Hi, Bombs Squad. Welcome to Food for Thought, a radio Cherry Bomb miniseries. I'm Carrie Diamond,

editor-in-chief of Cherry Bomb magazine. We wanted to know what's on your mind, so we hit the road

and went on tour to eat, drink, and talk with lots of you, all across the country. Today's stop is San Diego,

California, where we heard from six women changing the local food scene. Thank you to Carreygold

for supporting our Food for Thought tour. Carrey Gold is the Irish brand known for its award-winning

butter and cheese, made with milk from grass-fed cows from family farms all over

Ireland. We'll be hearing more about their amazing product later, so stay tuned. First up,

let's listen to a short talk from Laura Johnson of you and yours distilling company.

Thank you so much. I'm going to kind of dive in to how I became a distiller and how I

came to run a distillery at 23, 24. So originally I'm from the Dallas area, born and raised.

I grew up with pretty relaxed parents. There's not a lot to do in that part of

Texas other than go to sporting events and get in trouble, and I did plenty of both. So I was kind of

always encouraged. Alcohol was never like a taboo in our family. I was always encouraged to like try a sip of

my parents' wine or, you know, just try a taste of their cocktail.

So I feel like I grew up with quite a healthy, respectful relationship to alcoholic beverages from an early age.

And then my love for a distilling kind of first clicked the summer after I graduated from high school.

So I went on this kind of fun, what I understand now

was like a nice father-daughter bonding trip before I went off to college. So we ended up going

on this fun trip together before I moved out here to San Diego to go to USDA. And on that

trip, we just happened to pop into a distillery tour and I just remember being

fascinated like completely enthralled I couldn't believe how similar the process was to cooking

I I just remember my dad is super ADD and we were like 20 minutes into the tour and he was like

...