CJ Sentell On Nashville Food Project
C.J. Sentell, CEO of the Nashville Food Project, joins Signature Required for a rich and grounded conversation about food systems, community building, and what it really means to fight hunger at the root.
The Nashville Food Project is not a food bank. Operating from their headquarters in the Nations, the organization takes a comprehensive, full food systems approach, growing, cooking, and sharing nourishing food across Davidson County while addressing the systemic causes of food insecurity in Middle Tennessee.
About C.J. Sentell
C.J. shares how growing up on a pecan farm in Louisiana, earning a PhD in philosophy, and studying at Vanderbilt created an unlikely but perfectly suited foundation for leading one of Nashville's most innovative nonprofits. He walks through the core distinction between emergency food aid and the deeper systemic work the Nashville Food Project is doing, and why that difference matters more than ever.
He explains how the organization recovers 350,000 pounds of food each year from grocery partners like Whole Foods, Costco, and Aldi, transforms it into 6,000 to 7,000 scratch-made meals every week, and delivers those meals to roughly 55 partner organizations across 60 sites.
Community, Dignity & Systems Change
C.J. reflects on what food deserts really look like in Nashville, how transit lines and grocery access are deeply connected, and why one in seven Nashvillians experience a meaningful nutritional deficit each week. He talks about the volunteer community that makes the work possible, the social enterprise catering model that generates margin to fund the mission, and why the organization intentionally resists thinking of itself as a charity.
Throughout the conversation, one word keeps coming back: dignity. C.J. explains why every program decision, from sliding scale meal pricing to how volunteers are welcomed into the kitchen, is built around the dignity of the people they serve.
Resources
The Nashville Food Project
Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee
USDA Food and Nutrition Resources
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Signature Required. It is intended for Tennessean by Tennesseans,
CJ Sentel, CEO of the Nashville Food Project. Welcome to Signature Required. Thank you so much for having me. So we have no understanding of what the Nashville Food Project is, and probably a lot of our listeners could read the title and guess a little bit. But let's start right there. What do you do as CEO of the Nashville Food Project?
Yeah, well, so the Nashville Food Project is a community food security organization. So we are not a food bank. We address food insecurity from a comprehensive, holistic perspective. And so come at this and think about food insecurity, not at the individual or the household level, so much as from the community level, from a systems perspective, what [00:01:00] causes food insecurity in our community and what can we do to address it in ver through our various programs.
So if you're. You're not a food bank. If you were a food bank, what does a food bank do? So, a food bank aggregates, they collect food from across the food system. So Second Harvest is our food bank in Middle Tennessee, and they collect food and distribute food boxes, emergency food aid. I think that's the most, that's the most helpful way to understand the difference is that the food banks and the food pantries that are affiliated with them really come from an emergency perspective.
The ones that we have and the organizations that we have today really date back to the late seventies and early eighties with the de-industrialization of the Midwest and some of the economic turmoil of that time. And really focus on emergency food aid. They're delivering boxes of uncooked, usually food mostly dry goods, though, [00:02:00] not exclusively.
And they're meant to get people through hard times. Right. Temporary moments of food insecurity. The problem systemically is that the food, the emergency food banking system has become the permanent emergency food banking system that people rely on, their regular groceries, rely on food banks for their regular groceries.
We consider that to be the problem. We are looking to create a food system and a community where everybody has access to the food they want and need on a regular, reliable basis. So you're taking a step back. The food bank solves a problem. That's right. You're looking at what's creating the problems.
A step back from that. That's a great way to understand that. Okay. The food bank the food bank systems, and look, we are partners with them. Yeah. We're partners with Second Harvest for sure. They are looking to solve acute food insecurity. Right. [00:03:00] We're doing that. But also with the lens of the systemic causes of that food insecurity.
So let me ask, the way that you're answering that question makes me think you're doing a lot of research, that you're working with community leaders trying to find buckets of problems and then perhaps attach solutions to them. Is that right? Or are you doing something different? Yeah, we don't do a lot of research.
I have an academic research background. A lot of this research is already done. Sure. We already know a lot of the things that we need to do to solve this problem. I think when you look at the federal situation today, the cutting of the of the food aid, this is moving in the opposite direction that the research points to, right.
At the root of many of these problems, whether it's food insecurity, housing insecurity is poverty. Right. And so when you frame it that way, we are not going to solve poverty alone. Right. But. Through a network of collaborative [00:04:00] organizations in Middle Tennessee across the country, we can chip away at the systemic causes of food insecurity.
For example, in Middle Tennessee, in Nashville, there are several, what are called food deserts, right? That have existed for 50 years, right? Why can't we come up with the policy, the policies, and the approaches that address some of these longstanding systemic issues? And food deserts are one of them.
It's access to affordable, healthy food. Yeah. In your neighborhood right. On the transit lines, the mayor has recently put a mayor of Nashville has put a lot of of attention into the transit system. So think about this, the way the transit system and the food system are related are actually very important, right?
If you're on, if you're a low income person, you might be taking public transportation to the grocery store. If there are no public transportation lines [00:05:00] that go from your neighborhood to the grocery store, if you're having to walk half a mile, one mile with groceries, that's gonna be a barrier.
