Healing is Impossible in Loneliness

TNFP's most outstanding volunteers at this year's Volunteer Appreciation Celebration

One of the things I love about The Nashville Food Project is that it’s a place people want to be. And in the true spirit of “project,” our work is active and evolving and involves many people. I am so grateful to you, our volunteers for participating this grand experiment—holding each other accountable on your trucks teams, leading your groups in the gardens, and making creative decisions during regular volunteering in the kitchen. Through all of this, we are learning to share life.

So many times over the last six and a half years, I’ve heard from our volunteers that they get more out of this work than the "people we serve.” And this is where the waters become muddied about The Nashville Food Project – who do we serve? We are for all people. And while we are serving one another, we understand not only more about the other, but more about ourselves as well.

In a commencement address called “Thoughts of a Free Thinker,” Kurt Vonnegut offered these words about community and sharing life:

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

Yes. This world is too damn big for people to be lonely. And the undercurrents of pain and heartache we all carry with us disintegrate the relationships on which our entire lives are built. We received a Facebook comment this week, acknowledging The Nashville Food Project as an organization involved in “lifting up the human spirit, one person at a time.” Our hope is that the work we engage in together lifts lives, builds community, transforms pain, and heals the body, mind and spirit of everyone who chooses to be involved.

The Kentucky poet Wendell Berry reminds us in his essay "The Body and the Earth" that “healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness….” Being with you and doing the work of The Nashville Food Project has cured many lonely days over my last six plus years of being involved. And so for you and for this work, I am ever grateful.

Grace and peace,

PS: For those in a listening mood! Our staff enjoyed this interview with john a. powell on On Being with Krista Tippett. Powell is a faculty member at University of California at Berkeley and the author of Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society. Powell reminds us in this interview, “The human condition is one about belonging. We simply cannot thrive unless we are in relationship… If you’re isolated, the negative health condition is worse than smoking, obesity, high blood pressure – just being isolated. So we need to be in relationship.” Hope you’ll have a listen!

Our Friend Elizabeth

Elizabeth Royster James
October, 9, 2015
 
It’s been just over a week since we lost one of our own, unexpectedly. We grieve the death of an incredible woman and long-time Nashville Food Project volunteer, Elizabeth Royster James. Elizabeth served on a monthly food truck with four friends from her beloved St. Augustine’s Chapel. She chopped vegetables in our prep room and enthusiastically supported our annual fundraising event, Nourish.
 
Rev. Becca Stevens spoke eloquently at Elizabeth’s funeral about her penchant for lavishly celebrating even the least of these—preparing beef tenderloin for Room in the Inn guests on Christmas Eve, wrapping up high-quality stationary and colorful pens for a Magdalene pen pal program for women in prison, and here at the food project, adorning every table with flowers and a table cloth for meals shared with homeless and indigent residents of Mercury Court on Murfreesboro Road.
 
Elizabeth literally shined. She was the warmest, most generous friend. She loved people and showed her love in extraordinary ways. She sent gifts through snail mail for no special occasion but the occasion of life. She liked her meat well-done and recorded her appointments in pencil in a gorgeous leather-bound date book. She was always praying for others and doing for others with kindness and joy. She was hilarious and lit up any room she walked into. She was an angel on this earth, and we will miss her terribly.
 
It will take a long time for those of us deeply grieving Elizabeth’s death to process this enormous loss in our lives and community. But I understand grief is a passage and not a place to stay. As we grieve and carry on, we at The Nashville Food Project will do many wonderful things in Elizabeth’s memory, guided by the indelible marks of her enormous love, contagious laughter and devoted life.

TNFP Welcomes Teri Sloan as Development Director

Teri is a born-and-raised Middle Tennessean from Shelbyville. She earned a B.S. in Advertising from Middle Tennessee State University and a M.Ed. in Nonprofit Leadership from Belmont University. Teri has spent most of her career working with Greek fraternal organizations. She began as a consultant for Alpha Omicron Pi Women’s Fraternity, a job that took her to Morgantown, WV, and Kennesaw, GA, before returning home to Tennessee. She followed that with five years working with Chi Psi Fraternity, assisting the fraternity and its educational foundation with all marketing and development efforts. For The Nashville Food Project, she will direct fundraising efforts, donor relations, marketing and the annual Nourish event. Teri and her husband Adam live in East Nashville with their dog Audrey. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, traveling and spending time with friends and family.

