I found a local farm that does pasture-raised beef, chicken, pork https://grandviewfarming.com/
I read their website and watched their farm “tour” video and they seem pretty legit to me. They do delivery.
They have some bundles in the 10-25lb range that I might try out soon. They also have stuff like an eighth of a cow share, and claim it will fit in a normal freezer, but I think I’ll try something smaller first.
Yeah, that farm looks decent to me. And the fact that they have a farm store on the farm and do visits and tours is good. It is a lot harder to lie about what you are doing when you actually let customers visit your farm.
Makes sense to try something smaller first. I am not sure about their shares – if they are USDA inspected or custom-exempt. That is something you could ask about. Shares are usually cheaper per pound than individual cuts, and if they are non USDA, then you also get the benefit of a better slaughter process.
Not who you are replying to, but one easy way to do steak is straight from the freezer into an air fryer. Mikayla Peterson recommends this is the Lion Diet stuff, so I tried it, and it worked well & is super simple. You can do the same thing with pork chops and pork steaks and even individual frozen fish portions. You aren’t going to get the same fine control over temperature you get with something like sous vide, but it is a lot quicker & less prep work. You can check them for temperature/doneness more often in the beginning while you are getting used to the right times for your air fryer.
Also, there is a lot of difference between the different steak cuts. My personal favorite is ribeye. It’s common for people to recommend and buy leaner cuts, but if you have cut out a lot of grains & carbs, then a lot of people find they actually enjoy the fatty meats more. (Ribeye is a fattier cut.)
I have made thick gravy before by blending in the veggies (carrots, onions, celery) that I cooked along with the meat, with no extra flour/starch additives. I was just doing it to avoid food waste, not for any specific dietary reason – many recipes will have you cook those veggies along with a turkey or in a broth, and then just discard them. So I tried blending them in to see if that would work, and it was fine and thickened the gravy with no added ingredients. You could probably also use cooked cauliflower, which is allowed on Keto, and just blend that with the meat drippings, fat, and broth to make a gravy.
By the way, these are the kinds of ideas I can’t easily find, even on blogs and in cookbooks that are devoted to “whole foods”, “unprocessed” foods, etc. I was initially expecting that whole/unprocessed food communities would be full of ideas like that, but instead they are full of things like recipes that use arrowroot starch instead of flour or corn starch in gravy.
It seems like they aren’t really taking their own idea of whole/unprocessed foods seriously. Instead most of them are just replacing one set of flours & additives with a newer, different set of flours & additives. And I am not convinced that things like tapioca starch, arrowroot starch, cassava flour, etc are better than the more standard conventional things they are replacing.
Yeah I’ve actually done air fryer-from-frozen method with pork chops and was pretty happy with how they came out. (I recently got a basket-style air fryer. It has two separate baskets that are independently controllable in terms of temp and time, which is very convenient, though since the air fryer is divided into two compartments, it could be an issue if trying to cook a really big thing).
Something to investigate!
I tried finding some keto gravy recipes online just now.
Here’s one that uses these ingredients:
I also found a dairy-based one that seemed like it might be good:
I saw a number of keto gravy recipes using xanthum gum but I wasn’t interested in that.
The first one looks similar to what I was saying :)
For the second one, make sure you read the ingredients label on the cream cheese. A lot of them have a lot of extra ingredients. Yogurt is the same – they often have lots ingredients, and for some reason are mostly using low-fat milk. (And, also, most dairy you buy in a store is going to be coming from factory farmed milk.)
Yeah, when I try searching Paleo gravy, I mostly get arrowroot starch, and when I searched Keto gravy I got xantham gum.
Yeah :( The only cream cheese I’ve found at my local markets that doesn’t have a bunch of weird stuff is a particular brand of “organic” cream cheese they sell at Whole Foods that’s a relatively expensive brand. Even the Whole Foods store brand “organic” cream cheese has locust bean gum.
It’s actually been kind of hard lately for me to find Greek full fat yogurt period, forget about being picky about grass fed and all that. Also places are just out of heavy cream like half the time. I find it weird.
You can actually make cream cheese at home pretty easily. I haven’t done this myself recently, since I am not eating milk, but it is a pretty simple process: you just need lemon juice or vinegar to sour the milk (separate it into curds and whey), and then you separate out the curds.
Here is one recipe that uses lemon juice, with lots of details and pictures.
And here is another receipt that uses vinegar.
Another thing you could try is homemade kefir. You can get kefir grains and make kefir at home. (You just add them to milk, leave it for a day or 2, then strain them out and add them to new milk. And you keep doing that.) Then you can separate the kefir into the thicker curd part and the whey. Depending on how much you separate it, you can end up with something that has a texture similar to yogurt, sour cream, or cream cheese, and you can use it for that stuff. It will have a more pronounced sour taste, since it is a fermented food.
