Seems like I'm spending a fortune on food lately....

Lucky Luke

Well-Known Member
"Reconstituted"? Tell me more
Its a blend of one or more Cheeses or dairy products.. Fairly common in processed cheese.

Edit:" Reconstituted cheese is cheese which has been blended and is the union of more than one type or contains other reconstituted products e.g. skimmed milk."
 

Fubard

Well-Known Member
LOL your an argumentative fkr at times arnt ya?. I recon you and I would have a ball over a few brews. If the label sais its 100% Australian the producer and stockest would be in some trouble if it wasn't. The newer laws are helping /helped crack down on that sort of substitution Just like the labelling laws and country of origin labelling. I don't buy "ready made meals" and don't even buy processed cheese...disgusting stuff that looks like plastic.

The food chain is evolving. You can see this with how food is now marketed as a region. King Island beef or Scottsdale pork or even the farm like Nicholls chickens and Ashgrove milk. Sea food at the fresh counter in supermarkets have to have the country of origin displayed. I'm sure you have the same thing happening there. People want to know were their food comes from and how its produced, the rise of cooking shows I think has made this nearly mainstream.

I prefer to buy local but I do live in a rural island State so im a tad lucky compared to people in large cities.

.I wouldn't buy Barramundi as its not local and would be frozen to be available here. Frozen fish is never worth eating. I do like a good Barramundi burger though, Derby Hotel in the Kimberley used to do a ripper. Instead I buy fish from the local fish shop who's trawler docks in town..ship to shop, mainly the Gummy shark or for a change fresh salmon from the supermarket or the other fresh fish shop in town (who farm salmon in nets in the ocean.)

Buying local supports the local economy. Buying Australian products supports the country's workers.
Not argumentative, just realistic. I've seen how things go, and having lived through assorted "food scares", from the revelation that there's all sorts of bacteria in chicken (No shit, sherlock) to Mad Cow Disease and more, acknowledge that unless you know the source personally, and you living in a more rural area will have a better chance than a city dweller, you really don't know. We have origins shown on fresh food, whether it's fish, meat or whatever, strict regulation on food and so on, but even then there was a nice one here last year involving eggs where shelves were cleared thanks to it being found out that various places had been using an insecticide called Fipronil in the chicken farms. There was no real danger to anyone, but, also, nobody could say how long they had been doing that, rendering all the "guarantees" useless. The Shergar Lasagne was another perfect example of how wrong these "strict" controls can go, and we won't go into the use of antibiotics and other drugs in the farming of animals.

I mean, here's a scenario. Supermarket A sells something that is packaged as "100% Australian" and has a paper trail to the supplier saying it is. But it isn't, it's something using horse instead of beef. Someone finds out, questions get asked, trail goes from supermarket to supplier. Sounds good so far. So the supplier, let's say "Supplier X" gets lots of questions asked, but has a paper trail saying they got the ingredients from "Supplier Y" so off everyone goes following the trail which leads to ANOTHER supplier who has a paper trail eventually leading to Slaughterhouse B, who deny all knowledge and prove that the documentation has been falsified at some point. How does the system deal with that, who is to blame if documentation has been falsified to mask the trail, especially if the business who allegedly got the meat from the slaughterhouse suddenly "disappears"? That isn't some fantasy, it has happened as the system is only as good as the enforcement, and since the authorities can never hope to check all products then they do rely on trust and that's where things can fall down when there's a buck to be made, as nobody will do anything until AFTER something dodgy has been discovered and, like your land found out with the Hep A berries from "Creative Gourmet", then the damage is done as the reality is people expect no risks when the label is telling them that it's a "good" product. Unfortunately, there's money to be made and some will abuse that trust.

The other favourite one, and I ain't sure how it works with you, is the famous "Produced in" label. We have things saying "produced in the EU" but that can just mean someone has taken something from, say, South Africa, and then packaged it in an EU country, yet the impression is that the product was made here. Misleading? I think so but it's legal.

As I say, we have to be realistic regarding labels as they are no actual guarantee, you soon learn where the "better" places for things are, what is decent and what isn't. Like you, I don't do "ready meals", not when I can make the same thing for less and it's much healthier. Like you, that processed cheese muck doesn't get in my door. I don't do salmon at all now, because it's impossible to find "wild" instead of "farmed" which is much better and full of less chemicals and fats than the farmed stuff. We don't do that nasty bread in plastic bags here, luckily we've got a hell of a lot of bakeries here so decent bread is never far away 7 days a week or, of course, I make my own. And as far as junk food goes, I think McDonalds is perfect for vegetarians because I've never found anything I would class as meat in their burgers, that chemically-fuelled shit gets nowhere near my mouth, not when I can get a freshly made sandwich for less.

