A local nonprofit wants to bring fresh food to food deserts. Here’s how you can help.

An upcoming cooking class with an award-winning Raleigh chef will do more than feed its attendees some perfectly seared chicken and seasoned curried sweet potatoes.

Tickets to this event, hosted by local nonprofit Ripe for Revival in partnership with the Mediterranean restaurant Vidrio, will fund putting decked-out transit buses into some of North Carolina’s most food insecure regions, bringing farm-fresh produce to communities in barren food deserts.

Ripe for Revival, a Rocky Mount-based nonprofit that began in 2018, has converted transit buses into pay-what-you-can mobile grocery stores for North Carolinians in Wake, Beaufort, Edgecombe, Halifax, Nash, Pitt and Wilson counties. They’re called Mobile Markets.

Tickets, which can be purchased until Feb. 1, start at $99 and get attendees an intimate cooking class and dinner with revered Raleigh-based chef Saif Rahman.

There will be a virtual and an in-person option. The virtual option is $99 for a two-person meal kit and link to the online, interactive cooking course. The in-person option is $100 for each person and includes dinner at the restaurant.

All proceeds will support the Mobile Markets’ food supply, as well as the local farmers the initiative benefits.

Creating healthier lifestyles and outcomes

“Ripe for Revival is an organization with a purpose to revive communities through food,” said Will Kornegay, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “Our goal is to go into 20 counties so people can get good food where they are and when they need it, making it more affordable and accessible.”

Throughout the fall, the group served people in Wake County through a pilot program with the Town of Zebulon, which lost its farmers market, said press contact (and former food writer for The News & Observer) Andrea Weigl.

“We want to find ways to not only provide access but do so in an affordable way with dignity,” Kornegay said.

“As we take the mobile market into communities, we also have a Cooking Cart. We hand out recipes and teach our recipients how to cook with foods they may have never seen or never used before. A goal with this project is to, over time, create healthier lifestyles and outcomes.”

Farm (to bus) to table

Ripe for Revival has five transit buses they’ve converted to Mobile Markets, though they’re still working to fund three of them and make them operational. They hope all five buses will be driving into communities by June.

“We want to serve 75 sites per week across 20 to 25 counties. If we can have 100 families on site, and if they all get 10 pounds of food, that’s 75,000 pounds of food distributed a week,” Kornegay said.

The group partners with local farmers to get the food they distribute. Ripe for Revival, though donations and corporate partners, buys all the produce they redistribute on the Mobile Markets.

All items on Mobile Markets are already marked at 20% off market price, but all food is “pay what you can” with the option to pay it forward, meaning patrons can pay for other customers’ groceries.

“Our goal is to bridge the gap between farm excess and food access, while serving the farmers too. We help them get more revenue for their crops and mitigate waste — 40% of farmers’ crops go to waste every year,” he said.

The nonprofit purchases excess and non-marketable produce from local farmers. Sometimes they’ll sell whole items, like squash or carrots, and other times they’ll cut the smaller, gnarled produce into pieces before selling.

Upcoming fundraiser for Mobile Markets

Reviving the Supper Club, an event series that lets attendees cook along with a local professional chef, supports the Mobile Markets mission. Here are the details for the upcoming event:

• Date: Tuesday, Feb 7 at 6:30 p.m.

• Virtual cost: Virtual tickets are $99, which includes a box of locally sourced ingredients for a two-person meal shipped to the attendees’ homes, along with recipes and instructions to log into the event. The class will be live from Vidrio’s kitchen and interactive, but attendees who can’t make the live event can re-watch the video and cook along themselves later in the week.

• In-person cost: In-person tickets are $100 per person and include dinner at the restaurant following the live, interactive cooking class.

• Deadline: Tickets are on sale through Feb. 1.

For more information, visit resy.com/cities/rdu/vidrio.

To learn more about Ripe for Revival, visit riperevivalmarket.com.

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