That actually looks easier than I expected. I may have to try this out.
I actually have some store bought kefir that i tried recently. Wasn’t a big fan of it as a beverage, but I like the idea of separating it out and seeing what that’s like.
Store bought kefir is generally going to be a lot different than what you make at home with kefir grains. A lot of it isn’t even real, fermented kefir.
Kefir is pretty strong though. It has a stronger tang/sourness than yogurt, so it can be an acquired taste.
They’re USDA-inspected. Apparently you can generally only sell across state lines if you’re USDA-inspected (that’s based on a brief googling).
Reporting typos (I listened to this article with a Chrome extension, so I noticed a few things). I liked the article btw 
, and might say something more substantive later. I am assuming I should still post everything (including typos) here and not in e.g. the typos megathread. Suggested edits in [bold within brackets]:
Economists study big picture issues like [how] policies increase or decrease wealth.
The person selling bread might not current[ly] want shoes.
Put another way, the government’s job is to make sure that producing a lot of wealth is the only way to become wealthy (or receiving it as a gift).
This one above is more of a structure criticism than a typo report. I think that the parenthetical should come before the second “is”. So it should read:
Put another way, the government’s job is to make sure that producing a lot of wealth (or receiving it as a gift) is the only way to become wealthy.
If an expert is mistaken, but he has no power over me, then I can ignore [him].
(This one above is just a pronoun agreement thing).
I have found several examples of vegans talking about protecting prey animals from predators.
This is the most organized example I found: https://www.herbivorizepredators.org
It’s honestly hard to tell how serious that is, but the idea seems to be to genetically modify carnivores to turn them into herbivores. They also have a facebook, instagram, twitter, and youtube with content (and low views/followers).
I found a reddit thread of ex vegans talking about why they quit veganism. It was mainly about the health issues they got. Some of these people were very committed vegans with “good” vegan diets.
That seems like an ambitious program!
I think one could come up with many objections to this idea (including basic feasibility, at least anytime soon). One I was thinking about was this: wouldn’t you need a lot more land for e.g. lions to graze on if they’re just gonna eat grass? And what happens if the lions and zebras want to eat the same grass? Even if the lions aren’t meat-eaters, they still might kill the zebras just to eliminate the competition for food, unless you’re also gonna make the lions docile or something (which would seem to be a change that goes beyond just making them eat plants). It’s plausible that the total number of dead zebras might go up if lions have to kill all their potential grass-competitors instead of just eating the meat of some zebras (I’m thinking back to your full-context analysis of different food options earlier in the thread in making this point since it seems similar; the option that involves eating meat might actually result in fewer deaths.)
I checked their FAQ and they mention overpopulation but I don’t see anything about my specific concern.
Yeah, that makes sense. They also might just kill them for no reason. Even well-fed house cats kill mice. Not all house cats do kill mice, but the ones that do will often just kill them and play with them or leave them for owners to find. They aren’t just killing them to eat.
I was looking at some more stuff about Ancel Keys, and there is a lot of stuff written on both sides about his work. The main defence of him seems to be that he didn’t intentionally cherry-pick the countries, and that France wasn’t intentionally excluded: they were invited to participate in the studies, and the French researchers chose not to participate.
This paper has a response to some of the claims. It is very long and only deals with four specific claims though.
This blog post also defends Ancel Key’s work.
I haven’t done a thorough investigation of both sides. I just knew that some notable countries like France – which were later considered “paradoxes” – were left out, and that there was data from before the seven countries study even started showing countries that didn’t have the same strong correlation that Ancel Keys ended up showing, and that for some reason most of those countries didn’t end up in the study.
The main defence against that seems to just be that they weren’t purposely cherry-picked, and they could have participated if they wanted to. Which isn’t really a great defence of the study and the data.
Came across this on reddit:
The top comment says:
Would have been good to add an extra column depicting their nutritional values
I thought that was a good point and would go further than that. Lots of the almond milk that people drink is pretty watery nutritionally. I think on average the calories in 200ml of typical almond milk would be lower than the calories in 200ml of typical dairy milk. If you made the chart comparison based on environmental impact in a 200ml serving adjusted for calories, I think that the comparison between say dairy and almond would not be as unflattering to dairy (unflattering from an environmentalist perspective anyways).
Tangentially, I tried a couple of soymilks somewhat recently, and they made me queasy for a while. Can’t do soy, apparently. I’ve only tried oatmilk in the context of a Starbucks drink (pre-keto heh) and it seemed fine.
I’ve been getting a bunch of urgent hunger pangs lately and gained back a bit of weight (overall weight has been pretty stable within a 5 pound range since starting keto). I think it may have been triggered by insufficient sleep, since that seems to cause a bunch of problems for me.