As you say, the food chain is evolving. The problem is, like with many things, the legislative side of things doesn't evolve as fast, the authorities are always playing "catch up". "Proper" labelling helps, but only when the system can't be abused to hell, and my view is that people put too much faith in such labels because the system can be abused to hell, blind faith is never a good thing and people should be a bit more sceptical.

Buying as local to you as possible is the best way, for various reasons from knowing how it's produced to saving the baby polar seal penguins due to a lower "carbon footprint" thanks to less time spent being shipped around the country or, indeed, the world but that's not always possible, especially here where fruit is concerned as Belgium is hardly a country known for it's bananas.

Anyway, we're drifting away from the thing about spending too much on food.
 

sunni

Administrator
Staff member
my bill is no where near $600 a month I have a family of three and a dog
Sounds like you are either buying all prepared foods prepackaged foods / eating out

Or you over eat
Buy what’s in season for vegetables
Buy from a farmers market
Make your dried goods like rice etc buy from bulk
Utilize food “waste” ex scraps from vegetables can be made for vegetable stock

Take advantage of sales check your flyers or online sales use apps like ibotta for cash back on purchases
Make a meal plaN go with a list
 

vertnugs

Well-Known Member
Take advantage of sales check your flyers or online sales use apps like ibotta for cash back on purchases

This is a HUGE help.My 13 year old has taken these duties upon herself.....she enjoys it.

Hopefully i'm not raising a future crazy coupon lady that hangs out at the goodwill door shoving people out of the way to get to all the shit they just put out on the floor.
 

ANC

Well-Known Member
South Africa recently came out of a listeria epidemic, that was eventually found in the largest distributor of ham, bacon, polony etc...
Now, nobody buys it anymore. Poor pig farmers can't get their pigs sold.
 

Roger A. Shrubber

Well-Known Member
i hate each and every one of you fuckers.
with my stomach, i get to eat yogurt, mashed potatoes, ice cream....can't have gluten, can't eat anything with a lot of fiber....
so a weeks groceries for me is 12 2lb. tubs of yogurt, two boxes of carnation instant breakfast packets, a box of instant mashed potatoes, a couple cans of condensed milk. once a month i buy butter, cheese, coffee (the kind with the acid removed, usually folger's simply smooth) sugar.....so i spend about 300 a month to feed just me.....just yogurt......again......
 

Fubard

Well-Known Member
i hate each and every one of you fuckers.
with my stomach, i get to eat yogurt, mashed potatoes, ice cream....can't have gluten, can't eat anything with a lot of fiber....
so a weeks groceries for me is 12 2lb. tubs of yogurt, two boxes of carnation instant breakfast packets, a box of instant mashed potatoes, a couple cans of condensed milk. once a month i buy butter, cheese, coffee (the kind with the acid removed, usually folger's simply smooth) sugar.....so i spend about 300 a month to feed just me.....just yogurt......again......
Yeah, and I can't have anything with too much sugar or fat so that's a hell of a lot I can't have like delicious, juicy, ribs or a big fat sirloin steak. Can't have proper butter, can't have proper fries, beer is only an occasional thing, have to avoid ice cream and anything else loaded with fat and sugar, and so on.

You get used to it
 

Roger A. Shrubber

Well-Known Member
Yeah, and I can't have anything with too much sugar or fat so that's a hell of a lot I can't have like delicious, juicy, ribs or a big fat sirloin steak. Can't have proper butter, can't have proper fries, beer is only an occasional thing, have to avoid ice cream and anything else loaded with fat and sugar, and so on.

You get used to it
i've had this condition for over 30 years. in the beginning it wasn't that bad, but its gotten worse over the years. gluten didn't used to bother me, that started about 10 years ago, and now its so bad if i eat a piece of bread, it will raise blisters in my mouth.
lots of other allergy type reactions, one doctor told me it was crohn's disease, one told me it wasn't....make me highly confident in their ability to diagnose anything....
so yeah, you do get used to it in a way....and you never get used to it in another way
 

blake9999

Well-Known Member
There are three of us in this house and our grocery bill for the month hovers around $140.00 for the month. We don't buy anything prepackages and grow allot of our veggies.
 
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