The death of this Charlotte chef’s wife breathed life into idea for delicious fundraiser
When Mark Allison first started developing the concept for a fundraising event to honor his late wife, who died of cancer in 2015, a private dinner seemed like a no-brainer.
Cooking, after all, has been in his blood for years. He’d spent nine of them — from 2004 to 2013 — as dean of culinary arts education at Charlotte’s Johnson & Wales University, and several, more recently, as an executive chef in the area. But despite his prowess in the kitchen, Allison was also pragmatic.
“It was like, Are people gonna come for me? I doubt it,” he remembers thinking back in 2022.
So he reached out to eight chefs with more-recognizable names (or who headed kitchens for more-recognizable brands), he says, “thinking maybe three or four would say yes. And I was totally blown away that all eight said yes.”
Ever since, the event Allison founded — “FORK Cancer: A Celebration of Life” — has become a tradition that will continue in September with a third annual four-course dinner prepared by a collection of another eight local celebrity chefs, including Sam Diminich of Restaurant Constance and Samantha Allen of Wentworth & Fenn.
The event, which is planned for 225 guests, will be hosted by Food & Beverage Social Club at NorthStone Country Club in Huntersville on the evening of Saturday, Sept. 7. Last year’s dinner raised about $90,000 and Allison hopes to exceed that figure in 2024. Proceeds will benefit NothingPink, Xander’s Acts of Kindness Foundation, The Meggs Foundation, and Teal Diva, four Charlotte-area nonprofits that support local families navigating cancer diagnoses and treatment plans.
It will sell out, for the third straight year; only about 20 seats remain left to be filled with more than six weeks to go. However, Allison says, you don’t have to be in the room that night to make the world a better place.
The 60-year-old native of England and father of three explained that and more in a recent conversation with The Charlotte Observer about FORK Cancer.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q. How did you settle on 225 guests?
It’s very hard to cater for 500 or 600 people and do a really good meal. So I said right from the beginning, “We’ll stick at 200.” The problem was, we sold out the 200 tickets straightaway. So we went up to 225. And you can do an outstanding meal with 225 people.
The whole emphasis was: The food has got to be absolutely fantastic. It’s all made that day, whereas a lot of the time with charity dinners everything is preheated. You get a salad that’s already on the table that’s usually warm, then you always get steak with some shrimp, and then some kind of cheesecake. And that’s it. This is unique in the fact that everything is made on the day. Each chef, they prepare everything in their restaurant, then the night of the event, they drive everything up, and they cook everything on location and serve it. Everything’s fresh.
Yes, we could probably do a room of 500. But I know for a fact the food wouldn’t be as good.
Q. How do the chefs split up the responsibilities for the menu?
Andres (Prussing, executive chef at Stoke Charlotte and Golden Owl Tavern) is doing all the hors d’oeuvres. Sam Diminich is doing the appetizer. And then Mason (Martinez, of Swanson-Girard Culinary Solutions), he’s doing the first course. We’ve got John and Amy (Fortes, executive chefs at The Flipside Cafe) doing the main entree. Then Samantha Allen (Wentworth & Fenn), she’s doing the dessert. She’s absolutely phenomenal. And then we’ve got a chef (Raffaele Patrizi of Mano Bella Artisan Foods) that’s doing all the vegetarian and vegan courses.
(Chris Aquilino, director of culinary development at Elior North America, will run the kitchen; Jay Z Ziobrowski, corporate R&D chef of Morrison Healthcare, will serve as “chef and menu emcee.”)
Q. Can you tell me about your wife and the battle she had with cancer?
My wife’s name was Alison, which is the same as my last name. So she was wise enough to keep her name of Davies. She was Welsh, and we have three boys. We moved over here in September 2004, when Jonathan was 8, Matthew was 6, and James was 2. And I started working at Johnson & Wales — I came over for a job as an associate professor. We were in Charleston for the first year, and I helped with the closure of that campus, then we moved up to the new campus in Charlotte in June of 2005.
In 2008, I had just been promoted to the dean. Life was fantastic. Then my wife started having a few stomach problems, and they found that she had a tumor in her stomach. They said, “This is quite common. We’ll just remove it, and you’ll be perfectly fine.” But unfortunately, when they went in and removed that tumor, they noticed all of these spots on her liver. It turned out that she had 16 tumors on her liver. She had what was called carcinoid syndrome, which is a rare blood cancer that likes to deposit in the liver.
Basically, she was told she had around about three years to live, because there’s no cure for carcinoid, and it was already Stage 4.
