Since July 2020, Tallu Schuyler Quinn chronicled her experience enduring an aggressive brain cancer. And on Thursday night, the founder of the Nashville Food Project died surrounded by her family.
The nonprofit food charity would become her life’s work. It started small — just handing out sandwiches from an old car.
Quinn, a Nashville native and Harpeth Hall alumna, trained in Appalachian crafts before going to seminary at Columbia University in New York City. Then, she relocated to Nicaragua where she worked with poor farmers. When she returned, she saw food as a way to bring healing to the community where she grew up.
“She demonstrated the power of a kind of ordinary goodness,” says Margaret Renkl, author and New York Times columnist who wrote about Quinn in 2021. “Not the kind of heroism where you put everything away and go to serve the poor in a developing nation far from home but how you actually live out goodness in the most ordinary way that we can all replicate if we just try.”
After 10 years as a nonprofit, the Nashville Food Project opened a headquarters in the Nations with a communal commercial kitchen, built a community garden including the newest in Antioch and continued its food rescue and feeding programs.
In a remembrance posted by the Nashville Food Project, Quinn’s described as a worker and a leader who “could fire up a crowd to action, weed a raised bed or clean out a walk-in cooler with equal intensity.”
“That’s the miracle of it,” Renkl says. “She knew somehow that it is healing to the helper as much as it is to anybody who’s being helped.”
Renkl wrote a blurb for Quinn’s forthcoming collection of personal essays titled “What We Wish Were True,” largely pulled from the posts she shared on her CaringBridge site. These partial excerpts show her grief and suffering, along with plenty of gratitude.
Aug 17, 2021
There is something about imminent death or illness that allows us to let what’s less important just fall away. We rarely consider the gifts we find and what we lose, and there is so much I have lost, but the falling away of what is worldly, painful, covetous—all of it—is better served cast-off, with new room for life, and life abundant.
To love and to be loved—it is a complex, imperfect dance, and it is beautiful even still. tallu
July 21, 2021
And as I listened I thought about how death cannot separate me from the love in my life. I do not have the words for how deep my heartache is, but I understand that whatever pain our family is facing is only the flipped side of what holds us together in love, tallu
July 16, 2021
When we think about our legacies, there is often an emphasis on what we’ve personally accomplished but rarely enough about what we have been given along the way. There are no doubt some things we worked hard for, but also so much we received freely, generously.
Quinn’s glioblastoma attacked her vision initially, making it difficult to see at times. But in later months, the tumor growing in her brain led to confusion that also made it so she couldn’t comprehend the words she was looking at on the page, even though she had just written them.
“I have never been a part of anything where I felt so much love in one place surrounding someone, and her labors over these last few years, especially the past month, settled into a palpable feeling of peace,” Robbie Quinn, her husband, wrote on their CaringBridge site.
Quinn was 42. She’s also survived by two young children, Lulah and Thomas Quinn. The Nashville Food Project has established a fund for gifts in Quinn’s honor.
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