The Nashville Food Project: Changing the Way America Eats

In a city known for its hot chicken and honky-tonks, something far deeper is cooking in the kitchens and gardens of Nashville. Beyondish chatted with CJ Sentell, CEO of The Nashville Food Project (TNFP), about their revolutionary food movement that is transforming food consumption—a living philosophy rooted in three simple words: grow, cook, share.

TNFP began humbly in the early 2000s as a homeless outreach program under the name Mobile Loaves and Fishes, using two retrofitted catering trucks to deliver sack lunches directly to Nashville’s homeless encampments. That initial effort, fueled by faith, compassion and sandwiches, was backed by a web of local visionaries including real estate change-maker Jimmy Granbery of H G Hills Realty, former CVS exec Sarah Finley, and master gardener and food writer Judy Wright, among others. Their collective, benevolent vision eventually led them to Tallu Schuyler Quinn, a Union Theological Seminary-trained minister with a heart shaped by her food-security work in Nicaragua. Quinn didn’t see food as a handout. She saw it as a healing force. A ritual. A right.

Under her leadership, the project evolved from feeding the hungry a couple of times a week to a completely transformative food network. She believed food was a spiritual practice, one that connects people, restores dignity, and confronts systemic injustice. She rejected transactional charity models and insisted instead on an approach of justice, collaboration, and mutual empowerment. Recipients became co-creators. Meals became stories. Gardens became classrooms. Leftovers became legacies.

Then came the Nashville flood of 2010. Suddenly, the city needed more than sack lunches. TNFP was called on to upscale fast and prepare thousands of meals citywide every single day. Out of this disaster came a philosophical paradigm shift, a zeitgeist centered around bulk scratch cooking from community gardens with communal meals and food reclamation sharing. Grocery stores, restaurants, and caterers stepped up with surplus food. Community growers shared what they had. Neighbors gathered around gardening plots, cooking pots, and prep tables. What once had been a mobile food ministry became an integrated, comprehensive, hyper-local food system.

By 2011, TNFP had its new identity and its new mission: healing communities through growing, cooking, and sharing real food. Quinn’s life was tragically cut short in 2022 by a brain tumor, but her memoir, “What We Wish Were True,” lives on as a blueprint blending theology, humor, vulnerability, and food stories to guide the hands and hearts of the organization’s work.

Today, the program continues under the keen oversight of CEO CJ Sentell, a Bells Bend farmer rooted in the communal food circles and business communities of Middle Tennessee. TNFP, explained Sentell, currently produces and shares over 67,000 meals a week – fresh, scratch prepared, locally sourced, nutrient-dense meals delivered to shelters, senior centers, after-school programs, and beyond. And it has recently launched into a new initiative, Food Rx, an innovative program connecting doctors and nutrition educators with patients, helping communities to access fresh, healthy produce and learn to cook with it. These initiatives focus on increasing food access and building long-term wellness. TNFP is offering food as preventative medicine, meals as long-term therapy, and shared tables as sites of healing.

Community gardens, many run by immigrant and refugee farmers, dot the landscape of the movement. Members, as a loosely connected collective, grow food, harvest it, prepare it, and share it together with neighbors. Extra produce is sold at local farmers markets, creating income streams. Children learn where real food actually come from. Elders pass down recipes. Strangers become friends. Through their efforts, TNFP is fostering a stronger, more connected Nashville—where neighbors learn, grow, and share together through food.