What do you do with 25 pounds of basil?
For Julia Baynor, that’s not a rhetorical question. As the director of meals at The Nashville Food Project, a nonprofit based in The Nations, she’s responsible for planning and executing hundreds of hot meals, cold meals, and healthy snacks that are delivered every day to people across the city. Whether they’re working with a Boys & Girls Club, a senior center, or a charity that assists those in poverty, she and her colleagues strive to feed anyone facing food insecurity. Thanks to the Food Project’s robust infrastructure and large network of partners, it’s able to serve those communities on a massive scale.
But while she knows folks will get fed, Baynor never can predict what she’s going to feed them. That’s because 80% of her inventory is donated. When a grocery store or a farm delivers a haul of fruits and vegetables, she and her team must wait to see what’s in the truck before they can pin down a menu.
“It’s like being on Chopped every day,” Baynor told me, referring to the cooking competition show where contestants improvise dishes after receiving a basket of surprise ingredients. “You never know what you’re going to get.”
Baynor has learned to be flexible. The aforementioned basil, for instance, arrived just a a few days before Thanksgiving in 2022, when most of her staff and volunteers were about to leave for the holiday. She knew it would spoil if she waited for everyone to come back, so she decided to blend it with rock salt. “That basil salt lasted forever, and it stayed this vibrant green,” she told me. “I still have some at my house.”
I saw this creativity first-hand when I visited the Food Project’s kitchen. Two volunteers were at a cold meal station, prepping dozens of containers of celery, pita bread, and hummus. (The hummus had been made the week before, after several bags of chickpeas rolled in.) In the midst of their prep, Toni Newsome, a meals coordinator, walked over with a crate of carrots that had just arrived. On the spot, the trio decided to wash and peel them and add them to the hummus boxes.
Thirty minutes later, I spotted Newsome ladling portions of a delicious-looking chicken-and-pasta dish into trays. She told me, “There’s a cheese sauce on the pasta, and we put squash in there because we had squash. And we’re gonna end up doing the same thing with some pumpkins we’ve got. It’s a nice way to put some fall flavor in there, and you get extra vegetables, too.”
The staff is also clever about reusing what they’ve already made.
“With some of our partners, we’re sending them meals every day, and we don’t want to send them the same thing over and over,” Baynor said. “So you come up with ways to keep ingredients working for you. Last week we did an Asian-inspired dish–a chicken stir-fry. We made a vinaigrette that had soy souce and sesame oil. The next day, we were doing barbecue pork, so we used the leftover vinaigrette to be the base of the barbecue sauce. It’s always about being scrappy.”
And it’s never too late to make adjustments. Stuart Murphy is a meals coordinator who oversees much of the kitchen’s meat, and on the day I visited, he was prepping dozens of pounds of sausage. (The Food Project has a cold storage facility in Smyrna where it keeps its protein supply.) He had planned his dish the week before, since he knew the sausage was on hand, but he was happy about an unexpected development.
“We just got a donation from Costco of all these diced onions and celery and carrots,” he said, pointing at large bags of vegetables in their original packaging. “That’s a nice surprise, because it’ll add flavor and just bulk up the dish. So today, knock on wood, it’s smooth sailing.”
Taking a break from the sausage, Murphy showed me a tattoo of a steak on his forearm. “For me personally, this job is great because I love meat. Whenever we get nice cuts of beef or pork, we’re able to make some menu items that get me really excited. A few weeks ago, I opened up these pallets and saw this really great chuck roast, and I was like, ‘Oh man. I love this.’ We made a really nice beef stew.”
Everyone I interviewed was equally enthusiastic about some part of their job. As she was chopping rainbow chard, Newsome said, “Working here has opened my eyes to a lot of fruits and vegetables that I’ve never been exposed to, just because of the community I come from. I had never heard of kohlrabi, right? And now I know it pairs really well with pork.”
With knowledge like that, Newsome would do well on the actual Chopped, which has challenged contestants with kohlrabi on 18 episodes. The difference, of course, is that when The Nashville Food Project makes a dish, it isn’t only for the benefit of a judging panel. Their food travels, inviting folks all over town to share in the joy of their kitchen.
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