Learning to be a Food Entrepreneur Episode 4 (10/10/2019)

In this episode I talk about how I began learning more about food additives and reading about how the FDA classifies the safety of certain food ingredients. One of the things that stuck out to me is how vague the language that the FDA uses can be sometimes. I go on to give some examples of how certain food ingredients have been rated by the FDA for consumer safety. I also touch on my approach to increase the quality of my blogs/photos/audio in order to increase the amount of disposable income available to feed back into improving my content quality. To Reflect: At the time of recording this I had been jobless out of college for about 10 months. My goal at this time was to research and build a system that would allow me to be more productive on a daily basis. I would brainstorm ideas and create miniature projects for myself that I would then have to complete. Around this time I also started writing down the characteristics I wanted to have, my values in life, and the goals I wanted achieve. The project I was working on at this time was to build a timeline (overview) of the food industry. I pinned a long piece of yarn from one side of my room to the other, and began researching the dates when foods were invented, the dates when food companies were founded and the dates when food regulations were put into place. I marked the yarn with a permanent market and each mark represented a year. I would then place a sticky note on the mark that represented the year the invention/regulation happened. Now, I didn't memorize these facts or their dates, but it did lead me to learn a number of things I did not know about the food industry before. I can also refer back to this research experience and know where to find the information. For example, manufactured cereal was apparently invented within a year of pasteurized milk. Another example, the FDA had to put regulations in place to prohibit misleading labeling due to cases like - "Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup for teething and colicky babies, unlabeled,yet laced with morphine, killed many infants." Looking back I think this was very valuable because I was able to create a system to continuously develop projects and get feedback (positive feedback loop). At the time I had recently started doing an internet broadcast on Sundays where I would share information about my projects and then review/develop them based on the feedback I received. I still do that to this day. (more can be found on FDA 'evolving regulatory powers' here https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fdas-evolving-regulatory-powers/milestones-us-food-and-drug-law-history )