And even diary is hard to consume after seeing cows from a bio farm getting herded for milking. They’re in serious pain while getting continuously impregnated to maximise milk production… it’s really hard to stomach for me as I’m not morally opposed to milk/meat consumption… but the way these creatures are treated really make it hard.
I remember a YouTube of a journalist looking for the most humane technique to administer capital punishment and it turned out that during co2 asphyxia the victim goes light-headed, even laughingly before passing out and away without even realizing. When told about this, Death Sentence advocates were disappointed that the victims wouldn't suffer while the sentence was carried out. (surprising eh!)
The prices reflect this, of course, and I think the economics of more people adjusting their household budgets to eat in an affordable but also environmentally-sustainable way is really pivotal to seeing major change on this front in the future. They also claim to be carbon negative which is really interesting: https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/blog/carbon-negative-grass.... https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019....
The cool thing is that a lot of these operations partner with butchers who can cut to order, so you get exactly the thickness of steaks you like, certain roasts, Korean-style ribs if you want them, soup bones, shanks, etc. all exactly how you like them.
Grass-fed beef is a superfood!
There's one other source of good meat: hunting. I suck at that but I have friends and associates who hunt and they are often trying to get rid of extra meat. Always happy to help with that :)
But short of moving to the midwest and making friends with your neighboring farmers, I don't know what to tell you.
A good portion of the meat I consume comes off my own land, mostly as venison although a little bit of turkey too. It tastes better than farmed meat, it's cheaper, it helps keep the animals from overpopulating, and the animal didn't live a miserable life of torture before it was harvested.
But I get that not everybody lives in an area where that is practical.
They add celery powder instead of nitrates, so they can claim "nitrate free". However, the celery powder just decomposes into nitrates, achieving the same effect
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-uncured-ba...
We buy our pork belly direct from a farm and it hasn't been touched with anything.
Just the "uncured" but still processed bacon that is pretty much just regular bacon
Fresh vegetables can stay good too if you buy the right kinds. I've found that asian leafy green vegetables like yu choy or gai lan keep a lot better. The leaves may turn a little yellow but they don't end up a slimy mess in a day. Cabbage is the western equivalent that keeps forever.
In places where the grocery shops are within walking distance and more integrated with your life, you just make groceries more frequently. Consequently, the food you buy is always fresher.
There's so many things linked to poorer outcomes when associated with car dominate design
The beauty of canned goods is that you don't expend energy to store them.
The beauty of frozen veggies (and some frozen fruits, blueberries for example) is that they keep and work well for small quantities. I ate a lot of frozen veggies when I was single.
Cabbage, for instance, keeps longer than lettuce. Pluots keep, too, much better than peaches. Oranges, tangerines, and grapes keep well. Carrots keep pretty much forever.
I recently had a pile of potatoes sitting around for reasons unclear, now I've got several portions of an amazing potato chowder sitting in the freezer, ready to nuke in minutes when I want them. I had a spare onion and carrot lying around so those went in too, worked out great, no planning or recipe required aside from keeping basic cooking staples on hand.
Alternatively most raw vegetables (and fruits!) can be pickled. While you do have to get the proportions roughly correct, making refrigerator pickles is as simple as throwing extra sliced veggies into a jar with water, vinegar and salt (herbs and spices optional to your preference). The acidity keeps them from going bad.
Fruits can be turned into freezer preserves almost as easily. Almost any combination you have lying around can be mashed and cooked down on the stove as much or as little as you want with some sugar, pectin is optional. They'll last for months in the freezer, weeks in the fridge.
People think I'm a cooking genius when they see all this random stuff in my fridge but it's all so easy, the truth is I just don't like waste.
My wife came home with a small bag of brussel sprouts and some "gourmet" Baklava that weighed a bit less, but not much. Virtually the same price.
It is very common for (cardboard tasting) tomatoes, which come from a high-production plant, to cost as much or even more than meat, that comes from a plant-consuming animal and then butchered and constantly refrigerated. the vegetable/meat price ratio in the US means vegetables are comparatively 3-5x+ more expensive than any of the many other places I have lived. They are more like 10x less expensive than meat in in some places I have lived. The same goes for nuts to carbs, etc. And you will feel it immediately in lack of energy and hunger if you don't have protein and the sufficient number of daily calories, while lack of vegetables mainly leads to a more subtle lack of general health.
I suppose our food production has generally centralized over time to the regions that can grow these vegetables all year, and almost no vegetables are grown locally. So we end up paying the transportation costs, even during the four weeks in the fall when we could be overwhelmed by cheap locally-grown vegetables.
My ability to get broccoli in November in North Dakota is quite remarkable?
Oh, it is remarkable, but this is an honest question, do you really care?
I mean, I could get fresh tomatoes year round, but they're garbage outside of summer. When we buy things in season, they tend to be cheaper and taste better. Right now in my area, apples are plentiful and cheap! I really wish my supermarket would do some curation of products and only put the best stuff out for sale. I honestly don't care that I wouldn't be able to buy any (expensive, bland) fresh tomatoes right now. That's why we have cans...
