For many North Carolinians, fresh food is as close as the backyard garden, the farmers market or a grocery store a short drive away. For others, it’s a different story. In rural communities, urban enclaves, and small towns, accessing fresh food and hot, nutritious meals can be difficult, and this challenge persists. Welcome to North Carolina’s food deserts, where some folks face empty pantries and few options, while others are stepping up to meet their needs.

“A food desert, like a real desert, is resource-free, and if you’re in one, you might not know where that next oasis — that next meal, that next lifeline — might be,” says Angel Jones, COO of Green Rural Redevelopment Organization (GRRO), a community organization working to stamp out hunger in a 15-county area in eastern North Carolina. “In food deserts, residents lack places to buy fresh, heathy food. In addition, they may face economic constraints or lack transportation to a grocery store or farmers market.” Food deserts reflect more than the lack of access to and availability of fresh food. They speak to deeper issues, including food insecurity.

“That’s when there’s ‘more month than money,’ and when you ask, ‘Where’s my next meal coming from? Can I feed my kids tonight? Tomorrow?’” Angel says. “Hunger and the fear of hunger are real issues. When a student’s hungry, they can’t think. When a worker’s hungry, they can’t perform like they need to. Persistent hunger is not the sort of thing you can just move past; it has real impacts on the individual and the community.”

Across the state, organizations like GRRO, Second Harvest Food Bank, Ripe for Revival and others are trying to change this reality. Their efforts — mobile grocery stores, meal and pantry-stocking deliveries, school partnerships, food banks and more — bring meals, food security and nutritious ingredients to the people most affected.

“If there’s a need we know about, we find a way to fill it,” Angel says.

According to Second Harvest Food Bank, which serves an 18-county region from the foothills through the Piedmont Triad, the need is great and growing. They say that despite organizations like them working “relentlessly to close any funding for food supply gaps” through grant writing, partnerships and community support, “nonprofits cannot [fully] fill the gap.” Federal assistance programs, like SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), are vital to combating hunger. “SNAP provides nine meals to every one meal a food bank can offer.”

This makes the work of these organizations not just important, but essential. Second Harvest works with 500 community-based groups like food pantries and shelters, BackPack programs and meal distribution to students and seniors, citing a rising need. From April 2024 to July 2025, they distributed 37.7 million pounds of food, including 4.3 million pounds of fresh produce. GRRO cites similar numbers, with volunteers and staff driving 50,000 miles a month to deliver food and meals, impacting more than 100,000 individuals and families, and distributing more than 20,000 pounds of food weekly (that’s a million pounds a year) across their 15-county region. In other pockets of the state — the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains, the coastal plains and Sandhills, and our cities and suburbs — groups fill similar needs, distributing tens of thousands of meals and tons of food.

In 2018, Will Kornegay started Ripe Revival, a for-profit business helping farmers find buyers for “imperfect” produce, and in 2021 he expanded that initial vision and started Ripe for Revival, a nonprofit branch of the business that operates a fleet of pay-what-you-can mobile markets. These portable grocery stores visit communities across a 16-county area stretching from the Triangle to the coast, offering a solution to food insecurity regardless of what, if anything, you can pay for groceries and goods. They sell local produce, meat and dairy goods at more than two dozen sites each week, setting up shop outside churches, banks, libraries, senior centers and other locations. Like GRRO and others, their funding comes from grants provided by Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, the Coastal Credit Union Foundation, Smithfield Foods, United Healthcare and other organizations, as well as donations large and small.

“Hunger isn’t an issue that’s going away anytime soon, but together we can ensure that as many North Carolinians as possible have food today and know where tomorrow’s meal is coming from,” Angel says. “One meal deserves another, and when we share what we grow and what we know, we can connect our neighbors with what they need to live healthy lives where they don’t need to worry about how they’ll eat tomorrow.”