Jacqueline Foster
Chef & Founder
Jacqueline Foster is a chef, Ayurvedic health counselor and educator, and the founder of Elements Cookery School.
Jacqueline has been a chef for more than 25 years and a practitioner of Ayurveda for a decade, weaving the two together in an approach to food that is at once culinary and healing. She has worked at the helm of bustling restaurants, traveled the world led first by her taste buds, owned and operated food trucks, and created internationally award-winning cheeses.
Her love of food began around a loud family table and has grown into a lifelong study of the ways food can nourish, delight, connect and heal. Her work has long lived at the intersection of cooking and healing: not simply asking what is healthy, but what makes food nourishing, delicious, beautiful and possible to live with over time.
Elements grew from a recurring gap she encountered between two worlds. Culinary training could offer extraordinary technique without a larger framework for understanding the body, season or the living origins of food. Wellness education could offer sophisticated ideas about nourishment while leaving students dependent on limited preparations, dietary rules or recipes.
She wanted the education she wished existed: one in which the precision and craft of the kitchen could be taught alongside Ayurveda, sensory awareness, agriculture, seasonality and hospitality.
Elements is that school in its beginning.
Jacqueline now lives in lush Central Vermont with her son, dog, two cats and ever-growing flock of chickens.
Personal Philosophy & Vision
Cooking is one of the rare practices in which knowledge becomes physical.
You can read about heat, but eventually you must learn to recognize it in the pan. You can study taste, but eventually you must put the spoon in your mouth. You can learn the qualities of an ingredient, but eventually you must cut it open, smell it, cook it and feed it to someone.
That is what continues to make the kitchen compelling to me.
Food asks us to pay attention—to nature, to our senses, to our bodies, to other people and to the materials directly in front of us. Technique matters because it gives us the ability to respond skillfully to what we notice. My hope for Elements is to create cooks who possess both forms of intelligence: the trained hand and the attentive mind.