By Kim Severson

“I realize I wasn’t using my voice as much as I thought I was or maybe as much as I should,” said Kwame Williams, who, along with his sisters, runs the Jamaican restaurant Vital Dining in Montclair, N.J., and FreeTown Café in Newark. Mr. Williams was one of 15 chefs who met this week at Serenbe, a farming and residential community south of Atlanta, as part of the James Beard Foundation’s boot camps, which train chefs to shape food policy.