In early March, Jeannine Carpenter, director of advocacy for the Chattanooga Area Food Bank, estimated there was a 20% chance that the missing $7.2 million would get restored. Maybe 25%.

On Thursday afternoon, as it passed its $52.8 billion budget, Tennessee lawmakers voted to restore $7.2 million in lost funding for small farmers, families and food banks.

This Sunday, we take you to Smith-Perry Berries Farm in Ooltewah, where beloved farmer and Ooltewah-native Aubie Smith harvests and sells the gorgeously good fruit from some 200,000 strawberry plants. Folks come from miles around. Easy to see why.

It takes five days to make croissants at Bread & Butter, the beloved bakery in Red Bank. Five days. By hand. You mix on a Monday, laminate on Tuesday, freeze, then shape, and by Friday, you bake. Five days.

Hope continues to grow in Nashville, where noble, bipartisan efforts are underway to refund the missing LFPA Plus money. Our last post described the stand-up efforts of Chattanooga's Bo Watson and Yusuf Hakeem, a Republican and Democrat, respectively, and so many others who are working the midnight shift to clean up the mistakes made by Tennessee Department of Agriculture, or TDA.

When you walk into a dinner hosted by Sujata Singh, you enter a warm, welcomed space complete with flowers, beautifully set tables and air filled with the the most delightful spices and herbs.

It was during COVID and St. Peter's Episcopal Church was worshipping outside. As Kelsey Aebi – St. Peter's lay minister – set up the altar, communion table and chairs, the warm sun fell on her shoulders and the birds sang from overhead trees and she realized:I love this. I love worshipping outside.

Last week, Mac's Kitchen & Bar celebrated its one-year anniversary with a "Farm and Fire" night that contained everything you want in a Saturday night: a long table of friends, cozy lights strung through the trees, warm fire pits, Lon Eldridge on the guitar and, most of all:Mac's food and drink.

After hours, days and weeks of talking with Nashville legislators, explaining to them how and why the state lost $7.2 million in funding for Tennessee farmers and food banks, the director of advocacy for the Chattanooga Area Food Bank may be witnessing this most beautiful event: a selfless, bipartisan response.

Good morning, Food as a Verb. Spring officially began this week, which means we're about one month away from our last frost date of the year.

Imagine if we graduated agriculturally literate students who, in the words of the National Research Council, could "understand the food and fiber system and this would include its history and its current economic, social and environmental significance to all Americans."

Wherever we go, whatever meal we're eating – from gas station pick-ups to white table cloth dinners – we create our present and future health by the selections on our plate. What we eat, our gut becomes. And what our gut becomes, our bodies become.

The USDA says it sent six separate funding notifications. Tennessee missed them all.

In October 2022, the Tennessee Department of Agriculture (TDA) announced big news: thanks to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) funding, Tennessee would receive $8.2 million to be distributed among food banks, farmers and families across the state.

It feels like teenage Kenyatta – "skinny as a rail," he remembers – and his six siblings – one brother is 6'5", another 6'4" – are eating 100,000 calories a day. His mother, with some loaves-and-fishes power, is somehow able to provide. But she can't prevent brothers from being brothers.

Since we began publishing last August, one question has been quietly brewing in the back of my mind. As we travel across our regional food landscape, I've asked farmers, friends and agricultural leaders:

Working the land restores this connection in ways few other parts of modern life can. The very materials and methods present within farming are each wise teachers, each seed containing tiny scripted messages for us on life and how to receive it.

Welcome to all our new readers and friends. Thanks to Kristen Templeton's marvelous headliner story in Tuesday's NOOGAToday, our community at Food as a Verb grew a lot bigger overnight. 

Four years ago, Brad and Tara Smith were neck-deep in two careers – he was a landscape architect and planner; she, an elementary school principal – living near the Space Coast in historic and hip Ocala, Florida.

We're guest vending at the Main Street Farmers' Market this afternoon, 4 to 5.30 pm. Stop by and say hello; we'd love to see you and show off our new merchandise.

Ella Livingston's story could start with that moment – her moment – in Japan. Before Cocoa Asante became Chattanooga's luxury chocolate brand known across the world, Livingston was studying in Tokyo, 2013, when her entire perspective turned.