To accessing food. Understanding what the food bank is and knowing that you partner with someone like Second Harvest or others. It sounds like in, in business terms, like maybe Second Harvest is the top of the funnel or the beginning of the logistics cycle that is collecting a lot of the types of foods that you talked about, canned goods, uncooked stuff.
And so help me understand your relation with them. Yeah. Because it, it seems like they're addressing the acute thing, but it sounds like you're also. Pulling food from them to then Yeah. Distribute. Sure. So give me like two or three examples of what would be the most common things that the Nashville Food Project is using its time and resources for.
Yeah, and I should have, this is actually part of the answer to your first [00:06:00] question to understand our work. It's helpful. We talk about it in terms of growing. Cooking and sharing food. So our mission is to grow, to bring people together, to grow, cook, and share nourishing food, to cultivate community and alleviate hunger.
Right? So let's talk about the grow, cook, share. And the more wonky way to think about that is we are a full food systems organization. We're not just thinking about the meal in front of you, we're thinking about how to grow it. And how, what happens after you're done eating? So basically from seed to compost and everything in between.
And that, that gets to that systemic perspective that we were just talking about. So in terms of growing, we have, we steward three community gardens or three agricultural sites across Davidson County one in north Nashville. The Magruder Family Resource Center is a pretty standard community garden where people come and grow food.
They can take that food home with them or they can share it into our network. We have a community [00:07:00] farm out in Mill Ridge at the newest Metro Park at Mill Ridge, and this is a larger site where urban producers and ho household producers can grow food. But we talk about it in terms of a community farm because there's mo, there's seven acres there that we have access to.
And so we've got producers that are renting half acre, full acre plots as well to grow. And then finally we have a site off Haywood Lane. Excuse me. Working with immigrant and refugee farmers and they are farming for production. So they are growing for market and they have started a farmer's market out there, the only farmer's market in South Nashville.
And it has been a tremendous success. So we also have a community agriculture network that works with other garden sites. And this is really the direction we're moving in our agricultural programs where we are supporting other sites. In other words, we're not the farmers, we're supporting the farmers or the growers.
Right. And we've had several churches come on board. We [00:08:00] have a conference this this November called the Food and Faith Conference. We're working to organize the faith communities across Middle Tennessee. They often have a lot of land to grow. They also have a missional theological mission to alleviate hunger.
So we're working with the faith communities on that. Most people know us, and this is the. The headline here most people know is through our meals program. So what we're doing in our meals program is we're recovering food from across the city. Think Whole Foods, Costco, Aldi, sprouts, this time of year, lots of farms are giving us either their excess food or the ugly carrots, so to speak, that are still good, but they're not gonna bring top dollar at the farmer's market.
Right. That should maybe be the title of a book or at least a chapter for you. Ugly Carrot. Absolutely ugly carrots. Yeah. I want it on a t-shirt for you. Yes, I would love that. That's great. We bring that back to our headquarters in the nations, and we are [00:09:00] making that into scratch made meals that are then shared with other nonprofit organizations.
Wait, I wanna stop there for a second. I love to cook. I love to bake. So tell me, how are you mass producing home cooked scratch meals? That's the secret. That's the magic. It's not easy. It's like chopped every day in our kitchen. We can do a menu out Sure. A week out in advance, but you don't know what you're gonna get.
But it's like chicken and vegetable pasta or whatever it is. Right? You don't know the vegetables. Yeah. You, we do know the protein typically. But you don't know what you're gonna get. So that is the creativity and the adaptability of our kitchen teams. Right. They receive this, volunteers help us process it into prep, help us prepare it.
So by process you mean like. Chopped. Literally. That's right. Dice and slice and Okay. And and then we get these meals out to other nonprofits. So this part of our work is really like B2B. We [00:10:00] work with other nonprofit or back, or often we'll say poverty disrupting community building nonprofits. Right.
And we enhance their programming with food. So many of nonprofits have these, whether it's English language learning or after school programs or senior activities. Right. Food is this organizing gathering element. Right. We gather around food. And so we enhance the programming of other nonprofits with food.
We do food, they do. English language learning or workforce development. And we enhance that with the food and we deliver that five days a week. We are cooking between six and 7,000 meals a week, supporting about 55 organizations at about 60 sites. That's impressive. So how many volunteers do you have slicing dicey?
Hundreds a month. Hundreds a month. A month. Who gets involved? Is it church groups? Do people just sign up, be like, [00:11:00] I like to slice veggies, let me do it. Yeah. So we have volunteer opportunities five days a week, sometimes multiple times a day. During the day, it tends to either be retired folks or groups, whether it's school groups or corporate groups.
They're not exclusively in the evenings, it's often younger folks more turn on the ra, turn on the music and cook together. But that part is also part of our mission. Right? If you go back to our mission statement, it begins with bringing people together. That's actually a.
The secret sauce of the food project, whether it's in kitchens, around tables in the garden, it's the community that we're building through food that also addresses the acute needs of food insecurity in our community and the systemic barriers to food access. And then I feel like your favorite part of this, I would love the cooking part.
