in the bottom for water to drain out.
Potting Soil:
Choose a potting soil to start your seeds in. It should hold moisture well but be loose enough for the seeds and sprouts to access oxygen. There are many options for potting soil made specifically for seed germination, and you can consult your local garden center for a recommendation.
Planting:
Plant your seeds according to the recommendations provided on the seed packet. Most seeds only need to be planted to a depth equal to the width of the seed itself. Planting too deep will cause the seeds to struggle. Once you have covered the seed with soil, gently press or pat the soil to ensure good seed-to-soil contact. This helps the seeds absorb moisture.
Water and Warmth:
Provide even moisture and warmth until seeds emerge. The soil should be kept moist, but not water-logged as too much moisture can cause seeds to rot. You can help retain moisture by covering your starting containers with a plastic dome or by using cling wrap. Remove these covers when sprouts emerge and place them in a sunny location such as a south-facing window.
Potting Up:
Especially if you have started your seeds in very small containers, you’ll want to pot them up into larger containers shortly after they have germinated and the first true leaves have appeared. A growing plant will outgrow a small container or germination tray quickly, and potting up prevents the plant’s roots from becoming overly restricted and keeps the plant healthy.
Fill your larger containers with fresh soil, preferably one with added nutrients to help feed the growing plants.
Using a clean wooden stick or small fork, gently scoop under and lift the tiny transplant out of its original container. Never grab a plant by its stem and pull it out of the soil. Lifting from underneath keeps roots intact and reduces stress on the plant.
Gently tuck the plant's roots and some of its stem into the new potting soil and press it into place. Some plants such as tomatoes and peppers like their stems buried a bit deeper, and some plants don’t like it at all, so a bit more research on your type of plant may be required.
Depending on how quickly your plants grow, you may need to pot them up into even bigger containers before it’s time to plant them outside in the garden. This can feel like a lot of work but it is well worth the effort to ensure healthy, vigorous plants. If you plan to keep your plants in containers for a patio garden, you will definitely want to pot them up into large enough containers for the plants to reach their full size and provide a good yield.
Happy Growing!
In an effort to cultivate community and alleviate hunger in our city, The Nashville Food Project brings people together to grow, cook and share nourishing food. Learn more about our programs and how you can get involved.
Partner Spotlight: The Ark
AmeriCorps member Lilah Abrams writes about The Ark, one of our meals partners. The Ark addresses gaps in social services and community resources for seniors in Cheatham County, Tennessee. The Nashville Food Project shares about 100 meals each week with their seniors.
The Nashville Food Project staff and our new friend, Butch
By Lilah Abrams, AmeriCorps Member
Butch usually starts lunch with a joke — an evident ritual that manages to draw a number of giggles from individuals throughout the room. Since 2001, Butch, alongside his wife Marilyn, Melanie Smiley, and Anne Carty, has guided the Senior Lunch program at The Ark, creating a regular space to laugh, share, connect, learn and eat.
These weekly lunches seem to exemplify the core of the Ark’s work in their community: creating a web of care that is fundamentally personal.
While the organization was officially founded in 2001, their meals programming has roots reaching back to 1995 – led by two volunteers who remain active Meals on Wheels delivery drivers. Dedicated to the goal of “addressing severe gaps in social services and community resources for seniors in South Cheatham County,” The Ark’s programming takes many different forms: hosting weekly a “Senior Lunch” out of Pegram United Methodist Church providing utility assistance to seniors throughout the community, offering a robust food pantry, and subsidizing “back-to-school” shopping through their thrift store, Noah’s Ark, among other modes of community involvement.
However, their work of community building – through humor, generosity and hospitality – seems as foundational as much of their programming. The exuberance and warmth of The Ark’s organizing, around and with their meals, embodies much of what The Nashville Food Project holds as a value – “bringing people together” and “cultivating community through food.” In experiencing this, I was reminded of a sentiment I’ve heard repeated here at the Food Project, pulled from words first spoken by Tallu, that imagines a world in which people “have enough to eat and people to eat with.” Experiencing the Senior Lunch at The Ark and their thoughtful, yet incredibly natural ways of creating spaces to explore ‘being together, this sentiment felt brought to life.
This mother-daughter pair helps with Meals on Wheels deliveries and makes regular appearances at Wednesday Senior Lunch.
