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Alganesh Michael serves Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisine from her South Burlington-based business A Taste of Abyssinia at the African Diaspora Culinary Heritage Bonanza event held on May 9, 2026 at Clemmons Family Farm. Photo by Elodie Reed.
The African Diaspora Foodways Institute Pilots Partnerships with Vermont Culinary Artists
The 18-month project is led by Clemmons Family Farm, with collaboration from the University of Vermont College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
One recent Saturday at Clemmons Family Farm, a large group spilled into a sunny living room overlooking green fields, Lake Champlain and the Adirondack mountains.
People squeezed together on cushy couches and loveseats. Some sat on the floor’s braided rugs. More stood in doorways.
This abundant crowd directed their attention — and eventually, their taste buds — toward the four Vermont culinary artists standing in front of tables full of samples:
- Andrew “Pops” Gonyon with his northern soul food from Humble Revelry
- Maria Lara-Bregatta with her Dominican-Italian fusion dishes from Cafe Mamajuana
- Alganesh Michael with her Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisine from A Taste of Abyssinia
- Julian “Jewelz” Perkins with her authentic Jamaican fare from Jamaican Jewelz
These four chefs are the inaugural partners with the African Diaspora Foodways Institute of Vermont, or ADFI-VT. The pilot program is run by the nonprofit organization Clemmons Family Farm, with funding by the Leahy Institute for Rural Partnerships and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets Working Lands Enterprise Initiative. The University of Vermont College of Agricultural and Life Sciences is a collaborator on the project.
Clemmons Family Farm has a mission to preserve the historic Clemmons Farm in Charlotte, empower Vermont artists specializing in African diaspora arts and culture, and build multicultural community. Through the ADFI-VT, Clemmons Family Farm applied its mission specifically to food and agriculture, with the goals of:
- preserving the farm’s culinary and agricultural heritage, including by growing African diaspora crops;
- empowering Vermont African diaspora culinary artists with financial support and professional development; and
- enriching Vermont’s tourism economy by infusing it with African diaspora foodways.
At the end of the 18-month-long pilot for the ADFI-VT, Clemmons Family Farm President and Executive Director Lydia Clemmons, who directed the project, said there’s been much progress toward these goals.
“Of all the different programs we’ve done, this one is really touching the heart, the essential part of what Clemmons Family Farm is all about,” she said. “Bringing people together, in a very intimate way, around food, [and] the joy of discovery.”
Preserving heritage
Lydia Clemmons’ parents, the late Dr. Jackson JW Clemmons and Mrs. Lydia M. Clemmons, bought their 148-acre farm in 1962. They raised their five children, maintained a large garden, plus pigs, cows and chickens, worked at the University of Vermont Medical Center — he as a pediatric pathologist as well as a professor in the College of Medicine, she as a nurse-anesthetist — and contributed in so many ways to their local community. In the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Clemmons chaired the Champlain Valley Union (CVU) School Board, both he and Mrs. Clemmons co-led the Charlotte Central School PTA, and she also cofounded the Charlotte Chapter of the League of Women Voters and played an active role in the local 4-H club and Brownies troop.
The Clemmons elders also liked to invite people — family, friends, people they’d just met — for a meal at the farm. Their daughter said that in the 1980’s, Mrs. Clemmons was among the people to prepare home-cooked dinners to raise funds for the Flynn Theater.
“My mother’s African diaspora dine-around was very popular,” the younger Lydia Clemmons said.
In the meantime, Jackson Clemmons set about restoring the farm’s late 18th century and early 19th century buildings with painting and carpentry skills that he learned from his grandfather. The renovated blacksmith shop building became the Authentica African Art Imports store. The old cow barn and granary, put together, became the Barn House.