You would love the [00:12:00] logistics part. How do you get six to 7,000 meals in the hands of the people who need it? Before they spoil. Yeah. So that's also it. It is, it's a logistics thing. Whether, and our friends at Second Harvest, our friends at One Gen Away, we talk about this like, really what we're in the business of is logistics.
Yeah. Right. Food, a lot of this food that we're recovering from the grocery stores, they're throwing away and it, this is just part of our system that waste is built into our food system. And so we're re, we're solving two problems at once. If you think about it, we're preventing that food from going into our landfill, being just thrown away and we're using it to feed folks with it.
And it took me a little while to realize this, but our model is really, if I might say so brilliant in this way. We could recover the food from the grocery store. Right. And mostly it's produce or pre-made things, right? But if you took that and took it to our kitchen for a day or [00:13:00] two, then took it to a food bank for a day or two, then you pick it up and it sits in your refrigerator for a day or two, the strawberries are gone.
And strawberries are the thing that, Carli one gets moldy and the rest are fine and you just take care of that at your house. Right. But in this country, we're throwing away about 35% of the food that we produce while one in seven people in our community go without food. So it's this, that's one of the founding fundamental premises of our work is we've got this enormous food waste, which is an environmental problem.
It's an economic problem. And you've got this social problem of food access. So how can you. Take the food that we've got and get it to the people you who need it. Right. And that is a logistical problem. Yeah. And cj, you said something just a second ago that, one in seven people go without food.
Help me understand what that definitionally means. Sure. Because I understand there's. [00:14:00] Probably a bell curve of what that means. So yeah. Tell me on that. Well, all of these are USDA United States Department of Agriculture definitions. And so it is it's about the time it, like do you know where your next meals coming from?
How often does that happen to you? Within a week? And it's something like one or two. It's a very spec specific measurement Yeah. That they're after here. But it's something like not knowing, not not knowing where your next meal's coming from. Not knowing how you're going to buy groceries next.
Yeah. Running out of money before the end of the month sort of thing. And there's a slightly different measurement for children than there is for adults, but they're measuring both. Yeah. And so often in this country, food insecurity, hunger, if you will, looks different. It's not. The starving child on the street.
It's the working mother, skipping meals so her kids can eat. Yeah, definitionally, that's the one that's [00:15:00] always caught my attention the most, is looking at food insecurity. Just as a term I feel like is just so worn out. Yeah. It's like I, I feel like people just close their ears to it because it's been sometimes even weaponized in ways that just is not helpful.
But what has really brought it to life for me is looking at kids in the public education system that when there are times that school is out, or school is closed, like for ice or snow. Yep. Then they are looking at the reality. That the kids will not eat because the lunch that was served at school is not gonna be served at home.
That's absolutely right. And just the example that you gave where a parent skips a meal, so that way it's not as if they are truly starving to death, but it is a nutritional deficit that then gets plugged in with something that is fast food. That's something that's [00:16:00] really cheap. That's something that is not healthful at all.
And just makes it to where you're obese, you're have better, poorer health outcomes and you have a situation where you just can't provide for the type of nourishment that you need in the family. So, yeah, that, that's a very, a couple of points to this in response. The USDA actually now talks, they don't talk about food insecurity.
They talk about nutritional security. Yeah. Because they're trying to hone in on this nutritional deficit. For example, parts of Nashville are both food deserts. There's not access to healthy food and food swamps. What is a food swamp? A food swamp is a place that only has highly processed fast food fried. So many food deserts are also food swamps. Right? Yeah. And the problem with both of these terms is that they're invoking. Natural ecosystems, swamps, and deserts. Those things happen naturally. Part of our work is to highlight the way in which [00:17:00] these areas are not naturally deficit areas with like, policies create these people, create these economies, create these, they don't just sprout up.
And so, so yes, nutrition, security and then to think about that word hunger. Hunger is the pain you get in your belly when there's no food. Food and nutritional insecurity are the conditions that create, the conditions that allow you to be hungry long term, so to speak.
And so while you do hear organizations like ours kind of interchange hunger and food insecurity those are really specific things actually. I'd be really interested to hear. A couple of stories of outcomes that you've seen because you're working with all these volunteers. I can imagine that community has some life changing experiences in it, and then the people that you're serving.
I love these definitions. I think they're helping bring a lot to light. Yeah. But do you have any one or [00:18:00] two or three stories that could help us really understand the picture in a different way? Yeah. A lot of our partners, for example we have a, so about 65% of our partners are serving children or seniors.
Children and seniors are the most likely to experience. Wait, can you dive into that for a minute? Yeah. Because we talked about. Kids and how schools are the number one feeding institution for children. That's right. Especially impoverished children. Talk about the seniors. Seniors, yeah. Seniors are often, well, they're often on fixed incomes for one.
They often have mobility challenges or Right. Either they can't drive anymore or they can't afford a vehicle, or it's very hard to get on the bus. So not only they're on fixed incomes, limited mobility. And and there's a social connectivity problem as well for seniors in the sense that they're isolated often.
