I’ve even used Yakult in a bind and it turns out ok.
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Oops 
If it’s a living culture (Lactobacillus casei Shirota) it’s going to eat your lactose.
Don’t use lactose free milk.
" Can I use lactose-free milk to make yogurt?
Lactose-free milk may not be suitable for culturing. Some brands do actually still contain lactose, but also contain lactase, an enzyme that helps lactose-intolerant individuals digest the lactose. However, these brands are usually ultra-pasteurized, as well, which does not work well for culturing"
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This one is hard. Because the whole healthy part is a struggle. Taiwanese people generally don’t eat healthy. Except the Taoist vegetarians. Also most Taiwanese have zero understanding of food science and consumption and how that relates to being healthy.
Things that should grow well here aren’t grown or of are the farmers don’t use the machinery designed for specific crops to help make planting, weeding, and harvest much less labour intensive. Spinach and lettuce are two perfect examples. Also with such a tropical climate there is only a short window for traditional winter fruits and vegetables meaning things like broccoli, cauliflower and other brassicas are much more expensive.
Having said that a lot of other things are very stable in price. Sweet potato, taro, bananas, onions, mushrooms, eggplant, and cabbage, bok choi, choi sum, eggplant leaves and Asian spinach seem to stay around the same price.
A lot of stuff is imported. The traditional markets are like the street shop or department store equivalent. There are other bigger markets that you have to buy larger amounts. That’s fine for me but probably not for a single person. These markets sell to most of the restaurants and the vendors that sell at the smaller traditional markets.
The other thing that costs a fortune here are vitamins. Expect to pay an arm and a leg for them. The response from customs with iHerb orders is a mixed bag. But when a problem happens it’s difficult to sort out. Often requiring you to attend whatever facility out the back of Taoyuan somewhere to try and sort it out.
Buy in season. Try to find a wholesale seeds and nuts vendor if you can. They often have things like lentils as well. Brown rice mixed with wheat and oats is always a good stomach filler. Tofu is cheap and a good source of protein.
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Surely not the vegetables in the wet markets
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Yep. From Japan and South Korea and Thailand and other places. Large amounts of it are brought in through Khaosiung Port and then trucked up to Taipei.
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Shop at a wet market for pork and chicken and seasonal vegetables and fruits. It’s much cheaper than the supermarket. Go there early like before 8 am.
what he said. might be shocked! go to big fishing.ports with rows of seafood and check their garbage heaps for the boxes the stuff was imported in. it’s quite a surprise. same with many things. it’s cheaper to import because Taiwan labor is expensive and slow and the farm sizes are generally too small to justify the millions of usd to buy proper equipment to do the usual large scale monoculture farms. certain industries that are heavily subsidized here and get free use of machines paid for by public funds are the exception. like rice and certain beans.
This is something I’ve started to constantly started to remind myself about!
I’ve lived and traveled in Asia for many years, but, for some reason, my brain processes 100NTD as $1 and 10 NTD as 10c. When I do the conversion I realise I might be paying $3AUD for a soy milk or $5 for pack of fruit (in your example) that I might never purchase for $5 at home. Kiwi fruit may be 5 for 100NTD and I think, that’s cheap, but its $1 each in my home currency whereas I might get 3 or 10 for $1.
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My local is an evening market, opens at 2pm 
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Yeah, i did some googling and was shocked. Australia and Vietnam came up as big sources
I was surprised by the 8am opening time. Presumably that’s for wholesale?
Mine opens earlier than 2pm. Around 11am for veg etc, then around 1pm for meat and fish.
Sounds delicious. What time is dinner?
Meant to post this here. Confused the threads.
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Yeah, we’re having the wet market conversation on like 4 different threads
When I first came to Taiwan, I had to contemplate the same thing because many apartments don’t have kitchens. I couldn’t eat take away all the time because I’d feel disgusting in my body. Each meal is an ‘(un)lucky dip’ as to how I’m going to feel afterwards and whether I’m going to feel so bad, or thrown off centre that I need to eat more just to bury that feeling. You have no idea what they put into the food (additives, preservatives, salt, sugar) etc. to try make it taste better or so that they can produce it more cheaply (profitably), or the energy it was cooked in. (For example, you don’t know if the person who cooked or served you your food was angry, emotional or checked out at the time at the time they made it and that energy went into the food.) All of that will affect my well-being, along with whether I feel sleepy, will have sugar high and crash (and put me into that cycle) or whether I’ll get smashed by them dropping in a lot of salt to increase the flavour. Most people eat to ‘fill’ themselves so they don’t have to feel life, rather than to nourish themselves. I’ve moved away from that type of eating having eaten that way my entire life. The difference in my body is phenomenal because (when I’m eating that way), I’m no longer in a cycle of ups and downs… being smashed by the food then having to eat something else not to feel so bad, or having to fast for 12-24 hours so I can feel okay again.