I can go to Whole Foods and pay $10 for a bag of mini-cucumbers. Or I can go to Aldi and pay $3 for the same product picked from the same field and delivered regionally on the same train.
The answer people have to that is “I’m too busy and don’t have time to do that”. Grocery stores collect a lot of market intelligence and price to the audience. That’s why a tomato with a wholesale price of $0.50 costs more than a nice steak. Or why they sell pre-chopped carrots and onions to helpless people with money but without skill for $15/lb.
Fresh vegetables have a lot of handling, refrigeration and shipping timeline requirements that add a lot to the cost.
The government really could focus on subsidizing healthier food options and stop subsidizing taco bell's crunch wrap things, pizza hut's stuffed crust pizza or various colas.
In season fruits and vegetables are inexpensive. You can easily find vegetables that are under $2/pound. Eating half a pound of vegetables a day (most people dont) is a dollar a day.
carrots are typically $1/pound, green peppers $2/pound, cabbage .67/pound, peas .35/pound, green beans $2/pound, broccoli 2/pound
beef is expensive, but chicken and sometimes pork are less expensive.
But that's where things are cheap and convenient! :(
UK supermarkets sell one cob cut into two halves, wrapped in plastic for $2
Ha, so do I, except if you started forcing me to give in to certain things bread would be one of the last I'd be willing to give up. (Unless I was allowed 'packaged' bread from an actual baker I suppose.)
Pre-sliced supermarket bread has to be me the most miserable yet widespread thing in existence, can't stand the stuff any more.
However, after some experimentation, I have discovered that it is possible to make bread in a simplified way, which does not need more than 10 minutes of work for one bread made of 500 g of wheat floor.
I bake the bread in a microwave oven, in a lid-covered glass vessel. The right baking time must be determined by experiments, in my oven it is 13 minutes for the dough made of 500 g of floor.
The advantage of the microwave oven is a short baking time and perfect reproducibility. After kneading the dough for a few minutes, I can put it in the oven and go to do other activities. Now I make at home one bread every day after I wake up, for breakfast.
When baked at microwaves, you can use a leavening agent for a more conventional bread, but even the unleavened bread grows enough for my taste.
The simplest bread can be made with nothing else than wheat floor and water, by using the same method as described by Cato the Elder, 2200 years ago (except for using microwaves instead of fire).
With the wheat floor that I use (12.1% proteins), I add water that is 75% of the floor mass, e.g. 375 g water for 500 g floor.
The dough is kneaded for a few minutes, until it becomes homogeneous and elastic.
After kneading, it is possible to bake it immediately. However, in most days I prefer to make a bread with high protein content, in order to not exceed the daily intake of energy that would make me gain weight. For this option, the dough must be left to rest for 30 minutes, to become cohesive, than it can be washed for a few minutes, to remove a large part of the starch, enriching thus the dough in gluten, i.e. protein.
I bake the dough in a glass vessel covered by a lid, 13 minutes @ 1000 W in a microwave oven. The exact time will depend on the oven, so it must be determined by experiments. When the baking time is too long, the bread will harden.
Pure bread must be eaten immediately after cooling. Unlike the commercial bread with additives, it has poor shelf life.
Starting from the simplest bread, there are many options. One is to add a leavening agent, for a softer bread. Now, I prefer the unleavened bread, because when baked in a microwave oven it still grows, maybe 30% of what it might grow with an leavening agent, but it remains more chewy than standard bread. Unless you have untreated teeth problems, this is a good thing, because it causes much more satiety than soft bread in the same quantity. Chewing also keeps your teeth or your dental implants healthy, by stressing the bones.
Some people like to add salt to the bread, so that is another option (when that is done, one should take care that the recommended daily intake of salt is 4 to 5 g, so less salt should be added to other food). Various spices or seeds can also be added before baking.
Another option is to make it sweet, by adding sugar or raisins. Instead of mixing the sugar uniformly in the dough, I prefer to deposit the sugar on the flat dough, before baking, and then roll the dough and bend the resulting cylinder into a torus when transferring into the baking vessel. This method allows the use of less sugar, while still producing an intense enough sweet sensation, due to the alternation of sweetened and unsweetened layers in the baked bread. In this way, I use 50 g sugar for dough made of 500 g floor, but that should be adjusted depending on the individual taste. On the sugar, before rolling, I deposit e.g. cocoa powder (e.g. 5 g for 50 g sugar), vanilla essence, ground cinnamon, ground cloves etc. The advantage of this kind of simplified cake vs. traditional cakes or commercial cakes, besides the very short time for preparation, which allows doing this before breakfast, every day, is that the chewy bread, optionally with high-protein content, can cause satiety after ingesting a much smaller amount than would be needed when eating traditional cakes.
I like to eat red meat two or three times a month: tasty and I think some red meat is healthy for me.
I avoid any packaged food except I am too lazy to always make homemade bread. +1 for shopping for fresh vegetables, fruits, berries, whole grains, beans,…
Really, the main center parts of grocery stores where everything is in plastic or boxes really needs to be avoided.
As a substitute for packaged deserts, making a pancake and berries is pretty good.