Right. One of our main longest serving partners is 50 forward and they serve seniors across the county and maybe even in the ring counties. And what they do is they bring [00:19:00] seniors in, they go get them, bring them to the center, share a meal. Right. So again, coming back to this notion of food as a connect.
As a way to alleviate loneliness. Right? But I think economically it's about the limited mobility and the fixed income. And so if you're on a fixed income and food has gone up 10%, you've suddenly lost 10% of your buying power. So a lot of meals, a lot of our food goes to Meals on Wheels or the various iterations of that, right?
54 operates their own meals on Wheels program. And that allows us to get food into homes of seniors. Some seniors pick it up at the site. But, going back to children and the way the pandemic, right? Yeah. When the schools shut down in the pandemic, when 54 were shut down in the pandemic the place that most of these seniors and children get their food was suddenly gone.
And that's when you talk about the way the pandemic exacerbated food [00:20:00] insecurity, nutritional insecurity, that's really what we're talking about. A story that comes to mind really is a young person in an afterschool program who is getting dinner. What we would call and what federal government calls a heavy snack after school is actually dinner for many of these kids.
And a young person came to us and asked for ways to get food home to their family. So they were getting dinner, but their little sister or their mother was not. And so we've really had to think creatively about how, sharing a meal is great, right? We're sharing a meal after school, you're eating with your friends.
But if you know in the back of your mind that members of your household are not getting food, that creates another kind of stress. And so we've been working to identify ways to get family meals home. So most of our meals come in big pans. And this is a. Kind of how we also make it work.
Sure. It's bulk cooking, [00:21:00] right? So these pans that have about 35 to 40 servings, so we're working to develop, basically take and bake meals that kids could take home to their families through these afterschool programs. So that on the meals side is one that really sticks in my mind on the garden side, which is very important as well.
Some farmers came from Myanmar, from Burma, and they were farmers in their own country. And I just remember very vividly this one young woman saying, oh, I was so, they were farmers in their home country. They lived in the country. And she said something like, oh, I, I was so afraid about coming to Nashville and living in this apartment building with no grass, no trees, and this.
Program has allowed her to both find a community and to reconnect with nature, reconnect with the outdoors, all while doing something quite useful. Right. Producing food for [00:22:00] herself and her neighbors. And these farmers are producing culturally relevant foods, things that we don't really have in Middle Tennessee.
So that also is this part of this cultural connection that the food and growing food does for folks. And I'll just say. Pretty consistently post pandemic. The number one thing that our program participants who are growing food say is that, yes, the food we grow is great for our kitchens, for our families, but what really matters is this connection, this community that we find outside.
At Mill Ridge there are 14 languages spoken in this garden space. So people are connecting to people from their home countries in really meaningful ways. Cj I'd like to spend a little bit of time on your story too. So if you would maybe start at current day, and then I'm gonna ask you some questions that go back to the beginning.
But at current day, just what are the stats of how long [00:23:00] you've been CEO, what was the founding look looking like? Yeah. Like, just walk us through some of those dynamics of where you sit now. Sure. So I've been the CEO now for four and a half years. I took over from the founder to Lou Skyler Quinn. She founded the organization proper in 2011 as the Nashville Food Project.
Prior to that, it was a, an affiliate of the Mobile Loaves and Fishes program out of Austin, Texas. And so that got started in like 2007. And I call them the founding fathers and the founding mothers, the founding fathers really created. There was this group of gentlemen that created the Mobile Loaves and Fishes program.
They hired loot to come in and they were recovering food making sandwiches and delivering it mostly to the unhoused communities. They had these little silver trucks that they went out every night and they were delivering direct. To people needing the food. [00:24:00] And what TLU did when she founded the food project was create this bulk model that served other organizations, right?
And that allowed the organization to scale, right? If you're handing every sandwich individually to the person, that might feel really good, but it's got some limitations. Yeah. And so working with other organizations allowed more meals to get into more hands or on more plates if we want to go that way.
The 2010 flood was really important to the food project. The mayor at the time asked the food project to get on the ground and start delivering meals, and that showed the organization that it could produce at scale. That it did have the capacity to do that. And so you'll still talk to volunteers who have been around since then and they'll look, they'll say, oh, remember we learned this in the flood.
And that's where the pans came from. For example. So, that's the trajectory. We moved into [00:25:00] our headquarters in the nations in 2019. It all started out of Woodmont Christian Church and for many years it. We, I guess it was their old mans. It's this little house that sits next to the church and they were cooking meals 30 at a time in residential kitchens.
Wow. And there was a lot of esprit decor. If you talk to volunteers from that time, they loved it. They were elbow to elbow cooking outta these little ovens, and they came to the food, the new building and the nations, and that's a commercial kitchen. Sure. Right. That is set up to do bulk cooking. And so it was a big change.
But this organization has been scrappy from the very beginning. And they, there's some real pride in that of figuring it out, learning how to do these things. Nashville has had. A series of events in the last 10 to 15 years that has really shaped its trajectory and the flood being one of them.
Yep. And a lot of the economic development, COVID being another. [00:26:00] But I love, it's just something about how the Lord ordered the universe, I think, is that tragedy and hardship out of it comes such interesting learning and beauty. Yeah. And we would never choose to go through the flood. We would never choose to go through COVID, but darn, we're not gonna waste it.
