The Food Fairy: From Survival to Serving a Community

She arrives in Carrboro, North Carolina, with three kids, $11,000 in debt, and no clean roadmap, then builds a personal chef business that grows into Food Fairy, a service that nourishes families across the Triangle. Talking with Terri McClernon, we follow the thread that runs through every chapter of her life: food as connection, creativity, and a way to survive, even when the numbers don’t add up and the ground shifts under your feet. 

We go back to her 1950s kitchen-table roots and her early pull toward cooking, then forward into the vegetarian movement and Back to the Land years, where she learns self-reliance the hard way. Terri shares how a simple marketing flyer and one client’s comment gave her the name “Food Fairy,” and how community support, mentoring, and timely loans helped her keep the doors open without losing her integrity. If you care about women entrepreneurs, personal chef services, local food culture, and building a mission-driven small business, you’ll find practical detail here, not platitudes. 

The hardest moments bring the biggest lessons: the market crash that wiped out most of her clients, COVID shutting down in-home cooking, the pressure of payroll, and the disciplined use of PPP to keep her team employed. We also talk about her next evolution, building a commercial kitchen, and launching a nonprofit vision that includes gleaning farm vegetables and making soup to give away. Terry reflects on aging, meditation, stress, and the steadier inner peace that comes from surviving the hills and valleys. 

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Transcript

Who Wize Woman STORIES Serves

Food Roots In The 1950s

Speaker 2 0:12

How old are you? If you're listening to wise women's stories, you could be any age. And wherever you are in your life, there's something here for you. If you're just beginning, you'll hear from women who once stood exactly where you stand now, uncertain, hopeful, and finding their way. And if you're in the middle of your life, building, questioning, reshaping, you may begin to see that there's always another chapter. And that chapter is yours to choose. And now if you're stepping into your wise woman years, you'll discover you are not alone. There are women who have walked before you, who have taken life into their own hands and made difficult choices, creating something meaningful, not just for themselves, but for others, for their families. I'm your host, Delia Quigley, and this is Wise Woman Stories. Today I'm in conversation with Terry McClernon, a woman who, out of necessity, began with very little and built what is now known as the Food Fairyy, a business that not only supported her growing family, but now nourishes countless others across the triangle in North Carolina. Her journey wasn't quick, it wasn't easy, but it was guided by instinct, persistence, and a willingness to see possibilities where others might not. The stories you'll hear remind all of us there are no shortcuts. You can't push the river. You can only meet life as it unfolds. So let's begin with the early years, the 50s and the 60s, when Terry's story was just beginning. So, Terry, you lived many lives before a food fairy even existed, and much of it was around food. So if we go all the way back, what did food mean to you as a child growing up in the 1950s in your mother's kitchen?

Speaker 1 2:16

Well, food was very satisfying, and it was a way to connect with the whole family because we did all sit down at the table at the same time and tell stories about the day. And so that was what food meant. Also, my mother was a very uh experiential uh cook. She was doing things that I don't think other mothers were doing, like tacos, you know, in 1953. Um she and my father had been in Tucson during the war. So she knew about tacos, brought that back to Cincinnati. Uh, she had parties and so shrimp cocktail and avocados, things that were not all that common in the 1950s Cincinnati.

Speaker 2 3:05

Did she teach you how to cook? Did she take you into the kitchen and show you what she was doing?

Speaker 1 3:10

I don't think she did, that I recall, but I was certainly hovering. And I think my motivation for cooking is the end product was was I want to make that too. So it wasn't so much uh that I knew how to cook, it's that my motivation for getting to the end was how I taught myself to cook.

Speaker 2 3:38

Now you have to remember there wasn't the kind of access to health food or even information about it that we take for granted today. In the 60s and 70s, something was beginning to stir. Books were being passed from hand to hand, diet for a small planet, the vegetarian epicure, and they were offering new ways of preparing healthy food, creating awareness about the body and about the earth. The Back to the Land movement was taking hold. People were leaving cities, heading into the countryside, learning, sometimes mostly the hard way, how to live more simply, to grow their own food, to preserve it, to make do with what they had. And it was in this world in upstate New York, near Bethel, that Terry found herself. Living close to the land, learning by doing, cooking, experimenting, preserving, season by season. What about the 60s?

