What is your food budget?

Dziadować means to live in poverty (but in this context @Bojack meant to live in voluntary poverty).

Ciułać means to hoard.

Since I’ve read Gary Taubes’s book I believe exactly the opposite. We should eat fewer carbons and more fat (especially fat meat).

I think we had a pretty constructive debate. I learned a bit about @Bojack’s and @Julianek’s food habits and perspectives and I’m glad I learned it.

Ok thanks for the translations.

I didn’t read as much as you do about health, my plan was/is to read “How not to die”. I think they recommend to eat less meat and especially less processed food.

Maybe we do agree on how much meat we should eat. My point is that I/we eat too much meat. Statistically speaking, each swiss eat ~52kg of meat per year (1kg per week)

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I didn’t read the book, but I watched many videos from Dr. Greger. He indeed recommends a vegan diet and points to some study results, which back his recommendation. Like e.g. if you don’t eat meat, you have lower risk of this and that disease. The buzzword is inflammation. You should always avoid inflammation, because it makes your body get older faster. Also if you have a high metabolism and eat a lot, your body is like an engine running at full capacity, it gets worn out faster.

I think when it comes to meat, it’s not necessarily that meat is bad. It’s just that the meat that we have available is bad. It is full of antibiotics and chemicals. And it’s not sustainable for the whole planet to eat so much meat. Places where animals are kept are a breeding ground for the most deadly viruses in human history.

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Well the issue with diets is that nowadays each camp has his own set of rules, which they consider as holy as the 10 commandments.

  • keto guys : “Don’t eat carbs”!
  • Vegan guys : “Don’t eat meat!”
  • Most Governments : “Don’t eat fat”!

On my side, I put together two rules for myself, trying to be pragmatic :

  1. Only eat stuffs your great-great-grand-mother would recognize (i.e no processed foods)
  2. If you wanna breach rule 1 then you have to cook eat yourself (i.e if you want to eat cookies you have to bake them yourself, pre-made cookies don’t count!).
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I admit to eating a lot of meat, I can’t even satisfy hunger without a piece of meat during the day. Salad makes for a good starter though :-). I eat little fruit as I’m allergic to nearly all of them excluding citrus and melons.

I also never put much thought about balancing carbs, vegetables, meats. I guess not buying processed foods and sweet drinks is good enough for me to feel good about my dietary habits. Oh, and I only buy BIO eggs and milk as they really taste better. Bio milk is not normalized to a fixed amount of fat, which means it’s usually 3.6-3.9% fat. This probably contributes to a significant difference in taste.

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I already had that discussion with @nugget. Here’re my arguments:

That’s because it’s hard to make a science out of diets - it’s hard to test and falsify the hypothesis and there’re a million other factors influencing results. A major component of Gary Taubes’s books is the critique of the poor quality of scientific backup of modern dietary recommendations (especially the carbon-based government recommendations). BTW. I highly recommend his classic NYT’s article “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?”.

I personally stick to the rule - don’t eat sugar and carbs with high glycemic index (with exception of few fruits for vitamins and minerals) which makes my diet soft-core paleo/low-carb, not necessarily keto.

Totally agree!

Yes. I do the same thing. I buy my milk and eggs from my farmer. Milk is even cheaper than at Lidl, which is awesome.

Speaking of food … en Guete!

It would be interesting to know

It would be nice to have a list of farmers that sells stuff.
Living in Zurich, I only know the little kiosk near Stettbach.

Milk cheaper than Lidl/Migros/Aldi/Coop? Where/how?

I live in Zug and I have lots of farmers selling their stuff in walking distance. Milk costs 1.20 CHF per litre at most places, which is certainly cheaper than bio-milk in Lidl/Aldi and normal milk at Migros/Coop. Normal milk at Lidl/Aldi might cost the same or a bit higher - I don’t remember.

anybody tried buying directly with the farmer, for zurich perople here?

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You have read Michael Pollan’s books!
I like them a lot. There’s also a WONDERFUL documentary on netflix from him: “Cooked”

Lidl’s great. They even sell weed these days. Not quite the quality stuff from Amsterdam but better than nothing

Expensive. You can buy the stuff over the border for like 0.6-0.7 EUR/l

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The quality afghan stuff you can get from your local dealer on the black market. :joy:

Yeah, I know but the farmers’ milk is fatter and thus tastes better (and in my opinion is healthier).

I’m a single person and I spend probably chf70/week. I eat meat, and avocadoes. I shop almost exclusively at Coop.
What saves me is that at one of my schools there is no cafeteria, so if I want to eat, I have to bring it with me. The nice thing is that there is a full kitchen, so I can cook one day for that day and the next. I don’t mind eating leftovers or eating the same thing for three or four meals in a row.
I have a reasonably large freezer which is also super helpful for buying meat on sale.
I don’t eat out much. I have a hard time paying for food that I can make better at home, so I save eating out for occasions with friends or really special treats (because it’s always nice to have someone else cook and clean up!).
I don’t eat processed foods. I don’t really like to cook, so I use my crock pots to make large quantities that I can freeze in single portions.
Food is the one area of the budget that I can always justify spending, so I’m really proud that I’ve gotten it down to chf70/week (all in, including coffee/cocktails out). I used to spend over chf100/week just at Coop, but since about two years ago, I made an extra effort to get the spending down.

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That’s really impressive to me. 10 CHF per day, and that including meat. Sometimes when I buy one piece of tuna steak, it costs 10 CHF. Or half kilo of chicken or beef. That’s not gonna keep me full for the whole day, of course.

I can generally stretch the meat I buy to at least 2-3 meals. Meat is sooooo expensive here, but I eat it almost every day anyways. The freezer helps, the slow cooker helps, but meat is still by far the biggest part of my budget. Aside from avocados, I don’t really eat out of season vegetables and that helps, too. I don’t buy raspberries in February anymore, and sometimes I don’t even buy cherries in season because holy crap, have you seen how much they cost?!?! So there are ways of cutting costs even in the fruit and veggie department.
But we all are fortunate enough that we get to make choices for ourselves. I have a car because the difference in my quality of life even counting the gas, insurance, parking, traffic is so great that it is worth it. Not eating out very often and cooking mostly at home are some of my trade offs.

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I just want to say THANK YOU to everyone who have recommended Lidl. I finally went there and will now never buy at a Coop or Migros ever again! Easily saving +400 chf per month as of now for our family…

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well wait till you see the prices in lidl/aldi just north of the border then! jawdropping. don’t overshop though or i hope you have a big freezer

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Btw, in the topic of food. Have you heard of such companies as Blue Apron or Hello Fresh? The latter actually operates in Switzerland:

https://www.hellofresh.ch/

Basically, once a week they send you a box with ingredients and recipe for 3 meals for 2 people. It costs 90 CHF, or 15 CHF per meal, just the ingredients! The concept I like: I’d like to cook more, but I’m often without inspiration as to what I should cook. But the price is really high, even more so after having this discussion with you about your food costs.

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I’m skeptical about the quality of meat sent by post. would that even be legal? isn’t it supposed to be kept refrigerated?