That's right. And I believe the Lord doesn't waste such things. And so I love hearing the stories about how that comes out of it is the great learning of how we can feed multitudes more because we went through hard and your origin story of this company is so funny. It reminds me of. The start of our different businesses working elbow to elbow out of our blue floored bonus room, and we still have employees today that were there for those early days.
And you do get such a different comradery. You realize that you can walk through fire with people. Absolutely. But you only realize that because you've walked through fire with people. Yeah, that's right. A lot of those, the more recent ones that, that we forget, the tornado Oh yeah.
March, 2020. Tornado, the [00:27:00] Madison tornado. I was here for this and that's the thing. We were among the first organizations on the ground recovering all of that food out of East Nashville, bringing it back to our kitchens, cooking it, and taking it right back to East Nashville. Sure. And so, and this kind of ties back to what I said at the very beginning, we are not, when you think about it, we're not part of the emergency food system in terms of the food banks and the food pantries, but we are absolutely a part of the the emergency food center.
Yes. When an emergency happens, we are number two in the line. So in Madison, for example, world Central Kitchen chef Jose Andres's organization is usually the first on the scene. They get on the scene within 24 hours with food trucks. We come in. 48 hours with prepped meals, hot meals that people can eat if you don't have electricity, if you don't have a kitchen you, you don't need. Food to cook. Yeah. So only after the electricity's on and you're back in your [00:28:00] apartment, that's when second Harvest comes in, or one gen away comes in. Sure. With boxes of food for you to cook. So we are a part of the true emergency food system in terms of when the flag goes up, we get the call.
Well, and I think it's interesting to highlight too, that food insecurity, nutrition, insecurity, hunger, whatever we wanna call it. There's not just one thing to check off, a box to fix. No, it's so multifaceted. It requires niche organizations that have the power to do one thing really well, or a couple of things really well to work in tandem to fight the issue.
That's right. Yeah. Cj, if we go all the way back to your origin story, oh Lord. You were raised on a pecan farm in Louisiana, right? That's right. Okay, so first off, I do have a question, and I've waited my whole life to find someone that can answer this question for me. Oh, no. This could be anything. There's three ways that you can say pecan.
All right. There's pecan. And my personal favorite that makes people grimace, [00:29:00] especially my wife, is pecking, so he grimace. Yeah. Let it be known. I've got a lot of gr our listeners did too, but there's something very satisfying about just chomping into a pecking and so stop tell us some of that story and tell us how you all in Louisiana pronounce that word.
As far as I know we pronounce it pecan, the correct way to pronounce it. Yes. Yeah. So I come at this from the agricultural side. I grew up on a pecan orchard in North Louisiana. Then my grandfather planted and my mother's got farmers in Arkansas. They're big row crop planters. And so agriculture on both sides of my family, I grew up, graduated high school in 99 at a time, in college, in the early aughts when w.
Organic food, sustainable agriculture was really just getting going, getting everybody excited. And for whatever reason I decided I was gonna try to be a farmer. And and so came back to [00:30:00] Nashville to go to graduate school at Vanderbilt. Did a PhD in philosophy, wrote a dissertation on the relationship of freedom in food slavery and agriculture.
So the way that food systems and political systems go together, not often, they do go together. And and this was a big broad sweeping. Look from prehistory to the present. Often obviously in, in the United States, we often think about agricultural slavery in the South. But the story is much longer than that as well.
So. I approached this that way. I started a farm in Jolton as part of my dissertation. I called it the experimental apparatus to my dissertation. And lemme just say no philosophy. Dissertations have an experimental apparatus and was raising chickens and eggs. Started with chickens and eggs and then expanded into pigs, turkeys, cows, sheep.
Oh, McDonald. Had a farm. Had a kid and realized, oh, we're gonna [00:31:00] need to make money to support this family. At one point at one point I was paying 35 cents an hour, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to raise food for other people. And so economically, it was not viable. And ended up going back to Arkansas.
I went to undergraduate at a little school in Arkansas going back to, to help Heifer International. Have you heard of them? They it's this international organization where you can buy a goat, buy a sheep, and they give it to somebody in a village. And all you gotta do is pass it along.
In fact, we give you a goat. You just have to give a baby goat to somebody and it is a way for people in the developing world to build wealth. Right. Livestock is actually. Wealth in many places. They wanted to do this in the United States, and so we formed, I helped them form two cooperatives of small farmers.
One was a livestock farming cooperative and one was a [00:32:00] veggie cooperative. And so I was on the livestock side and the whole premise of this were can small farmers cooperate to achieve some kind of economy of scale to make this economically viable? The question is still open. Many farms these days that you see, see as successful, these small to medium sized farms, often, not always, but often have something unusual there. Either they had a first career in software development or they had, they inherited the land, or somebody's, like me and Joltin, I had 2200 acres that a landowner let me have for like a dollar a year or something.
