I don’t know about you guys, but I’m getting a little tired of suffering from nutrient deprivation and diet-related health issues here. I know how to eat right, but sometimes it’s a little difficult to find certain foods I know are healthy.
I want to create a resource list here for healthy/quality foods–regardless of your dietary preferences, from Paleo to vegan. I have several items I’ve found and several I still want to find. Any help with sources for the items I haven’t located yet would be incredibly appreciated!
Food Hitlist
Found Items
Milk from grass-fed cows:Ausgreen New Zealand milk found in many supermarkets.
Butter from grass-fed cows:Anchor New Zealand butter, usually found in the frozen section of local supermarkets.
Grass-fed beef:Diamond brand may be grass-fed, or at least partially; I’ve only see this at Jason’s Marketplace so far, but it’s not expensive.
Canned cod liver:Found in many supermarkets, surprisingly.
Pasture-raised chicken and eggs:There are brands in a few 有機店 that claim to have pasture-raised, healthy chicken and eggs.
Pastured pork:A brand called Herb Pork claims their pork is pasture-raised.
Make-your-own-yogurt kits:Located at Jason’s supermarket. You can use the New Zealand milk for this and have much healthier yogurt.
Wanted
Wild salmon: Not found. I’ve only seen the shitty farm-raised Norwegian salmon everyone eats here. As some of you may know this contains very few of the benefits of wild salmon and may be harmful to health. Alaskan, Russian or Hokkaido salmon would be preferable.
Fresh sardines: Not found. Maybe because I’m not sure which of the small fish in stores are sardines. Basically I’m just looking for small fatty fish with a lot of omega-3, but it seems nobody knows how much is in local fish.
Frozen green vegetables: Not found
Healthy-looking fresh greens: Not found. Stores seem to offer mostly pale-looking, slightly withered greens–and only rarely have the most nutrient-dense ones (kale, collards, chard, spinach, broccoli).
Japanese sweet potatoes: Not found. Seeking the purple ones preferably.
Avocados: Not found. Western varieties preferable.
Fully grass-fed beef:Looking for a better alternative than the one mentioned above.
If anyone has anything they’d like to add to the list, I’ll edit this post and put them in. I’ll also edit it with food sources. Let’s get healthy!
I’m not sure why you’re not happy with the greens at the supermarket, but there is a wider variety at wet markets, certainly fresher on average and definitely cheaper. Might have some luck there with fish too.
Haas Avocados are becoming more available at supermarkets like Wellcome and Carrefour and sometimes wet markets.
I guess in part it depends on what you mean by “greens”. There are tons of greens for stir-frying, and that’s fine. But often I’d also like lighter greens for salads, or heavier for soups and stews (kale, collard greens, etc.) Those at either end of the spectrum are harder to find. I think the Chinese New Year “long-life vegetable”, whatever that’s called, is the only “hearty green” that regularly shows up here. I presume it’s possible to cook that in a way that’s enjoyable, but I haven’t found that way yet.
Someone here posted that there’s a market in Tianmu that sells other kinds of greens, but the one time I managed to get there, the place had shut down for the day.
Broccoli is almost always available, isn’t it? I sure go through a lot of the stuff. Spinach often disappears in summer.
Haas avocados come and go. I used to think they were seasonal, but now it seems too random for that. Ditto the Ausgreen milk; that is the kind of milk I try to buy now, since I basically no longer trust Taiwanese produced milk at all, although I’m not sure why I should trust a supposed import.
I’ve seen frozen spinach at the import stores in Tianmu.
On sweet potatoes: what’s the difference between the yellow ones here, and Japanese purple ones? Or for that matter between yellow (often labelled 紅, red, if I remember correctly) and paler ones? I’ve been confused in the past about sweet potatoes, because I gather it’s a rather useless taxonomic term that can refer to a wide variety of roots, with varied nutrient profiles.