Meet Katie Duiven, TNFP Meals Assistant

Katie Duiven accepted an internship with The Nashville Food Project in June 2015, and within a couple months, her can-do personality, organizational skills and talents for making hundreds of granola bars helped promote her to Meals Assistant. Katie moved to Nashville from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to attend Belmont University where she plans to graduate in Spring 2016 with a major in Social Entrepreneurship and minor in Nutrition. Given her studies, Katie calls working with The Nashville Food Project a dream that strikes a balance between having fun, building community and providing nourishing food for people in our city who need it most. When she's not in the prep room or kitchen, Katie enjoys spending time with friends, being outdoors, babysitting and singing backup in her best friend's band. 

Biscuit Love Chefs Visit TNFP Kitchen

When Chef Karl Worley of Biscuit Love arrived at The Nashville Food Project’s kitchen, he scanned the recipe that had been handed to him. Then he reached into the fridge with the authority of a man who has reached into a lot of fridges and pulled out a hunk of butter. He dropped it into a giant pot, covered it with sliced potatoes, and dinner was underway in a sizzle.

Karl and Biscuit Love manager Heather Savey agreed to help in the kitchen to prepare a meal for the Thursday food truck run to Mercury Courts, a weekly rate complex that houses low-income Nashvillians sometimes in transition from the streets. But Karl has manned a food truck in downtown Nashville during many a music festival. He opened a restaurant with his wife Sarah based on their truck's concept, and lines of diners now wrap around the building waiting to get in on weekends. Bon Appetit magazine recently named it one of the top 50 best new restaurants in America (and the East Nasty as the best sandwich in the country). So even though he can cook a meal for 75 people with one hand behind his back, it’s still a marvel that he would come here after working all day to work more for those in need.

“I love it,” he said. “Everybody’s into the mission and seeing the mission through.”

The kitchen visit isn’t the first time Karl has helped TNFP. He participated in the annual Nourish dinner for the past three years with a star roster of chefs such as Tandy Wilson of City House, Sean Brock of Husk, Levon Wallace of Cochon Butcher, Rob Newtown of Nightingale 9 and Wilma Jean in Brooklyn and Scott Witherow of Olive & Sinclair. Though the food is top shelf, the barn at Green Door Gourmet where the event took place this year, swelled with a down-home love in knowing that even being there helps further our mission of bringing people together to cook, grow and share nourishing food, with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in Nashville.

As the Nourish dinner began this year, Karl and the other chefs worked together to plate one another’s dishes. It’s the type of pitch-in collaboration found in our kitchen or in the gardens where diverse groups come together to volunteer.

“Food is a universal love language,” Green Door's Sylvia Ganier said the night of the dinner. “It’s a language that The Nashville Food Project speaks fluently.”

Inspired by that work, the chefs tucked bits of their own story into their dishes at Nourish. Tandy Wilson used mint from his father’s garden in a plate of squash, pea farinata and buttermilk cottage cheese, for example, and Karl prepared a sophisticated yet homey take on cassoulet with Southern ingredients of sausage, duck confit and black-eyed peas.

After servers delivered his course, Karl stepped to the stage and announced he would donate brunch at home to the top bidder for 25 people. It sold for $4,000.

“I never would have dreamed that people would pay that much for breakfast in bed,” he said.

Poverty and the issues surrounding it hit close to home for Karl.

“I grew up really poor,” he said. “We were never hungry, but we had months of brown beans and cornbread. Like, every night.”

Karl’s mother worked at a diner, where he often kept busy as a kid while waiting on her shifts to end. His grandfather had owned restaurants, too. But Karl left his hometown of Bristol at 19 on the first train out, literally. He took a job as a railroad conductor out of Cleveland, Ohio.

“I had been to Florida for like two days. Otherwise, I had never been out of East Tennessee,” he said. His first time through the drive-thru of a Cleveland Burger King, he was nearly laughed out of the line for ordering biscuits, gravy and sweet tea, menu items you couldn't find on the breakfast menu there. But it was also the place where he connected to home when he craved the beans and cornbread his mother made.  “I hated it growing up,” he said. “Now it’s my go-to comfort food.”

After a move to Atlanta and then Nashville and jobs that included selling used cars and working for a builder, Karl dabbled in culinary school at Nashville State before dropping out. Then when he met Sarah, the woman who would become his wife, she warned him that things couldn’t get serious because she was headed to Johnson & Wales culinary school in Denver.  “What if I go to culinary school, too?” he asked her. And this time, the plan stuck.