Right. There's something unusual about the people that are making it work economically. Yeah. But the whole system is set up against small and medium sized producers and there's a whole debate to be had about the productive efficiency of these kind of operations. So I helped them do that and then came back to Nashville at the [00:33:00] beginning of the pandemic.
I married somebody from Nashville. And so we came back to be with family and this opportunity came up. I remember farming when Toulu was starting the food project. And we knew each other through the farming circles. So it, it's nice to be back and to see this organization at a point where it's having such an impact.
Yeah. There was a really interesting part of your story that. You said I wanted to become a farmer. And then if I had to guess like what the next 10 sentences would be like, there's a lot of things that I'd say, okay, this seems like a natural next step. But I think in your story you said I wanted to become a farmer and then I went to graduate school at Vanderbilt.
And I would imagine that's an unusual pathway to say, sure, I'm interested in farming to go this way. So what was the mindset that led to the decision to say, I wanna do this, and then go and pursue some like really advanced degrees? Sure. That's a good question. So it was about it was [00:34:00] about thinking about farming and agriculture as part of basically a liberal arts education, right?
There's this great book called Shop Class as Soul Craft, right? And the way that manual labor and working with our hands is really a lost art. We don't do it much anymore. And the way that it. It really contributes to being a whole person. So I went to a little liberal arts school and the idea at the time was to create a, an educational farm.
And so there's a number of schools like this, whether it's Warren Wilson in North Carolina, Berea in Kentucky is like this. Deep Springs college out in California and Antioch College in Ohio all have agriculture as part of the education. And the point in these schools is not really to train people to be farmers, but it's to train people to integrate that kind of hands-on labor.
With [00:35:00] education. And so that was the original idea is to create a school. And this is not, I was Montessori, I'm a Montessori kid. This is not unlike Montessori for adults. For college students. So the idea was to get a PhD and to do more educational endeavors over the years that shifted.
And then, it, a certain kind of person sees a challenge like, oh, I'm gonna make this farm economically viable. Right? That's the problem. And then you end up focusing on that. But that's still part of my larger vision vocation is to think about the ways that food and food production in can integrate and inform.
Our larger humanistic education. Well, I can't help but take the bait because I'm a business guy, cj, and so my mindset always goes into economic viability, scalability, and the guts of how something works. And so can you bring us [00:36:00] back into the food project and help understand. What the financial guts are.
Is there anyone that you all charge? Is it all donation based? Because I, I see this and I really care about solutions and there are some solutions that really are only designed to be local. Like if you try to scale them, it breaks them. Which is a lot of, like, Carli and I have a passion for saying that the local church has for so many years failed in their responsibility of serving the community because there's some things that only the local church should be doing, but then there's other things that should be scaled and can survive that scalability. So walk us through some of the economics and help us understand that narrative as it relates to the Nashville Food Project.
Sure. Absolutely. So the food project currently has about a three and a half million dollars budget, annual budget, [00:37:00] and about 31 employees. About 65% or two point. Don't hold me to the math. I know this number two point, we raise philanthropically $2.3 million a year. We a full million of that.
3.5 is donated food, so that does get added into the whole number. So we're recovering about a million dollars worth of food a year. Okay. We raise about 2.3. We have, we divide our revenue into philanthropic revenue program revenue and earned revenue. So philanthropic philanthropically it's something like 60% of our money comes from foundations and grants, and then we've got individuals and events, the sort of standard breakdown on the philanthropy side.
What is I think somewhat unique about the food project is we have a program revenue, and that's the meals. So oftentimes our partners have budgets for food, right? If they weren't getting it [00:38:00] from us, they would order pizza from Domino's because you need pizza to bring people in to the GED classes. I'm just making an example.
And so they have a budget. If they have a budget, we work with them to recover some of our costs. So none of the meals program operates on a partial cost recovery model, so it has no margin. We're recovering. We would like to recover 65% of our costs, but it's more like 55%. And so we work with partners on a sliding scale to get reimbursed for some of the meals.
We utilize federal programs, the child and adult feeding program, the summer school feeding program that. That pays for these organizations to have access to food. Right? So whether we are working within their own sort of individual private budget or the federal budget we generate about seven to $800,000 a year in cost [00:39:00] recovery.
And that's mainly labor and overhead. It is. That's what it is. And delivery. Right. If you're an organization with a budget under $1 million. It's like we charge 10 cents or something, like, it's like for the pans. Very di minimus. And it, again, it is on a sliding scale. No partner.
Even the big ones are not paying a hundred percent of cost. They're paying like 60% of the cost. So we're, we work very closely with our partners on that model. That was a model that, that they generated to Lu developed a couple, 10 years ago, and it's been just remarkably important to the fiscal health of the organization.
In our earned revenue. We have catering. And facility. So we rent out our facility in the nations. It's a beautiful little space. It's, very moderately priced. And we also do catering. And the catering does have a margin on it. And that is our social enterprise. And so that margin goes back [00:40:00] to support our mission.
We are higher than standard catering companies Carli we don't wanna compete with them. But if you choose us for your board meeting, your church gathering, whatever that, that margin goes back to support our mission. Can you give an example for someone that maybe hadn't considered at all using you all for catering?
