Vaccine scientist Dr Altreisha Foster finds therapy in baking
Published:Wednesday | July 12, 2023 | 12:09 AMShanel Lemmie/Staff Reporter
While the pleasure derived from consuming pastries is nothing new, Dr Altreisha Foster is ready to heal hearts through the power of baking.
Trained as a vaccine scientist, Foster is now the author of Cake Therapy: How Baking Changed My Life – an autobiography that doubles as a cookbook narrating each chapter of her life through tasty anecdotes and delectable deserts.
In the 190-page-read she explains how her once hectic life was just a band-aid, only concealing the traumas she previously experienced.
“I think because I was so used to going, always on overdrive having two new babies now, I fell victim to postpartum depression.”
She continued, “Prior to baking, I didn’t know where I was. I think when I discovered baking it’s when I realised that it’s during my quiet times, that’s when I started to conjure up things that happened to me in the past and you know just the memories kept rushing back. I was always on overdrive, just working and going non-stop.”
When Foster started dabbling in YouTube recipes four years ago, the floodgates of her mind opened, allowing her to confront the hurt in her past and begin the healing process.
Now through her book and her foundation of the same name, Foster says her goal is to give women and girls the coping tools she wish she had.
“For me baking was in fact therapeutic right. Why is it another individual won’t be able to take up this art to be able to transom their life right, be it mental or emotional. I speak to the art in a way where it doesn’t have to just be cake. So maybe we could say it is artistry therapy. It is the process of doing something that allows you to actualise your own potential and to realise what is actually happening to but my art was cake. What I did to process my emotions is cake and that’s the message that I am spreading.”
For the St Catherine native, her unending faith in baking as a therapeutic tool came when she had an eye-opening gab-session with her ailing mother.
“She doesn’t speak up a lot but I think one day I was in the kitchen with her and it was just pure conversation. The traumas I experienced as a child kind of forced me into a shell where I don’t have conversations with people. I don’t talk about things that I’m going through but that particular moment I was actually talking to my mom in the kitchen about just stuff. Not just day-to-day things but just having a really deep conversation, really understanding what she herself was going through and just enjoying baking with me.”
She said on that day she was finally able to open up about topics that had previously weighed on her subconscious, like her being sexual assaulted at 15 years old.
Commemorating International Women’s Day earlier this year, Foster’s book was released on March 8 and is available in physical and online bookstores both locally and internationally.