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> Good luck finding a chip not fried in safflower or sunflower oil in 2023.

This is a project that isn't quite ready for prime time, but it is turning up some options: https://labelferret.com/?search=chip+-%22sunflower%22+%2Bpot...

But your point still stands - the impossibility of finding food with ingredients I wanted to eat led to me creating Label Ferret.

The sunflower oil stuff is shifting a bit due to the war in Ukraine, which is one of the largest producers in the world.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/body-armor-blocked-ports-...

This page is very well designed! I really like that it puts the focus on text arrangement, font sizes and the strength of border lines around the cells and whole tables. Looks very pleasing.

Now this! THIS is one of the coolest projects I've seen in a while! Why did instacart never build anything this useful? I'd give anything to be able to filter my grocery store's shelves with something like this.

> Good luck finding a chip not fried in safflower or sunflower oil in 2023.

... Wait, when were commercial chips _not_ fried in one of these (or possibly rapeseed or peanut oil)? Also, what's wrong with sunflower oil?

> the fact that no alternatives appear to exist

What were you expecting? Olive oil and lard would both have smoke points too low to be practical, I would think. Like, what do you think they should be using?

If you just want less of it, the baked chips have rebranded to 'air-fried' since an air fryer is just a directed convection oven.

What they were originally fried with: animal fats. Lard, tallow, clarified butter, goose fat, etc.

Potato chips and french fries predate industrial seed oils.

I've definitely seen chips at Whole Food fried in animal fats, but they were substantially more expensive which I think a) makes sense and b) is a good thing given the additional environmental cost of raising and consuming animals.

Commercially produced bagged potato chips more or less never were, I don't think? I don't think you'd get a very good product if you fried them in lard and then put them in a bag for a year.

Animal fats? Vegans are getting pitchforks sharpened...

You can have my butter when you pry it from my cold, dead, slightly greasy hands! That would actually be pretty easy, but then your fellow vegans would ask why you have butter.

> This trend got me to stop eating junk food for good. This also extends to 100% of fast food and takeout. Beyond the crap quality, the cost of these options has become insane.

Low quality and high price is the exact "perfect storm" that's needed to turn back the tide on fast food and the health problems that come with it.

> It's a challenge to find certain things like actual chicken broth

It's also hard to find chicken and pigs that haven't been fed soybean, safflower, or sunflower oils. They eat it, they store it in their fat, then you eat it.

> If you are time-sensitive, then cook more at a once to amortize your time investment. Your freezer isn't just for holding the crap that comes frozen at the grocery store. You can accumulate weeks worth of high-quality DIY rations with proper discipline. Think about how big a pot you could actually put on your stove. How many cubic feet is your oven? Do you have the ability to run a propane burner outside? You can make a month's worth of lunch in 3 hours. Think about the economics of that at scale. Sure, you would spend a solid week cooking, but then you would have several amazing meal options to choose from for an entire financial quarter.

Do you, or others, have any advice or references for this? I cook at home, and I generally enjoy it, but I'm not very good with the meal planning part and knowing what will save, for how long, and how to store it, so I'm mostly making meals a day or two at a time and at the grocery every week.

I may not be able to get away from that entirely, but I'd love to scale the daily food prep back and limit the weekly shopping to only the stuff I need fresh.

My favorite for this is bulk batching anything that could freeze well and owning a chest freezer - if thats an option. Chili, burritos, spaghetti, curry, etc. Anything that goes on rice is a prime target, just make 2-3 cups per person at the start of the week and fiend off of that. If you’re feeling froggy then fried rice at the mid-end of the week is also a super keen way of getting rid of fridge waste.

Start simple. Things that are trivial to store for long term and easy to reheat would be soup, chili, taco prep, pasta.

Meal prep doesn't necessarily mean 100% completed ahead of time either. For me, I have a perpetual frozen store of taco meat (1 frozen portion per meal), but I still have to toast up the shells fresh each time and occasionally cycle in a new bowl of beans, which lasts 2-3 days per in the fridge. Frozen portions you can bet on for ~90 days minimum in a typical consumer side-by-side before freezer burn and defrost cycle starts to take hold. If you have a proper deep freeze arrangement, many things will last indefinitely.

> I have a perpetual frozen store of taco meat

Now I'm fantasizing about taco starter that works just like sourdough starter. Take out a couple scoops for dinner, add back a few oz of your meat choice and a shake of seasoning, repeat.

Great way to get started: Feed Your People: Big-Batch, Big-Hearted Cooking and Recipes to Gather Around https://a.co/d/bzk1f8u

Likewise. I've lost about 60 lbs over the past year and I have corporate greed, in part, to thank for it. Most of it costs more, delivers less quantity and uses worse ingredients.

Thanks for being greed-driven entities of shit, Corps! My waistline and partner thank you!

After COVID my food allergies have been insane. I can't prove they're related and my doctor has no idea but pretty much overnight in early 2021 I became extremely sensitive to a bunch of ingredients including corn. Subsequently I had to cut out 99% of junk food and snacks sold in stores.

The upshot, I feel great and eliminating corn syrup and whatever else those foods and drinks had has reduced my cravings for sweets by something like 99.5%.

Palm oil has entered the discussion...

Not that it is any better. Reminds me how we have pork fed with rapeseed here... As something positive, I wonder is that really better or not...

> The new ingredients are typically abysmal for your health by comparison. Good luck finding a chip not fried in safflower or sunflower oil in 2023. Seriously, go try right now. I am not a seed oil guy, but the statistical prevalence of these oils might have some impact on public health and the fact that no alternatives appear to exist (outside of boutique settings) does kill off some of my bullshit canaries.

There is absolutely nothing unhealthy about seed oils.

Sunflower is not so bad. It's the soy and canola (when cooked) that you have to watch out for.

I thought every industry was rapidly migrating to Palm oil specifically because it is very cheap and saturated, I am surprised they still use the much more expensive and healthy seed oils.

Are you saying you think it’s better to fry potatoes in butter?

Literally no where was that said, and fat is not as bad as sugar (popularized by the sugar industry).

That's just what Big Fat wants you to think.

Well, when someone singles out seed oils, they almost always are saying that butter is somehow better which is why I ask. And from there I ask them for the evidence so I can gauge their epistemic standards.

For example, your comments make no effort to distinguish saturated fat from unsaturated fat. Unsaturated fats are fine. Saturated fats have a mountain of evidence converging on their negative health impact.

I do think actual potatoes fried in butter would be healthier than whatever comes out of a bag of Lays today.

Ruffles and Lays potato chips are just potatoes, vegetable oil, and salt. I think it's debatable whether butter or sunflower oil are healthier, but the environmental impact of butter is certainly worse.

I'd like to see the evidence for that. Given the evidence we have against saturated fat, I would expect better health outcomes for people fed potato chips fried in vegetable oil over butter. Every time we swap saturated fat with unsaturated fat, even in metabolic ward studies, we see better outcomes.

When I see someone saying that butter is somehow better, I like to see what evidence they've used to reach the inference despite all the evidence against that position.

Unfortunately the position usually just cashes out into "but I like butter".

I'm no food scientist, but it's probably better to cook perishable items in butter than it is to eat a bunch of foods made shelf-stable by a giant laundry list of ingredients that you would never eat otherwise.

Ruffles and Lays potato chips are just potatoes, vegetable oil, and salt.

There are more junk foods out there than potato chips.

Ah, I think I responded to the wrong commenter.

Duck fat is the real deal

Lard or tallow

Obviously.