When Katie Kuhl of Crossroads Campus approached The Nashville Food Project about providing a meal to be served alongside their Wednesday afternoon self-development and skills training activities, we knew that we wanted to leverage our efforts to support the work the Crossroads team is doing with young people and with animals in our city.
What We Have Right Before Us
Our Simmer Series: An Update
Local Food + Lemon Shallot Vinaigrette
As construction cranes loom over Nashville and development creeps into the countryside, we’re thankful for a growing number of farmers who make the best use of our fertile land and do the hard work of tending it for produce that nourishes our community. The Nashville Food Project wants to support this work. In fact, our commitment to purchasing local food is a growing portion of how our meals happen…
Celebrating the Community Farm at Mill Ridge
Since last fall, we’ve been busy breaking ground and building infrastructure at our newest garden site in southeast Nashville - the Community Farm at Mill Ridge Park. Located in Metro Nashville's newest regional park, this community farm will be a new home to TNFP garden programs. So much planning, love and work has already been poured into this project, and we were incredibly excited to celebrate with a grand opening of the farm on Saturday!
Sweet Peas: Summer Eats for Kids
Over the last few years, we have been learning about the incredible need for summer meals for youth in Nashville and wishing we could do more. Every school year, Metro Nashville Public Schools serves 8.4 million lunches and 4 million breakfasts. During the summer months, without these daily meals, many children and youth are at risk of hunger. According to Feeding America, this could be as many as 1 in 5 children under the age of 18. These numbers are staggering, and we are finally in a position to do something about it. We are thrilled to announce a new initiative for our meals program: Sweet Peas, summer eats for kids.
Understanding Garden Pests
It’s a beautiful spring day, and neighbors are gathering for garden workshop at the Wedgewood Urban Garden, an urban oasis tucked off of Wedgewood Avenue near the Tennessee State Fairgrounds. Today, we’re learning about garden pests. Whether it’s aphids or caterpillar worms, many gardeners can relate to pest problems. At TNFP gardens, we’re using and encouraging an approach to natural pest control called Integrated Pest Management…
New Ways of Being With Each Other
This article by TNFP’s Growing Together Market Manager, Sally Rausch, was recently featured in Tending the Fire Quarterly, which reports on efforts of contemplative justice within St Augustine’s Chapel, the Center for Contemplative Justice and the wider world.
Corn Five Ways
As our gardens begin to thrive and the kitchens ramp up for the summer, things have been heating up and coming together in beautiful ways at The Nashville Food Project — “simmering,” if you will. And that’s part of why we gratefully launched the first installment of our new fundraiser this month, “Simmer: a chef series where good food and ideas come together.”
Making Gold: Composting In Nashville
Did you know 28% of all waste in Nashville is compostable material? Here at TNFP, the idea and act of composting is a value: taking our forgotten bits, our discarded carrot ends, broken eggshells and spent coffee grounds and diverting them to be used as rich inputs for the earth which we've too often abused and abandoned. Learn how YOU can make gold out of your own leftovers, including FREE compost drop-off at select Metro convenience centers.
Homemade Pasta
Any given day you walk through The Nashville Food Project’s kitchens or gardens, the incredible care put into the little details of the work is so evident. One great example? Every week, a group of friends and acquaintances comes together in our kitchens to make fresh bread and pasta from scratch for our meals program.
A Guide to Seed Starting
That Special Sauce
In the past year, The Nashville Food Project has cooked and shared over 204,000 made-from-scratch meals with 47 meal sites... which means rain or shine, we're loading up and delivering good food around our city. Last week, I shadowed our Distribution Manager, Emily Novak, for a behind the scenes look at what goes into these meal deliveries…
Rocky Glade Farm
Basic Chicken Stock
The Farmer & Chef Bond
Last week the Growing Together farmers hosted a visitor at their weekly training - Jessica Benefield, chef and partner at Two Ten Jack and The Green Pheasant. Jessica and her husband, Trey Burnett, were some of the first chefs to seek out and maintain a consistent relationship with Growing Together.
Mill Ridge Community Farm: A Place to Grow
To continue and expand TNFP’s thriving garden programs, we are excited to announce a new partnership with Metro Parks and Friends of Mill Ridge Park to develop a community farm at Metro Nashville's newest Regional Park, Mill Ridge Park in Antioch!
In Case of Emergency
Not Just About the Meal
It’s not just about the meal. We want our food to be the backdrop, the engine, the song in the background of all the good work of our partners. A few weeks ago, we received the note below from our amazing meals partner Preston Taylor Ministries - her feedback on a recent meal shared by TNFP with their community…