Sharing these values and goals, The Nashville Food Project has been partnering with The Ark since 2018, serving about 100 total meals each week for both the Meals on Wheels program and weekly Senior Lunches, cooked in our kitchens. Like the work we seek to do in our spaces, Melanie Smiley, a former director of meals for the local school district, often adds and alters based on what folks have been asking for (usually including some dessert options and homemade drinks gathered from donation), before serving inside the church’s community space or distributing among volunteer drivers.
It is over these cake slices, glasses of lemonade, and plates of homemade beef stroganoff that The Ark draws people in to gather – forging new connections and nurturing years-long friendships…eating and having people to eat with.
You can learn more about The Ark’s work to create community in Cheatham County on their website.
Sweet Peas 2022: Setting More Places at the Table
For many children, school is essential in providing both an enriching community and nourishing meals. Our summer meals partners work hard to ensure that when the school year ends, kids don’t lose access to either of these critical things. Thanks in part to Jackson®, our fourth year of Sweet Peas: Summer Eats for Kids kicks off this June!
This summer, you might see our trucks around town on routes to Conexión Américas, Project Transformation, Preston Taylor Ministries or Napier Kitchen Table. You may also catch us on our way to some elementary schools, despite the summer break — A Z Kelley in Antioch, or Hull Jackson in Buena Vista Heights. For all of these daily site visits, the trucks will be loaded up with fresh fruits, scratch-made meals chock-full of veggies and proteins, and cold milk for about 600 kids in Nashville. This is the work of our Sweet Peas: Summer Eats for Kids program, sponsored by Jackson® for the third consecutive year!
Every school year, Metro Nashville Public Schools serves 8.4 million lunches and 4 million breakfasts. But during the summer months, without these daily meals, many youth are at risk of hunger. Despite robust government programs in place to increase food access, Business Insider reported in 2019 that only 16% of children who depend on USDA-funded summer meals are actually able to access them.
That’s why, for the fourth year in a row, we have partnered with diverse summer programming sites across the city to ensure that children still receive the meals they depend on during the summer. Thanks to a long-standing partnership with Jackson®, we anticipate sharing 10,000 nutritious meals at 15 different sites this June and July. This is in addition to the ongoing local partnerships the Food Project maintains year-round.
Since the program’s genesis in 2019, we have shared over 63,000 meals with kids during the summer months. But the work goes beyond that. School is a major social touchpoint for most children, and summer can be a challenging and lonely time for some. A good meal is often an entry-point for our partners to develop life-changing relationships with the kids who come through their doors: it fills a need, starts a conversation and creates a culture of trust and interdependence. As our partner Nations Ministry said last year,
“Because of the food The Nashville Food Project serves, we have been able to continue building trust with our students which has in turn allowed them to feel safer at our program and in our staff’s care.”
So of course, we hope that Sweet Peas cultivates a new crop of broccoli enthusiasts, strawberry lovers and adventurous eaters. But our greatest hope is that it cultivates deep community. We are so grateful for and impressed by the work our partners do to give kids safe and engaging places to connect when school is out. It’s an honor to be involved in this interconnected community by setting as many places as possible at an overflowing table.
We hope you’ll follow along with us on social media as we share updates from Sweet Peas this summer!
Click here to learn more about the 2022 SFSP meal sites sponsored by The Nashville Food Project.
Reflections on Simmer: What We Wish Were True
We were so grateful to gather together again at Simmer, the chef pop-up dinner we held in April! This was a special one as it honored our beloved founder, Tallu Schuyler Quinn, and brought together the minds of several local chefs and friends to celebrate the release of her memoir, What We Wish Were True.
““Seated around the table, give me real people who are ready to have real conversations and set aside all the pomp and circumstance of what is false, hollow, hateful, worldly, or avaricious. At the table, talk with me about your regrets, your peculiarities, your memories of your ancestors even if painful, the magic you have encountered, your great love, your fear, your shame, or your hope for the world.””
Photo by Elle Jackson Photography
Our first Simmer since 2019 was a special one, honoring our late founder, Tallu Schuyler Quinn and celebrating the release of her beautiful memoir, What We Wish Were True: Reflections on Nurturing Life and Facing Death. Surrounded by the tall, stained-glass windows at Riverside Revival, we crowded around tables to share memories, swap anecdotes and tell our origin stories of the person who made The Nashville Food Project what it is today. We were grateful to host over 125 guests for this special night — our largest Simmer ever — and proud to tell you that funds raised from this night go directly back to our work.