Imagine if everyone had stable levels of blood sugar.No more skyscraper highs. No more shaky, hangry, hand-me-the-peanut-butter-before-I-LOSE-IT-lows.Instead of helter-skelter, we could be stable throughout the day. Balanced. Calm, even.

The distance between Medellin and St. Elmo is not as far as you think.

Each Wednesday, so many of us buy our produce from Hernandez Family Farms. From the far side of Monteagle, Daniel, Jennifer and their children drive to the Main St. Farmers' Market, bringing affordable, gorgeous produce – sweet potatoes, spinach, arugula, squash, pumpkin bread – grown with love.

This year, the Chattanooga Area Food Bank will deliver, provide, donate and offer more food for hungry families and individuals than ever before in its 51-year history.

It began, as these things often do, over beer.Wintertime, 2012. The Olympics were on. Three old friends – Scott Shaw, John Coffelt and Tom Montague – were itching for, well, some wintertime fun.

For me, there was cantaloupe sliced in half-moon pieces with knives sharp enough to split hairs. And pimento cheese sandwiches on white bread served on plates the color of egg yolk. The crystal was high on shelves, out of reach, never used. Glass bottles of Coke and Lays chips and homemade chocolate sauce poured warm from pint Mason jars over peppermint stick ice cream.

Refugees for 17 years. Prison. Threats of regime violence. For the Alabid family, coming to Chattanooga was freedom from immeasurable fear. How to express gratitude?

This is the story of our city's urban farm looking backwards – its land, leaders say, was a place of horrific forced removal and plantation slavery – in order to shape the future.

There's some important history between Dr. King and Chattanooga. In 1960, he traveled to speak here, just months after our own downtown sit-ins, as white Chattanooga was boiling over.

During COVID, Hannah Wright began posting Instagram videos about diet and nutrition.That's good. Hannah, 37, is wise, grounded and has a keen and trained ear for discerning diet and nutrition truth from snake oily, exploitative motivations.

Two Wednesdays ago, we set up shop at the Main St. Farmers' Market. We had the grandest of afternoons, more fun, as Bobby Weir once said, than a frog in a glass of milk.

Olson is the owner of Scenic City Wine in St. Elmo. For the last 20 years, Olson, whose career shifted to wine during culinary school, has been immersed in the global wine scene, from distribution to importing to enjoying. As he loves to say:

While other Asian cuisines have found success in Chattanooga, Filipino food and culture are lesser known. But a few local Pinoys are changing that with food trucks and grocery stores aiming to serve all Chattanoogans.

In churches across the region, the communion sacrament takes many forms: wafers, crackers, pieces of store-bought bread. In Red Bank, loaves are baked by hand, from scratch, in prayer.

Today at 4pm, Food as a Verb will be guest vending at the Main St. Farmers' Holiday Market until 5.30 pm in the parking lot adjacent to Finley Stadium.

In Sewanee, three friends are growing gourmet mushrooms inside a renovated wood shop. There are foggy fruiting tents, a machine called the Swirling Death Blender and gorgeously good (and sexy) mushrooms. What's not to love?

Sunday, we profiled the outstandingly talented Mallory Grimm and her compelling vision for local food and sustainability at LUNCH, located on the edge of The University of the South's campus on beautiful Monteagle mountain.

Mallory Grimm left a thriving Nashville business to move back to Sewanee and open a restaurant devoted to local food and community. Folks are gushing.

On Sunday, we told the story of Gwen, a grandmother in Tyner working two jobs, living with four other people in a two-bedroom apartment and struggling with a stack of bills over an inch thick.

Gwen works two jobs: an eight-hour shift offering sit-in home health care that also includes 12-hour shifts every other weekend. In her spare moments – late afternoons, Sundays – she sells government-issued phones from nearby parking lots.

As travel nurses working in Everett, Washington, in 2020, Amy Dunham and Steven McKinney were some of the first people to experience the Covid-19 pandemic as frontline healthcare professionals. After long shifts tending to sick patients in the ER of a mid-size city near Seattle, the couple would return to their temporary home on Whidbey Island, a regenerative agriculture farm where Amy's brother shears sheep and raises livestock in a healthy and humane way.