Personally, I couldn’t live that way anymore every day.
I learned how to cook simply. Its an ongoing process but there are good sources online. This is one of the big changes that made the difference for me. When you find recipes online, they’re generally complex - ten+ ingredients, complex sauces, methods that take a while to prepare. Discovering that it is possible to cook so many meals in a way that is easy, was a game changer. The next level for me is learning how to do it properly myself (recipe adaptation and creation) - there is an approach I’ve learned to doing that, I just need to adapt it so that its healthy. So, I learned how to create simple recipes from 1-2 ingredients plus seasoning (at its most simple level, that are tasty and not unhealthy, though some are un-balanced), but mostly 4-6 ingredients. That enabled me to start taking greater charge of what I was eating.
What I found is that I took all the stuff out of my diet that was putting me into those horrible cycles (salt, preservatives, additives, sugar (including fruit which is loaded with it - it’s slightly different to refined sugar but its still sugar), processed food, gluten, dairy, eggs, nuts, legumes, nightshades, rice etc.). As I was removing them, I experiment with each food and how it effects my body. I’m not perfect, and sometimes I slip, but I ended up just eating mostly vegetables (mostly greens) (which I’ve never really been a big eater in my life) and fish and beef. (I was doing chicken but once I felt how it was in my body after eating it, I had to let go of that too). In my home country I was eating ‘healthy’ junk food - say, pasta made out of peas or lentils or snack balls made out of nuts and dates (but they’re super high sugar also).
What surprised me was how amazing I felt. Taiwan is the first time in my life I’d tried this. Simple meals actually taste amazing, better than anything I could buy. Just greens, simple home-made dressings, chilli, pepper and meat/fish. My body feels amazing and not overloaded as it did when I was eating how I was before (even with the healthy ‘junk food’ or healthy replacements (pasta made out of lentils etc.)
Thats a big part of how I live now, although I’m not always perfect with it. It is actually not that expensive to eat this way, especially if you eat foods in season.
I buy mostly vegetables (mostly greens) from my local wet market and fish (from the market) and beef from the supermarket. They discount it on the last day by 40-50%, which makes it almost a normal price. Sure its not at its prime, but its still okay to eat. You can buy a box of frozen prawns (1.2kg for 280NTD at the market).
The cost of cooking my 1-2 meals at home would be something between 100-250NTD. On average its around 150, and that’s for a decent sized meal. That said, I’m starting to eat smaller meals and I’m shopping at the farmers markets where the quality of the produce is much better.
A small fillet of fish in a lunchbox would be 120+ with rice and a few small servings of vegetables, and cooking yourself is way healthier and tastier. I rarely eat junk or rubbish food (including bubble tea, all the sugary things and fried foods)… the cost of eat that way is actually really expensive.
So, OP, you’re on track. I would say the key is loving yourself and your body. Don’t make it so much about money, even though this is obviously a consideration, but loving yourself and loving your body. It can be done for the same price (or less) than eating poorly.
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Yes many get confused when it comes to currency conversion and think Taiwan is cheap because it feels cheap. But compared to other countries Taiwan is expensive for food and general living expenses but far cheaper for for rent of an apartment.
Eating at home in Taiwan is expensive. Owning a car expensive.
Live Like a local and have a scooter and eat out at lunch box places and it can appear cheaper.
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They also don’t understand how critical proper sleep is to health. I am not at all surprised at the amount of depression and other mental illnesses given the severe sleep depravity of Taiwan youth.
Mental health is almost entirely overlooked
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Yes, its the currency conversion, I must mentally associate 100 with $1. I’ve traveled for decades and regularly convert things between multiple currencies in my mind to assess relative value, except, for most of my time here! But its mostly on food and not big ticket purchases that I seem to make this calculation oversight.
Yes, groceries are expensive, even when compared with back home where they’re also expensive but there are regular deep discount specials at home so you can always work around that.
That doesn’t seem to be so much the case here. I’ve seen ‘specials’ where they inflate the supposed original price of the item but then you have to buy 2 of them to get them for the price of one. Pure deception.
But I’m eating well here, for a cost that is not materially different to those lunchboxes (80NTD-150NTD/meal).
I can’t eat those lunchboxes for more than a few weeks because I feel awful in my body. I’d leave the country before I took that kind of hit to my well-being. I can’t imagine feeling lethargic every day and on a constant sugar high/crash from the other stuff that is normal here to consume.
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Maybe outside of Taipei.
Any midteir or lower city in America is cheaper (I paid 700 a month for a one bedroom house right off campus as early as 2018 in Tucson. Paid the same for an apartment in Milwaukee in 2020)
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