That's not at all what my instinct would be when I was thinking of caterers. I would not call the Nashville Food Project and say that, that would seem very counterintuitive to me. Yeah. So can you talk about what that could look like from a catering perspective? Like what that generally offering would be?
Sure. Our chef, we have a true chef on our staff. Yeah. Bianca Morton, she's our Chief Culinary officer. And we have a full catering menu. Wow. And that is there is some recovered food in there, maybe carrots or something back to our carrot. But we do buy. Yeah we purchase food for that is market standard sort of stuff.
And it can go from everything from, salmon, all, all the way to cheese [00:41:00] boards and hot meals. It's beautiful, really good high quality catering. And, we started this because other non-profits, nonprofits wanted to support another nonprofit. So many groups order lunch.
Yeah. And so like, box lunches are really the bread and butter there. But we did a retirement party last week that was the full Monty and really beautiful high quality stuff. I've been wanting to use the bread and butter pun this entire podcast, and you just stole it. And I just have to say you Well done.
Thank you. Getting that in there. Yeah. I'd been waiting, I'd been sitting on it and I didn't get there. I wonder as Nashville's growth is just exploding. All of your founders up to, you have had a lot of foresight in how you've built the model and how you've added these social enterprises. Is there any other city that is doing something similar that you're talking to them?
Like do you have buddies across the country? Yeah. How does that work? Thank you for this question. Carli it actually ties back [00:42:00] to your question too, the model look every, okay. Lemme just answer the question directly. No. There are organizations doing the food recovery bit. Yeah, there are organizations doing the community meals bit, and of course there are organizations doing the agricultural part.
I have not seen any organization that's doing all three, and that either means we're brilliant or we're crazy. And I can't, or both and I can't figure that out yet. No. So I do not know, I know some outstanding organizations keep Austin Fed comes to mind. They're recovering a million pounds of food.
Wow. We recover 350,000 pounds of food. And DC Central Kitchen is doing the meals like we do and supporting other organizations. There's a lot of great. Agricultural organizations, Denver Urban Gardens, Kansas City Community Gardens. So there, there are others, but I have not seen an organization that does all [00:43:00] three, I will say it adds a significant level of complexity.
Sure. You've actually got two or three organizations jammed into one. And the culture, for example, from a kitchen is not the culture in a garden, right? So it does present challenges. Now in terms of replicable model, every city is throwing away food. Every city has hungry kids. This is a model that could be reproduced.
And we have thought long and hard about how do we do that? For example, if, and I'm just making this up, if Louisville wanted to do this, could we go in, could we help them set it up, show them how to run the relationships? Because ultimately this is really about relationships. Whether it's with the grocery stores or with the nonprofits. Could we set up a little food project in a box sort of thing. We are exploring that. I think it's possible. And it would certainly solve a problem. Getting back to your question [00:44:00] about local and global scale. Like this is a local problem, wherever it is.
There's no national solution to food waste and food insecurity at this level. Yeah. And so how could we create little sites that work in. Insti in communities that are made. Part of what makes us work is we are embedded in Nashville. What works here might not work in Memphis. Right? And so how could we explore those areas? But yes, this model is theoretically do replicable in other places. I think it's also goes back to the economics of it. I would like to get the e to where philanthropy is more like half 50% of the revenue needs. And this is just me. I will say philanthropy's not the answer.
We have to develop economically viable ways to do the things that we're doing. If we're gonna [00:45:00] rely on charity, that is going to limit us. And so how can we make our work sustainable from that perspective? I think that's really what we've gotta figure out. And and this model of charity versus community building, we don't think about ourselves as a charity.
We are not giving away handouts, right? It may look that way in some instances, but there's this deeper thought about rebuilding our relationship network in ways that is not reliant on a handout on charity. It's about dignity. Right? It's about human dignity. And people need more than a handout.
They need to have, there are many models nowadays where, and I was thinking about, there's one in Boston, the daily table where it's not free groceries, but you're paying like 25 cents a [00:46:00] pound for apples rather than 2 99. There is a dignity in the transaction in many ways. So cj, we wrap up each podcast with three short fill in the blank questions.
Oh no. That at the end will be a blank for you to do a word or a short phrase for you to be able to complete the thought. So if you'll just repeat the prompt back to me and then fill it in with whatever you think finishes it. Yep. You got it. You ready? Okay. Okay, here we go. Number one, the most important lesson food has taught me about community is blank.
The most important lesson that food has taught me about community. Is the power of breaking bread together. About communion. Communion and community are the same root word. Yeah. And that, that sharing, sharing bread, breaking bread is a [00:47:00] spiritual and a social connection. Yeah. Number two, one thing people don't always realize about food is blank.
One thing that people don't realize that sometimes people don't realize about food is, and it's an awkward word, is its preciousness, is its specificity every. Leaf of lettuce was grown in some soil at some place, harvested by some hands. Every apple was picked by a human being in a tree somewhere.
Yeah. It, it experienced clouds and rain and a bug landed on it. And so it's this radical specificity, radical individuality of food. It's both general and specific. And I like to think about that. And number three, the moment that made me [00:48:00] most proud of the Nashville Food Project's work was blank.