Dr. Clemmons’ restoration craftsmanship, Mrs. Clemmons’ passion for sharing African art and diaspora food, the farm they loved and cultivated and protected as one of the few remaining under African American ownership, all continue into the present. Shortly before their deaths in 2024 and 2025, they sold the now-138-acre farm, listed in the National Register of Historic Places and a landmark site on the Vermont African American Heritage Trail, to the Clemmons Family Farm nonprofit in 2023. And at the recent “African Diaspora Culinary Heritage Bonanza,” held on May 9, their many legacies shined through.
The sold-out event, held in the Barn House with 50 people, celebrated the ADFI-VT pilot program, the four inaugural culinary artist partners and their food, and the preservation of African American heritage in Vermont.
Chef Pops of Humble Revelry, for instance, shared the origins of his Humble Hemings Mac Pie. It’s inspired by James Hemings, who was born into enslavement in colonial Virginia. Before eventually negotiating his freedom, he served as head chef for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, and he received training in France, where it’s thought he learned how to make macaroni and cheese. He then helped make the dish popular in America.
“I read and read and read, and you actually can’t find his exact recipe, it’s kind of impossible, it’s probably been destroyed,” Chef Pops said. “But then I started reading about food during that time… food had to be preserved.”
So, he wondered, how did people keep dairy good during that time?
“The answer is salt,” he said. “So this mac and cheese has dried cheeses and the fresh pasta… and it’s actually cooked low and slow for two hours, and then you let it sit so that it’ll hold, and it stabilizes.”
And then – like the event attendees enthusiastically demonstrated — it is ready for eating. (And, like all the food served at the event, is delicious).
Video filmed and edited by Nani Clemmons.
The “Bonanza” event was among 13 hands-on cooking and tasting experiences that Clemmons Family Farm hosted with the culinary artists for the ADFI-VT pilot. The idea is that this model could be repeated again and again, with new classes of culinary artists, as part of a farm-to-table enterprise.
Catharine Noel, the Senior Farm-to-Table Advisor for the ADFI-VT, said the first iteration of this model worked well because of the generosity of the chefs.
“Even though they run their business independently, they were really dedicated with putting on the events,” she said.
Also helpful: $10,000 business capital grants provided by Clemmons Family Farm to each chef, which could help make up for hours they might need to close for events.
One chef, Maria Lara-Bregatta of Cafe Mamajuana, also used some of that grant money for the “farm” end of the Clemmons Family Farm farm-to-table enterprise. She bought all kinds of seeds — varieties of watermelons, peppers, potatoes and much more.
“My end goal would be to have a tropical greenhouse, that uses geothermal energy from the ground to heat, so that we could grow avocados and plantains and things that culturally resonate with me,” Chef Maria said.
Her goal — which she said she eventually wants to carry out on Clemmons Family Farm land — is in line with the nonprofit’s vision of growing more African diaspora crops for programming. Clemmons Family Farm is especially interested in teff, a cereal which evolved locally in Ethiopia and is used in foods like the spongy bread injera, which made by another of the ADFI-VT chefs, Alganesh Michael of A Taste of Abyssinia.
Several years back, Clemmons Family Farm was able to try out some teff seed by way of Virginia State University, with some technical assistance from UVM Extension.
“We planted the teff in small plots,” said Heather Darby, a UVM Extension Professor and Agronomic and Soils Specialist. “We had a couple of varieties.”
Weeds presented challenges during that experiment. More recently as part of the ADFI-VT, the same expert from Virginia State University, Dr. Vitalis Temu, did a site visit — but the missing piece continues to be a farmer who can manage the crop.
“The land is there, it’s the access that’s hard,” Lydia Clemmons said, adding that most growers of African diaspora crops are located in Colchester, Winooski and elsewhere in Vermont. “We still have our eye on figuring out collaborations, partnerships, really, with farmers who produce African diaspora crops.”
She said that Clemmons Family Farm is considering building and providing affordable housing in the future for farmers and artists.
Empowering artists
For the first four culinary partners of the ADFI-VT, the pilot program aimed to offer a lot of different reg with community, and the kind of visibility and professional development that could get their business to the next level
The chefs said the ADFI-VT did all of that, and more.