Last Thursday, with the 200 block of MLK Ave. closed to traffic, Sharon Palmer of East Lake relaxed at a white table seated on the westbound side of the double yellows as a November wind blew light orange leaves from the maple trees nearby.

This country superstar has been working a second job: breeding cattle, stewarding the land and cultivating dung beetles. Lots of them.

East Tennessee Wheat.That's what Erik Zilen, co-owner of Niedlov's Bakery & Cafe, is calling it.

Here's a thought exercise: travel anywhere in the US, walk into an Indian restaurant, any Indian restaurant, and odds are pretty good that wherever you go, the experience will be mostly the same.

A few Fridays ago, something really special happened in Sewanee, Tennessee.Gathered around five or six round tables inside a Methodist church, a group of regional farmers, growers and producers met with buyers and grocery store owners.The day's goal: to plan out next year's growing season.

In 1965, Wendell Berry left a teaching job in NYC and moved with his family to a farmhouse in Henry County, Kentucky. There, he began his abundant writing career: more than 80 books of essays, novels and poetry, all of which seem to revolve around naming both what's been lost and the path back to it.

Instead of asking what can go wrong, what if we asked a different question: what can go right?

When you know where Bryan Slayton was, you'll know where he's going.

Listened to my first Taylor Swift album a few days ago. My very first. I know, I know. Half the world adores her. I'm a little behind the times.

Imagine bread, beer and whiskey made from grains grow locally. From Niedlov's to Sequatchie Cove Farm to Red Clay Farms.

Can Chattanooga become a Blue Zone city, where people are living longer, healthier and happier lives?

Within American capitalism, I can only think of one other class of laborer whose livelihood – day in, day out – exists in such a vulnerable, trusting and insecure position.Servers.

Not long ago, I was outside Aldi talking with a friend headed to a meeting where folks were asking a most intriguing question.

The Palestinian-Jordanian chef has a rare vision for what his restaurant can accomplish. People across the US are noticing.

We're constantly stumbling into one very hard truth: growing food for a living is tremendously difficult. We marvel at those who do it well.

There are 17 items offered. Mushroom grits. Blackened trout. Cheesecake. Okra with beet hummus, bee pollen, pickled onion, honey, cilantro and naan.And nearly all the ingredients are locally-sourced.

One month ago, we launched Food as a Verb, telling local food stories you can’t find anywhere else.You responded with open arms, supporting and subscribing in such generous ways.

The summer sun rises above us at Sequatchie Cove Farm in Marion County, Tennessee. The flock of 2,000 Novogin laying hens is protected by a series of strands of moveable electric fencing. A white Pyrenees moves through the flock with authority of soldier guarding the wall. Full of summer freedom, a boy rides by on an electric dirt bike followed by a pick-up carrying a flat bed of garlic harvested earlier that day.

Chattanooga – twice named Outside's Best City – is known coast to coast for our outdoor identity. Name any outdoor sport – minus skiing – and we offer it in gorgeous abundance.

Over the last year, Ian “Sully” Sullivan has served some three thousand bowls of oatmeal to Chattanoogans. He’s the owner of The Oatmeal Experience, a food truck that specializes in specialty oatmeal he says “aren’t your granny’s oats.”

My best friend is working on a Toyota with a malfunctioning alarm system. Every time you put the key into the ignition, the car alarm blares and won’t stop. It's an awful sound and paralyzing: you can't drive the car with a blaring, honking alarm. But, to fix the car, you must start it, which triggers the alarm and makes working for more than five minutes unbearable and crazy-making.

Get to know Spencer Perez – founder of Coffee Machine Service Co. and our city's espresso machine repairman – and you'll see the world – and coffee – in brand new ways.

Here at Who Knows Why Farm, there’s a very wide gap – a maddeningly, comically wide gap – between my vision for growing vegetables and the reality of what actually happens.

"One of my goals of moving here was to help open hearts .... that we can come together as a community.”

Three of us were harvesting milky oats on Cagle Mountain, swish-swishing through the grain, white clouds floating in a blue summer sky, when we all just stopped speaking. 

She also shares the origins of Alleia's Baked Creste Rigate with Veal Meatballs and a fifth-generation recipe for buttermilk pancakes.

Welcome to Food as a Verb.

The landscape of Chattanooga food is arguably the best it's ever been.