Speaker 1 4:39

Where were you then? Well, I graduated from high school in 1969, and so I was still at home for most of the 60s, eating uh with my family. Um, and by the way, I want to say that it used to take us out to a restaurant, uh regular um fancy restaurant where I ate lobster tails and blue cheese dressing, you know, at the age of like nine or 10. Um, so anyway, the around 1970 or so, 1969, I actually moved out of the house and I became a vegetarian. And I knew nothing about being a vegetarian. I just knew that it was vegetables. And I had been hanging out in California a little bit uh with friends, and so I was motivated to try this new way of eating. Then if we jump to like 1972, my Aunt Jo, my father's sister, uh, she was a vegetarian and she sent me Diet for a Small Planet, that cookbook.

Speaker 2 5:36

That one changed a lot of lives, right, Barry?

Speaker 1 5:39

It did, it did, and it really showed me, oh, there's a method to this, uh, to eating healthy while being a vegetarian, food combining, you know, for proteins.

Speaker 2 5:50

Well, that's about when you started living off the land up in New York, right?

Speaker 1 5:55

Yeah, that was uh just before that, or maybe it was around the same time. And then, yes, I mean, I was living my uh first husband and I threw a tent on his 10 acres, and I had a Coleman stove and a picnic table, and I began to cook on that. I made a breadboard out of leftover tongue and groove flooring, and I decided to make my own bread. I baked it on the Coleman stove. I gathered wild blueberries, I taught myself how to can from well, I didn't teach myself, I probably got a book. Certainly there was no Google, so you had to get a book or meet someone who could show you how. Back then, I wonder if I'll ever be good at anything because I just didn't, right? I mean, I was only in my early 20s, and I didn't feel like I had accomplished anything by that time. Um, little did I know that I would become quite good at cooking.

Speaker 2 6:53

It's the mid-1990s. Terry is raising three children now and coming out of a marriage carrying $11,000 in debt. So she does what many women have done before her. She gathers what she can, packs up her children, and heads somewhere new. South. And she arrives in a small town, Carberough, North Carolina, and something in her recognizes it immediately. A feeling of this could work.

Speaker 1 7:26

Yeah, you feel it. Yeah, it's yeah, it becomes very solid. Oh, I'm here, and I and I had no idea how I was gonna do it exactly, the money or anything, because my husband and I only had debt. Uh, we actually divided our debt, so I moved here with $11,000 in debt.

Speaker 2 7:46

There's a place in the center of Carrboro, it's called Weaver Street Market. It's a gathering place, really, where food, community, and daily life meet. And in many ways, that place becomes part of her foundation. Because it's here that something simple begins. She starts to cook for others, just a few people at first, one kitchen, then another, and slowly word begins to travel from one person to the next, from one home to another.

Creating The Food Fairy Brand

Speaker 1 8:18

Yeah, so I was working for $7.50 an hour as a kitchen retail manager, which if you multiply that times 40 hours a week, it's not enough to raise a family on in an apartment in Chapel Hill. And so I decided that I was going to start a personal chef business. So a friend of mine back in New York, she uh had given me an article out of the New York Times about the USPCA, which is the United States Personal Chefs Association. And she said, here, maybe, you know, maybe when you get to North Carolina, you might want to look into this. Actually, I don't even think I was going to North Carolina when she handed me that article. I found it in a desk drawer when I was packing to leave. So I looked up the USPCA because there was Google, and uh they wanted $3,000 to start or $300. Didn't matter. I had nothing. So I read what they offered and I said, well, I I can do my own marketing because I know how to do that. And I don't I don't need anybody to give me recipes, so I'll just put an ad in the village advocate and it say that I'm a personal chef. So I had a new client. They were a couple of women who owned a computer lab. So this is obviously a time when not everybody had a computer. Um, and so they were business women, young, not young, but they were my age-ish, and and they they had a fairly new but successful business. And so I read to them a flyer that I was going to put on windshields at Wellspring. And as I was reading, imagine coming home after a hard day of work, and you walk in the house, and these aromas are wafting through the house. And and she stopped me, Kathy stopped me, and she said, Why, you sound like a food fairy. And I said, That's it. Another another knowing, right? I knew the name. Southern Living came to me and asked me if they could do a story about Terry and the Food Fairy. It came out in I think May or March of 2000. But I remember thinking, oh my God, I may not even still be in business because it was, I didn't know that in the summer everybody left North Carolina, left this town and went to the beach or to the mountains. I didn't know that. So when the summers came, I was struggling. But I had I had miracles, multiple miracles. I am just getting myself out of debt, which by the way, the Women's Center and Chapel Hill helped me do that. Uh, they were amazing, immensely helpful with that. And I said, no, I don't want to go back into debt. And then I think somewhere in the summertime when things were desperate, I called him up. I said, okay, thank you. I'll accept the loan. So that was one of the angels. And then there was another angel who is a well-known artist in the area. And I don't know if I should say her name or not, but uh she also was um using our personal chef services, and I was driving a rickety old car, uh, which was a $2,000 car, which is all I could afford to buy when I moved here. And she said, Let me help you. I'll loan you the $20,000 to buy a minivan, which she did, and which I paid back. I paid them both back. Yes.

