Bianca Morton was in culinary school, watching an instructor whisk together milk and flour to make béchamel sauce, when it dawned on her: she had watched her mother make the same thing her whole life. It was just mac and cheese sauce.
Since that day, she’s experienced the same moment of recognition many times over. In fact, it’s been a theme of Chef Bianca’s four years at The Nashville Food Project – remarkable food, without pretense — served to after-school programs, immigrant communities, homeless outreach organizations and so many others across the city.
“You can call it whatever you want, but at the end of the day, good food is good food,” she says.
Bianca was the first-ever employee of The Nashville Food Project with a culinary degree. When the organization hired her in 2018, they were just months away from moving into a brand-new building with a commercial kitchen — a pretty drastic change from their beginnings in a modest church kitchen. The meals team was trading pots and pans for shiny braising tilt skillets that could hold up to 40 gallons. And with the addition of Bianca, they were ready for it. Almost overnight, food production scaled up from 75 to 750 servings at a time.
Now, as Chief Culinary Officer, Bianca entrusts her team with the daily tasks of food preparation — the systems she put in place years ago means they can cook 1,200 meals each day like clockwork. Instead, she’s creating ways to invite Nashvillians into her expansive culinary world and finding hope in the fact that people from marginalized communities get to taste butternut squash because of the work she’s doing at the Food Project.
“I grew up in a food desert,” she explains. “I didn’t know what a butternut squash was. But this role gives me the opportunity to introduce foods like that to kids in the same situations — I get to show them that there is more out there. Your current circumstance is not a limiting factor in how far you can go.”
Her words echo the organization’s vision for a Nashville where everyone has access to the food they both need and want: a world where good food is not off-limits to certain people, in certain neighborhoods. A world in which bottle gourds and garlic cloves are the doorway to thriving communities.
“This is not just my job — this is who I am, as a chef and as a person,” she says.
Bianca has earned her white chef’s coat a thousand times over. But she doesn’t need it to validate her deep understanding of the transformative power of food. She’ll just keep coming to the kitchen with her passion for delicious, nutritious, approachable food, using béchamel sauce to make mac and cheese.