Chef Jewelz, for example, received one-on-one mentoring from Burlington state representative and previous owner of Sugarsnap Catering Abbey Duke. Duke spent 21 years evolving Sugarsnap into the largest off-premise caterer in Chittenden County before selling the business in 2025 to two long-time employees.
“She is a blessing and an inspiration,” said Chef Jewelz, who is busy evolving her own Bellows Falls-based business, Jamaican Jewelz. “She’s showing me how to work smarter and not harder, and how to make something from what I’m doing and not work myself to death.”
After starting out selling food from a farmer’s market tent, Chef Jewelz now serves customers in a brick-and-mortar space, has a food truck, provides catering and sells her own bottled sauces. Her goal? Staying power in doing what she learned to love as a child in Jamaica, where she grew up surrounded by women.
“Each woman had a phenomenal passion for baking, cooking or business, so I knew from a young age I wanted to be like them,” Chef Jewelz said. “And running a restaurant is not easy… But if it’s something that you love and you burn in your stomach, do it.”
Getting beyond the hardness of running the restaurant business — the intensity of the job, keeping up with the bills, health challenges, dealing with the aftermath of a car driving through the front window of his Milton space — is what Chef Pops said his partnership with ADFI-VT provided.
“You realize that when you let go of all that, then you actually find the love again,” he said.
In late June, Chef Pops announced he was retiring from being a chef — but not from sharing his story of being a seventh-generation Black Vermonter chef. He said he’s realized that legacy was the most important thing.
“Nobody knows these stories about our family and about other families like us, and what this was, was an opportunity for me to be seen,” Chef Pops said.
He added that he took down a lot of notes during the ADFI-VT partnership that he wants to pass along to the next generation of African diaspora chefs — maybe his teenaged son, Jonah, who’s been cooking with his dad the last few years.
“I have a whole bunch of information that I think will help the next group of people,” Chef Pops said.
Chef Maria Lara-Bregatta said the partnership with ADFI-VT also broadened her vision for herself and her Colchester business Cafe Mamajuana — with an emphasis on her interest in farming.
“Thinking more intentionally about one, the crops I grow, the food I’m producing, within that lens of the African diaspora has been really awesome and enlightening and helpful to, kind of ground my mission a little bit more,” she said. “It’s easy to get into the food industry just for food, right, without having any other context or mission value.”
In addition to grounding her work, Chef Maria said working with the ADFI-VT has helped her on a very personal level.
‘I am both the colonizer, the slave and the Indigenous, you know, I carry all of those identities,” Chef Maria said. “And so for me, any way that I can workshop that, is helpful for me. I think I’ve always lived in this place of limbo, being somebody of mixed descent, I can easily pass white, and then another spaces I cannot easily pass. I think this Institute, more than anything, has helped me come back to myself in a way, and I really value that.”
For Chef Alganesh Michael, who runs her Ethiopian and Eritrean catering business, A Taste of Abyssinia, in South Burlington, one of the most valuable parts of partnering with ADFI-VT was getting more and more connected across Vermont.
For instance: Clemmons Family Farm set up both Chef Alganesh and Chef Jewelz with separate five-day-long paid residencies at public schools in Barnet and Strafford, Vermont, respectively.
And teaching opportunities are especially meaningful for Chef Alganesh.
“That’s how I spread the tradition, the culture of the food and what it means to us, what it means to me,” she said. “I came home [from Barnet] … with a lot of love and appreciation from the community.”
On top of teaching opportunities, Chef Alganesh said that Clemmons Family Farm has opened up new chances to learn, too. The ADFI-VT culinary artists have been able to meet with nutritional science and food scientists from UVM’s Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences to discuss technical assistance needs for product quality, nutrition profile, taste and scale-ability.
For Chef Alganesh, she’s seeking help with how to make her injera (spongy bread) with 100% teff flour (versus several kinds of flours), while ensuring quality and shelf-life.