Media Attention And Unexpected Lifelines

Crashes That Threaten The Business

Speaker 2 11:58

So this is where things really get interesting, challenging, a bit dicey. Because it's one thing to build a business, to invest everything you have, your time, your energy, your resources, and slowly, steadily create something that works. Something that supports your family, something that you can rely on. Even if it's always a little uncertain, even if there's always some level of risk, some level of debt, because that's often the nature of building and creating anything. But then suddenly, boom, something happens. Something that no one can control. The market crashes. And when it does, everything tightens. People become careful, uncertain, afraid. And the first things to go are often the very things they need the most, the things that nourish them. The extras that in truth are not extra at all. Personal chefs, yoga classes, massage, the things that help people really feel well, grounded, human. Suddenly those things are put aside. Not because they don't matter, but because survival feels more urgent. And so clients pause as they pull back, they disappear. Not forever, but long enough to change everything. And for the people offering those services, the small businesses, the individuals, the ones who have built something with their hands, the impact is immediate. And in Terry's case, it's almost overnight. She lost the majority of her work. 70% gone. And this is the moment, the one every business owner at some point will face in one form or another, when everything you've built is suddenly at risk. That was 2020, another shock to the system. This time, even faster. Within weeks, 75% of her clients disappear. And once again, she is asked the same question. Life has been asking her all along. Will you continue? And how will you do it? And once again, she answers yes. She adapts, she finds support, she keeps her team intact, and in the midst of uncertainty, she begins to imagine something new.

Speaker 1 14:43

But I knew about the PPP program. And I actually had mentors through SCORE, which is retired business people who mentor young businesses. And um, he called me the poster child for PPP because the food ferry was my child, it was my lifeline. Without the food ferry, I didn't know how I could make a living. It was money that was probably going to be forgiven, but you might have to pay it back if you couldn't prove all your all your paperwork, all your numbers, all your employee numbers. But because I was still, it was payroll, forgot what it stood for, but because I kept people on payroll, I just gave, you know, I gave them something to do. Scan these documents, do this, do that. And so I kept people employed, and that's why I was able to keep the PPP money. And so we did, we got PPP one and we got PPP two. Um, and and all of it got forgiven. So that that got me by. It got me got us by so well that I could keep people employed even if they weren't cooking, because not everybody wanted us in their home.

unknown 15:53

Yes.

PPP Survival And A New Vision

Speaker 1 15:53

Well, so because of COVID, right, there are many silver lines that I think were all finding as a result of COVID, the lessons learned. And so one of the things that hit me was like, well, I'm really stuck here if something like this were to happen again. Because that mind you, that's the second time that I've had I've taken huge hits. I was like, if I had a building here and I could cook in, then I could still cook for people here. Uh, there's a town in Brazil I used to go to on a retreat, uh, meditation retreats, and they gave away soup. And I was like, okay, I'm gonna build this kitchen. It'll be backup for the Food Fairy, and I can make soup and give it away. So that that was the beginning, and it was during COVID. Yeah, so um actually we haven't actually made soup to give away yet. That is gonna happen on April 10th. Um, I have a board uh and if it's bylaws and all the official things. We had to file 990 this year, you know, for taxes, even though we didn't have very much income. But we're getting there. Um, and so yes, I've got a freezer over there that's full of ingredients. I've worked with the department with uh the Society of St. Andrews. Uh they offer gleaning of vegetables from farms where the extra either post-mature produce or uh the farmer's done, they've gotten enough, and it's gonna be plowed under, come and glean these vegetables. Before the big frost in the fall, we went to grab tomatoes, which were gonna get killed by the frost. So I was I've been going out to the fields and gleaning the vegetables and preparing them for the freezer and putting them in the freezer for when it's time to make soup.