Well, the moment that made me most, that makes me most proud of the Nashville Food Project's work is when I meet someone who has received. A meal or received access to land and expresses their their gratitude for that or, and what that does for them on a daily basis? It is humbling. It is affirming of this vocation.
And it is really important. I will say generally last year, we received our first national recognition through the yield giving award. And that was also affirming from an administrative point of view. It was a large unrestricted gift that recognized our work on a national scale.
Cj, Carli and I have been doing this podcast for quite some time, and a consistent theme [00:49:00] that we see is that the Lord's hand has been working and preparing someone for oftentimes their whole life but meaningful portions of their life to have them where they are today. And it's so fascinating to meet someone that came from a peck and farm.
We'll let that slide a Acan farm in Louisiana and brought you through a level of knowledge that farming is really intimidating for a lot of people. And we've had farmers on our podcast that recognize that very few people make the choice to go into agriculture if you haven't had multiple generations of it.
And so to see you help bridge the gap between. A kind of, I don't wanna say dying industry, but an industry that's out of favor for sure. And make it [00:50:00] relevant, but also have it have a therapeutic component to it is just a really fascinating way that I feel like your calling has been deployed. And I also think that the uniqueness of the complexity of the challenge for you is also like uniquely cj, like, I don't know you all that well, but seeing like.
You PhD in philosophy and even like how you answered some of the questions, like I can see that philosophical element that you're dealing with some big, hairy, ugly problems. And those are ones that drive me crazy, right? I'm just like, you know what? We're gonna square peg round, hold this, and it's just gonna have to work.
If it breaks. But that is not your philosophy and I think it's just really great to see how much you really care about the individual stories [00:51:00] and the kind of hyper locality, of what you do. And so it's just fun to hear your story. And I think it really does fit into our whole goal here on the podcast, which is to teach people about what makes Tennessee special.
And so it's nice that we count you among our ranks here. And thank you for doing all that you do to support the least of these in the city that are so often overlooked and and you and your organization don't overlook them. So thank you for what you do. Thank you for having me.
CJ Tel, CEO of the Nashville Food Project. Really a fascinating human being that CEOs, this project, a PhD in philosophy, has been to Vanderbilt, but. Was raised on a pecan farm. Just a wild [00:52:00] combination of different things that really has equipped him to be able to address what is a big, hairy, ugly, audacious problem that is unique in city's, amongst groups of people that most have no understanding that it's more than just, oh, they need some food.
Like there's really deep issues that they may not have electricity, they might not have working appliances. It's much more than just, wow, they need to eat today. Yeah. Every once in a while when our team gives us our packet, right. For preparing for a podcast, I'll read, and this one, I will not lie. I was a little intimidated.
I was like, how are we. Going to be able to relate, like, I'm from Detroit, Michigan. I, how am I gonna sit across from a pecan farmer with a PhD in philosophy and have any rapport? And he did such a good job. I think he did such a good job [00:53:00] of explaining terms, helping bring the problem to life, whether you're talking about food swamps or food deserts, or helping educate about the difference between nutritional insecurity, food insecurity, hunger, all of these terms that get thrown around and you think, but understanding what that actually means by storytelling.
I really enjoyed hearing that come from him. And then thinking about the therapeutic use of farming and the volunteer hours of cooking, what they're doing. It feels like that toy that's in the kids' room where you turn it over and the water just swirls in a cyclone, like he is overseeing this hunger cyclone and he's doing it really well.
And I think chiefly because they're building relationships with the smaller, even smaller organizations that are boots on the ground. I think it also reveals to me how important storytelling is for sure, because there's a famous quote that I'll probably butcher, but it's something close to, when one [00:54:00] person dies, it's a tragedy when a million people die.
It's a statistic. And that is so true in hunger, even in the United States where I think the instinct is that. Yeah, there may be some hungry people in like the most impoverished parts of the nation, but the stat that he gave, that one in seven Nashvillians are experiencing some real nutritional deficit each week.
That puts it in new perspective, especially when you combine it with, we throw away 35% sure of all the food that is made in America. That's a tough combination to have, but if there's not a story behind it, if there's not a face, if there's not something that brings it to life, then at the end of the day, the truth is that people don't care.
Yeah. That's just the answer. It is what it is. They don't care, but they do care when. [00:55:00] It's real and in front of you and told correctly. I agree. And I think he did a good job of talking about how Nashville's unique and how the Nashville Food Project is unique. But one thread I've heard, whether it was Papa Joe from Walk of Love, Chris and Elaine Whitney from One Gen Away, or CJ here today, was the word dignity.
And you can't overlook the importance of dignity when you're working on hunger and how it's not just about, here's a sandwich, right? It's about you wanna have the dignity to say, I gave you this food. You have a hot meal. Can I have a meal? But not forget that my little sister's at home not having a meal.
There's a lot of. Self-worth issues at play when it comes to hunger. And we've heard those on these couches and on these chairs, and I think he approaches those really delicately with his storytelling. But I think continuing to unwrap [00:56:00] this as we do on the podcast, keeping dignity, the dignity of the human spirit at the forefront is just paramount.