“I have not found the secret yet, so I’m confident that it will help me,” she said.
Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences Chair and Associate Professor Judith Anglin said that the next step is to get the four initial ADFI-VT culinary artists into the lab.
“If they have a new product they want to try, we want them to take it here,” she said.
Anglin added that she views the relationships with Clemmons Family Farm, and the culinary artists they support, as going well beyond the pilot program.
“We have now established a partnership that I want to consider lifelong,” she said.
Building multicultural community
Another long-term outcome the ADFI-VT pilot has aimed for: getting the four culinary artists embedded in Vermont’s tourism scene. And UVM Extension Professor, Natural Resa Chase has been helping with that
To start, she spoke with each chef about their goals. For all of them, one immediate need that rose to the top was more visibility.
“It’s really important for our visitors and our local communities to realize that we have a very diverse food and drink scene here in Vermont, bringing together different cultures and experiences from around the world,” Chase said.
To get the word out, Clemmons Family Farm has collaborated with UVM’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences communications team. Three of the four culinary artists have appeared on the television show Across the Fence, and all four chefs have been featured in their own promotional videos made by Clemmons Family Farm videographer and film editor Nani Clemmons and this article’s author.
In addition, Extension Professor Lisa Chase has provided introductions between the ADFI-VT and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets and the Vermont Agency of Tourism and Marketing.
“Vermont’s tourism industry is working very hard to be open and inclusive and welcoming,” Chase said. “It’s a great opportunity for this Institute to highlight the African diaspora, be affiliated with the African American Heritage Trail in Vermont [through the Clemmons Farm], and shine a spotlight on the vibrant African and Caribbean cultures represented here in Vermont.”
Lydia Clemmons, the ADFI-VT Project Director, said local community-building has also been underway.
“People are much more aware of the farm, of African diaspora foods, and of these four chefs,” she said. “Certainly on Front Porch Forum or various emails I receive from community members, people are saying, ‘I want to go… How do I find it?’ So word is percolating out.”
Among the people who the word has reached: Essex residents Erica and Matt Lumsden. They’d never been to the Clemmons Family Farm, though Erica said her dad, A. Ray Sherrod, was a frequent visitor, and had many pieces of artwork from Authentica African Art Imports. Then they saw the advertisement for the African Diaspora Culinary Heritage Bonanza on May 9, which they both attended.
“We’ve been to Humble Revelry, and it was wonderful,” Matt said. “So when we saw that he was also here… we were excited.”
Erica said that they’d also had great food from A Taste of Abyssinia. The couple said they would love for Vermont to keep growing in its food offerings from all kinds of cultures so they could try new spots — but also access what’s familiar.
“We love Jamaica, jerk chicken’s obviously a favorite, collard greens, Dad made that all the time,” Erica said. “It just feels like home.”
More attendees described how at home they are at Clemmons Family Farm, as a result of its different efforts over the years — the Authentica African Art Imports shop, the “Windows to a Multicultural World” African American and African Diaspora K-12 curriculum and now, the ADFI-VT culinary events and programming.
“It’s heartwarming,” said Michele Karode, the Manager of Outreach Operations at the Leahy Institute of Rural Partnerships, which provided $250,000 toward the ADFI-VT. “You feel it in the room when you walk in, that everybody is here in support.”
The four chefs who partnered with the ADFI-VT program say they feel that, too.
“I didn’t feel alone anymore,” said Chef Jewelz. “Because I know other chefs, as myself, are out there and they’re dreamers and builders as I am. I’m always here for support and continue to encourage other young chefs that are out there: ‘Is this really possible, can I do this, where do I go for support?’ Yeah, Clemmons Farm is the place.”
Learn more about the African Diaspora Foodways Institute at Clemmons Family Farm’s website, https://www.clemmonsfamilyfarm.org/adfivt.
University of Vermont College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