Building A Kitchen To Give Back

Speaker 2 17:43

And after everything she's built, life asks her once again to begin. In these later years, there's expansion, but not without cost. She takes on something bigger, a vision that has been quietly forming for years. A commercial kitchen, a space not just for her business, but for others. A place where food can be created, shared, and eventually given. She builds it. She adjusts, rebuilds, reimagines. Because by now, this is who she is. Not someone who avoids difficulty, but Terry is someone who moves with it. And slowly the vision begins to take form. The kitchen opens, other chefs begin to use the space, new ideas emerge. So I asked her how someone would go about signing up with the food fairy and have a personal chef come to your kitchen and prepare delicious meals. This is what she had to say.

How The Personal Chef Service Works

Speaker 1 18:46

So we start off after a phone call. If they're uh very interested and they want to go forward, we do a new client interview in their home. The chef will be there because they have a choice of chefs. So, you know, not every chef is available, but from who's available, they get to look online and see who who they might like to work with. And actually, we including me, eight, yes, I'm number eight of the chefs. And so the chef would be there to it's a 90-minute interview. Uh, and then I'm there for the admin part. The questions are not what do you like to eat, what do you don't like to eat, but what are your allergies, what are your sensitivities? We wanted to make the same choices that they would make. Uh, we want to value what they value. If they value non-GMO, we're gonna do non-GMO. If they value um organic, we'll get organic. If they value being uh a carnivore and only eating meat, we'll value that too. We want to be there. If you're vegan, that's fine too. If you have cancer or you've just had a baby, you know, there's root restrictions, and people want us to be able to follow those and make their food delicious and appealing and yet meet those criteria that are important for their health, that they feel is what's most important for them. So that's what that interview entails. And then after that, uh then they go onto the calendar that we we put their name and address and contact information, and then it becomes a recurring event. So if a weekly client and you're on Monday morning or Tuesday morning, that's a recurring event. So and ahead of that date, that Monday, then the chef would be writing to the client or calling them. Some of our older clients like phone calls versus email or text and said, and these are the ideas I was thinking. You want fish, I was thinking of this one or this one, and you want chicken, I was thinking of this recipe or that recipe. And I know you wanted a vegetarian meal, so these are the options I have. And so then they can pick what what their choices, what their preferences would be. And then on the day of the cook, the chef goes to their favorite grocery store, wherever they would have shopped, is where we shop, and then shows up at the house with the groceries. Uh, then she'll, she or he will unload them, cook the food, package it in the client's containers, label it, put it in the fridge or the freezer, depending on the frequency. Could be weekly or every other week or monthly, or even every six weeks to clean up, take out the garbage, recycling, compost, sweep the floor, put the kitchen back the way it was, or better. And and then they get uh an email with the names of the dishes that were made, how many containers, and the reheating instructions. It's all very tidy.

Speaker 2 21:31

All very tidy, neat, and organized. Well done. So now at 74, you don't mind my saying that, after building not just one, but multiple businesses and now stepping into a nonprofit, what feels different about this chapter of your life compared to when you started at 47? Listen, standing and cooking for hours and hours is no small thing, you know. Yeah, it can take

Speaker 1 22:00

It's toll. Yeah. So that takes time, you know, it takes time to take care of this body that I didn't feel like I needed uh to take care of so much when I was in my late 40s. There were there were a couple of years where I only slept three hours a night. That that would not work for me now at all. Um, so that's that's one of the things that feels different. The other is I guess my peace, the inner peace, and the experience that uh I know the experience I feel has brought me to this point, and I trust more. I have faith that I've been through so many ups and downs, so many hills and valleys. That doesn't mean that I might not, I don't really worry so much. I might fret a bit. Might fret and wonder. And uh, you know, my brain is seeking, looking where's the answer, what's next. Um, but not like it was um in the past years. I'd say there's a whole lot more inner peace at this point.

Speaker 2 23:03

Well, I noticed you mentioned your meditation practice. So, how much has that helped with finding that inner peace?

