The Cooking Gene

Mia Coltrane (3/29) currently serves as the Organizational Learning & Development Coordinator for the City of Roanoke, Virginia. She served 14 years in Retail Management and has served as a Private and Public sector Human Resource Professional in the Retail Management, State and Local Government fields. Mia has also served as an Adjunct Professor and Academic Advisor for Indiana Wesleyan University. In addition, she was an Academic Advisor for Hampton University and University of Maryland Global Campus and a Spouses to Teacher Academic Advisor with Old Dominion University. She is the owner and operator of SiVad Vision.

Mia’s quest in the genealogy world began over 10 years ago with the attempt to discover more about her family and lineage. She currently is the family genealogist and historian. She is also researching generational traits and how those traits can impact a family line. She feels, one must know who they are, regardless of the outcome when it comes to one’s family history. 

Michael Carter, Jr. (4/5) is  a 11^th generation American/farmer, and is the 5^th generation to farm on, Carter Farms, his family’s’ century farm in Orange County, Virginia where he gives workshops on how to grow and market ethnic vegetables. With Virginia State University, he is the Small Farm Resource Center Coordinator for the Small Farm Outreach Program. Virginia Association of Biological Farmers (VABF) and Virginia Foodshed Capital have him sit on their respective board of directors. He also serves as the state coordinator for the Black Church Food Security Network and as the food safety coordinator for the Six State Farm to Table organization. He acquired an agricultural economics degree from North Carolina A&T State University and has worked in Ghana, Kenya and Israel as an agronomist and organic agricultural consultant.  

As a cliometrician, curriculum developer and program coordinator for his educational, cultural and vocational platforms, Hen Asem (Our Story) and Africulture, he teaches and expounds on the contributions of Africans and African Americans to agriculture worldwide and trains students, educators and professionals in African cultural understanding, empathy, and implicit bias recognition.

Cameron Terry (4/12) moved from Denver to Virginia in the fall of 2017 with the dream of starting an urban farming business.  His formal education is in video production, with a career to this point spent in film projection booths, behind various cameras and in sales of fine ethnic art.  But work on a film about an inspirational farmer, vegetable gardening captivated his attention and took most of his free time for several summers.  He launched Garden Variety Harvests in the Roanoke Valley with the goals of bringing food sovereignty back to the local community and reducing the miles traveled from field to table.