To design the menu, we recruited the brilliant minds of our friends Ann Fundis and Anne Sale, as well as Chef Tandy Wilson of City House Nashville and Chef Margot McCormack of Margot Cafe & Bar. They worked with our very own Chef Bianca Morton to piece together morsels of Tallu’s life and create courses that honored her, a deeply meaningful process. As Chef Margot said, “the dinner gave me some closure on Tallu’s death: saying goodbye, but also feeling my heart open to so much.”
The careful process of choosing each ingredient began by emphasizing the foods that Tallu loved: homemade bread, pickled vegetables, butternut squash, Mexican flan. Then, the chefs worked together to bring their ideas, experience and expertise to the table. “Once the menu was narrowed down, we began collaborating on each other’s strengths and carving out who led what part of the menu,” explains Chef Bianca.
“ “Each of us offered our own interpretations that would elevate the dishes and honor our love of Tallu.””
In true Tallu form, the night began with bread, generously donated from Dozen Bakery. In her book, she talks about the Latin and French origins of the word “accompany:” to come with bread, or to be a bread-friend. As we welcomed one another from near and far, some meeting for the first time and others embracing for the thousandth, we shared charred French baguettes topped with savory smoked fish mousse and sweet ricotta, figs and honey. We were grateful for the chance to forge so many bread-friendships!
As dinner was served, the stories spilled over. Mixed greens in little silver mixing bowls recalled the big salads Tallu would prepare from farm-fresh ingredients and eat at work for lunch. Roasted chicken in a butternut squash red sauce paid tribute to an organic farmer who donated hundreds of pounds of squash that he couldn’t sell because his cows had taken little nibbles of the ends of them — Tallu recruited a small team to peel, cube and roast the squash and then puree it into a creamy, rich sauce to bake into lasagna and pour over pasta. And dessert, a beautiful panna cotta with caramel flan sauce, lemon curd, crumble and blood orange, conjured memories of her sweet voice singing a song with her father as guests at the Nourish Patrons’ Party enjoyed the very same dish several years back.
Over dinner, beloved friends shared the stage to read passages from What We Wish Were True. Each reading was a story of its own but prompted countless others, all describing poignant moments of laughter, hardship and hope.
We listened to Margo Cloniger revisit The Nashville Food Project’s humble beginnings under its old moniker, laughing as she recalled a bulk Mobile Loaves and Fishes t-shirt order that came in right before the organization officially changed its name. We were reminded of Tallu’s core belief that human value transcends what they do for work when Nate Paulk shared how she counseled him through a really difficult phase in his professional life. And we heard from Sally Rausch about the vulnerable process of helping Tallu write the book when her body began failing her, which could not have happened without the bonds of deep trust that Tallu shared with so many. With each story, the corners of the room folded in a little more to pull us closer together.
As the night wrapped up, C.J. Sentell, CEO of The Nashville Food Project, shared a final thought from the book:
“For years I was wrestling with God and with myself about my purpose and place and role, and here it was before me all the while—the mission we keep folding ourselves into, which I’ve come to understand as the perfect recipe: to grow, to cook, and most important, to share.”
An ever-growing community has been galvanized by Tallu’s radical vision of food security. The tables we continue to gather around invite us into this mission again and again. And the more meals we grow, cook and share, the nearer we draw to one another and to the world around us. We are so grateful to have you with us on this journey!
““The Nashville Food Project is not a church, but it is a community that saves people. It saved me.””
Thank You
A special thanks to all of our sponsors and donors for making this Simmer event possible:
City House and Chef Rebekah Turshen
This life-giving work can exist because of your generosity, in all its many forms. To learn more about ways to get involved and support, visit thenashvillefoodproject.org.
If you haven’t yet, purchase your copy of What We Wish Were True. A portion of the proceeds from each book sold at the link above supports our work.
Blood Orange Vinaigrette
Crafted by Josh Rickerman
Serves: 6
⅔ c olive oil
⅓ c fresh-squeezed blood orange juice
Zest of 2 blood oranges
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
2 tbsp herb oil
1 tsp Dijon mustard
2 tsp honey (sub. sugar or agave nectar)
Salt and pepper to taste