Aging With Peace And Meditation

Speaker 1 23:11

Yes, a lot. Well, a lot. You know that. Yeah. Helps a lot. I mean, it it also enables one to be mindful and catch the stories, uh, the stories that go through your mind that you can grow. Um, you know, we didn't touch on the part, the other disaster within the food ferry was when the North Carolina Department of Revenue in 1999 decided that I had been breaking a law and that I owed um $215,000. Yes, because I'd not been charging sales tax. So that was just before COVID. Uh, that was in January. They audited me in December of 99. They came back in January and said, you owe this money. I said, I'll see you in court. It was not in their tax bulletin. They claim I was a caterer. And yes, caterers are supposed to sales do sales tax. I say I'm a personal chef. And according to the health department, I am a portional chef. But according to the Department of Revenue, they have their own definitions. So that number, so I took them to court. It took years because of COVID and blah, blah, blah. And at the end of all that, I lost. And by then, they told me I owed $400 and something thousand dollars because of fees and this and that. Yeah. So we settled for the $215,000. Oh, which has to be paid, which has to be paid within 30 days. But I had an SBA loan that I had applied for during COVID. So I had the money, I was able to pay it and accept the loss. Yeah. So I'm still paying that back, of course, to the SBA. So yeah, we've been we've been through some ups and downs. So, yes, and mindfulness that comes from from meditation allows one to just be aware and watch the processes of the brain and the mind and how it can take you off base. Um, and it affects your body too, right? That stress, if you let those stories grow, they end up settling in different parts of your body and can create disease.

A Tax Battle And A Hard Loss

Speaker 2 25:25

Absolutely. I mean, you you just begin to live that misery or that despair, right? So let okay, so after all of that, let's come back to this final question here. And it's if you could speak to that woman arriving in Chapel Hill in 1996, tired, uncertain, carrying everything, children, eleven thousand dollars in debt. What would you want her to know?

Speaker 25:51

I'm gonna cry. She has my heart, you know. I I feel for her. I can recall her, right? What would I say to her? Be bold.

Speaker 1 26:08

Um just keep your heart open. Yeah. And and I think she did. I mean, that's when I actually took formal meditation classes um back then through Duke. I think you could if you somehow I proved I could get it for very little money, even though I didn't have cancer, but I could go to a mindfulness classes at Duke. And so um I think that that was, you know, that was the beginning of that. I knew about meditation and yoga, but I never really did it much. So that was a big start for me. I also at that time I had uh ventricular tachycardia. For 12 years, my heart would go into tachycardia, but I had no health insurance, so I just dealt with it. Um finally it it it just it came back as soon as I left the hospital and I had to go back. Um and I ended up actually Medicaid actually picked up a good part of that $80,000 bill. Wow. But I've been fine ever since, right? 2007. Yeah. So but you know, courage and um flexibility, resilience, uh, keeping an open heart. Determination. Determination. Well, I'm a cancer, so you know, there's there's something to be said about a a crab, right? They they're very tenacious, right? Right, right. And so tenacity is very good. They can also be very clingy and not let go when they when they should let go, you know. So I think, you know, as a younger woman, I was still probably more grasping and less less letting go because I did probably I did worry about I had my children to feed. Yeah. So but that was the motivation for starting the whole thing was enough money to feed my family. And that that's total motivation. I never expected I would be here 30 years later. It wasn't that I didn't expect it, I didn't have that vision. I just had to be here now, you know, feeding the family. Yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 28:15

And so now you're here and you're happy where you are.

Speaker 1 28:19

This is yeah, you feel in a good place. I do. I have a tremendous amount of debt. Um, but it I don't lose sleep over. Even with the North Carolina Department of Revenue, I still sleep seven to nine hours a night. And now I might take a nap. Actually, yesterday I took an hour nap, but I love where I love. I'm in the trees, I look out at this beautiful commissary. Um, I'm around, I'm surrounded by beautiful staff who have parts as big as the universe, feeding people, loving what they do.

Speaker 2 28:57

And now you're gonna take that food truck out and feed people who have nothing. Hey Terry, I want to thank you for being on today. And uh, I think you're going to be a great inspiration for so many of all ages, and that's really the whole point to these interviews that I'm doing. You know, wise women sharing their experience and love.

Speaker 1 29:27

Yeah. Well, thank you for that opportunity. And I love that last question, you know, that made me cry.

Speaker 2 29:34

I'm getting a little teary-eyed right now myself.

Speaker 1 29:38

Yeah, that those tears uh tell me that there's a truth here, that there's a real golden nugget within me. So, and so what I've done with that is gone back to myself and said, Oh, you are such an amazing woman, Terry. I love you. You've done a good job.

Speaker 2 29:54

And everybody would agree with that, Terry. Everyone would agree with that. Again, thank you so much, honey. Thank you so much for being on.

Speaker 1 30:02

You're very welcome. It's really my pleasure. My my awakening.

Speaker 2 30:10

You've been listening to my interview with Terry McClarnan, owner of the Food Ferry and Chef Extraordinaire. I'm Delia Quigley, and this is Wise Woman's Stories. There's plenty more to discover at DeliaQuigley.com. Thanks so much for listening until next time.