So with me being a chef — and I’ve got two sons who are Type 1 diabetics — we looked at “food as medicine.” That’s why the food at FORK Cancer has got to be that good, because I’m a real believer in “food is medicine.” If you eat the right foods, and not all this processed junk, you can live a longer, healthier life. We basically changed my wife to a whole-foods diet — a lot of plant-based foods. Very little meat. It was more fruits and vegetables. And she survived eight years before she passed away in 2015.
Q. Do you feel like the “food as medicine” approach played a role in extending her life by more than double the doctors’ predictions?
I would like to think so to a certain extent, but I think her drive to live was a huge factor. I honestly believe she didn’t think she was going to die. The day that she passed away, practically the last thing she said was, “I don’t want to die.” An hour later, she passed away. But I think right up until then, she didn’t think she would ever die. Because she had such a zest for life. And not one day that she had cancer did she ever complain about having cancer. She just said, “I’m gonna live the best I can, and whatever happens, happens.”
But when I met my wife, she couldn’t cook a thing. We met in culinary school, because she came to school to learn how to cook. (Both 30 at the time; he taught one of her classes.) Her diet was so high in sugar, it was unbelievable. And over the years, she changed her whole diet. She was all into eating as many fruits and vegetables as she possibly could.
I think that’s unfortunately one of the biggest problems we’ve got, not only in America, but also definitely in the UK. We’ve probably got the highest obesity rates in the whole world. To me, the number one thing we need to change in this country is bring back home economics or cooking in schools. Because if you don’t know how to cook, how do you possibly know what to choose when you go into a supermarket to buy food? When you go shopping, the first aisle you come to is all fruits and vegetables, but how many people just go past that and go to all the rest of the aisles — where it’s just cardboard boxes of food instead of actually real-live food — ?
Q. As for the event and the charities it supports, what’s the hope for the impact of the funds being raised?
All of the charities are actually helping in some way to take that financial burden off that person going through the cancer treatment, or the family going through the treatment, so all the money’s going to them. It’s not going to research that we’re never, ever gonna see (the results of) until, hopefully, there is a cure.
From my point of view — and from going through it myself for eight years with my wife — there’s always a financial burden somewhere, paying the medical bills, (but we also want to support people with cancer) just finding time to have a date night; to get out and try and enjoy life, as opposed to just sitting in the house worrying about it. So to me, if we can raise money, and give it to the people who are actually in need of that money now, then it’s all worth it.
Q. Are you looking to grow the FORK Cancer concept in any way?
Yeah, we’re hoping to actually turn it into a not-for-profit this year. The problem we’ve got at the minute is we have a great team working on it, but nobody’s getting paid. So it’s in everybody’s free time. To actually grow this, we’ve got to turn it into a proper not-for-profit, and whoever is running, they’ve got to be at least getting paid to run it. Then we can do it properly and we can build on it.
If we got this professionally off the ground and run it as a charity, then you could go to, say, Katie Button in Asheville at Cúrate and say, “Hi Katie, would you want to be one of the chefs to help promote FORK Cancer?”
The whole idea for FORK Cancer was you just take local chefs, find a venue and host a dinner party. That could be done in any city in America. So it would be nice to take it to Asheville, or take it to Raleigh or Durham, and continue to raise money for these much-needed patients who are battling cancer. Then you could spread out — you could go to Atlanta. You could go anywhere really. It would just be a matter of picking up the phone and asking the chefs, “Would you like to be involved?”
Q. And finally, since it’s possible that any day now the event will be sold out, what’s the message you’d want to deliver for people who might be interested in helping but can’t go to the dinner?
I think it’s just awareness. I think hope is the number one thing you can have. So even if you’re not attending this event, if you know somebody, or you’re going through it yourself, just have hope. Your mind is an amazing thing. It can do so much for your body.
At the end of the day, everybody’s gonna die. It’s just: when? So if you are given that sort of timeframe, and you know that you might not live a great lot longer, appreciate the life you’ve got and appreciate your family and just enjoy the life you’ve got. Because you’re probably gonna actually live more in that timeframe than the average person who is just going through life — who isn’t ill, or unhealthy, and take life for granted.
Life is short. Whether you’ve got cancer or not, it’s pretty brief. But there’s so much joy you can find in life. And even if you’re battling cancer, if you’ve got a good support team and you love your family, then it’s all about enjoying moments with them.
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For more information about FORK Cancer: forkcancerfundraiser.com.