At The Nashville Food Project kitchen, Karl took an off-recipe approach to seasoning their cabbage and sausage stew with a few shakes of hot sauce, garam masala and curry powder they found in the kitchen cabinets. As with most meals at TNFP, the ingredients came from various sources – tomato jewels from Tallahassee May’s Turnbull Creek Farm, cabbage from Delvin Farms, carrots and cabbage from The Nashville Food Project’s gardens and sausage from a large donation from Gaylord Opryland Hotels. Tracing the food back to its origin is a big part of why Karl likes to support the cause.

“We forget where the food comes from,” he said, “and how it’s cooked.”

Heather pulled cornbread from the oven, and they tasted their stew a final time. They would soon send their work from the kitchen into the community as another set of volunteers arrived to take the meal to Mercury Courts.

“Man, that smells good,” said Toni Rogers, walking into the kitchen. She’s been delivering food to Mercury Courts on the same night of the week each month for several years. Over time, she’s made friends and learned the names of residents.  Food, she said, served as the entry point to get those conversations going. Just as Karl and Heather compared family notes on how they prepared meals, Toni would do the same with Mercury residents.

“Once everyone is together and with food, there’s that ‘meal community’ kind-of thing,” she said. “Even if you’re not in a house, it’s the same spirit.”

Click here to see the cabbage and sausage recipe that provided the basis for Karl and Heather's dish. 

If you are a chef interested in visiting TNFP kitchen, or if you know a chef you’d like to recommend, please email jenniferjustus8@gmail.com. Thank you!

"I feel good from my head tomatoes"

This weekend, the Tomato Art Festival will happen in East Nashville. But we’ve been having an unofficial tomato festival of our own at The Nashville Food Project.

Thanks in part to a donation of Juliet tomatoes from Tallahassee May at Turnbull Creek Farm…

…we’ve had enough to make enchilada sauce and marinara.

We’ve dehydrated tomatoes…

…and roasted them before sealing them up for later.

Yesterday, we added enchilada sauce to quinoa, red beans and beef from Chipotle and stuffed it into green peppers. Anna shows how it’s done.

Then we topped the peppers with cheese and slid them into the oven to warm. 

The marquee outside Rosepepper Cantina in East Nashville.

TNFP Welcomes Darrius Hall as Meals Assistant

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Nashville native Darrius Hall is an entrepreneur who doesn't mind getting his hands dirty. Joining The Nashville Food Project as Meals Assistant, he gleans food on local farms and works in the kitchen to keep track of donations and meal prep for delivery.

Darrius also put his business degree to good use by founding his company Creative Curren$y. He works to provide essential living needs and empowerment to those in his community near the McGruder garden.

"I have dedicated my time, business, and it's resources, to nurturing melanin-based communities and those similar to it," he said. "When I do find time to myself, I like to indulge in books, painting, music and gardening."

A Day in a Dozen: 12 photos tell the story of one day at TNFP

A variety of volunteer groups meet in the Wedgewood garden each morning to work. This group from RISE (Refugee and Immigrant Students Empowered), a youth program of the Center for Refugees + Immigrants of Tennessee, paused for a lesson on the importance of bees.

Meanwhile back at the kitchen, a morning crew of volunteer cooks prepared trays of sausage strata made from donated and gleaned ingredients that will be delivered to Bethlehem Centers.

By 1 p.m., a volunteer prep team had arrived including Olivia, a young woman visiting Nashville and Woodmont Christian Church on a mission trip from Ohio. She chopped kale harvested from the Wedgewood garden the previous day.

Then at 3 p.m., a two-person team swooped in to prepare hot meals for 170 people. The meals on two separate truck runs would head out by 5 p.m. As part of the process, Judy clipped herbs from the garden behind the kitchen.

Then she prepared squash boats over roasted greens including produce gleaned from Delvin Farms and a donation of meats.

The squash boats would be served with slaw made with donated produce from Granbery farm.

Just before 5 p.m., volunteers arrived to load trucks and deliver the food.

While one truck headed for Rex Courts, an Urban Housing Solutions property, another truck left for the Community Meal at Trinity United Methodist.

Grace, TNFP Outreach Coordinator, plated food with volunteers at Trinity United Methodist...

...as guests began to gather for the meal. 

And a parting gift? Produce to-go with recipes!