Technophile Monkey

Recently I went shopping at Migros (one of the largest Swiss store chains, covering nearly 50% of the market) and was, once again, unable to find any chicken meat from Switzerland. What’s worse, products with processed chicken meat (such as chicken nuggets) are usually made with chicken meat from Brazil. This begs one very deep question: What the fuck? Excuse the expletive, but how come that in one of the world’s richest countries, we cannot afford locally produced chicken meat? Migros presumably buys Brazilian meat because it’s cheaper to raise chickens in god-awful conditions in Brazil, kill them, freeze them and ship them over to Switzerland than it is to abide by the (pretty restrictive) Swiss animal protection laws regarding chickens and produce the meat here.

Migros is a company that works under the pretense that they have some moral standards. They don’t sell alcohol or cigarettes, for example. Instead, in order not to lose face but to cash in on those markets, they bought their competitor Denner who makes a lot of its annual profits exclusively from alcohol and tobacco. The Denner deal shows that Migros has no right to call themselves morally superior, and the Brazilian chicken meat isn’t helping that.

Because of issues like these, I’ve often pondered becoming vegetarian, simply because it would mean I don’t have to think about all these animal problems anymore, at least for my little world. But Migros’ and Coop’s vegetarian products won’t help me at all, because most of them contain milk! So for a lactose-intolerant vegetarian, the Swiss supermarket landscape looks very bleak. Out of sixteen Migros products, only three were without milk, and they were the most basic and most boring ones. At Coop it looks worse, of 23 products I’ve seen, only four are without milk, milk serum, cream or fresh cheese. This is not counting non-specific vegetarian products — I was only looking at meat replacements.

The best solution to the problem would be to create every single dish yourself, but that means you’re missing out on (very yummy) Quorn and tofu products from these major supermarket chains. Small and expensive specialized stores with other products do exist, but Quorn-based products aren’t really available there, and many of the meat replacements they offer have the same milk problem as the major players’ ones. You’re also looking at prices between 10 and 50% higher than what you’d pay at the major chains, so for people with less money, this probably won’t work at all.

I’ve written Migros an e-mail asking whether they might be adding milk-free vegetarian products to their product lines. Let’s see what they write back.

Update: Migros answers! Here’s the key sentence:

Um unsere Produkte für Allergiker und Veganer interessanter zu machen, werden wir zukünftig auf Milchprodukte im Vegi-Sortiment weitestgehend verzichten.

Migros will stop using milk products in their vegetarian product lines as far as possible. This is in order to make their products more interesting for vegans and people with allergies. That’s great news It means the mythical lactose-intolerant vegetarian might actually be able to.. err.. not starve. And thus exist.

My girlfriend was baking easter bunnies, but I wanted an easter octopus. Or even better, a Cthulhu. Look at him! Isn’t he cute with his widdle shawl for when the cold times come?

With lactose free butter of course.

Yesterday, Rivella AG released a yellow version of their milk serum drink that is based on tofu serum instead of milk serum. One consequence of this change is that the drink contains no lactose.

If you’ve grown up in Switzerland, you probably know the bitter-sweet taste of Rivella from your childhood. Several cultures have produced drinks based on milk serum, but the Swiss are the only ones crazy enough to make it one of their national culinary treasures. So you would think that making a similarly tasting drink available to lactose intolerant people and vegans would be a noble act by Rivella AG, wouldn’t you?

Catering to the vegans and the lactose intolerant is just a pretense. Rivella AG wants more. They want the Chinese market and are using the Swiss launch as a test bed.

Over 95% of Chinese are lactose intolerant. There has been no significant dairy industry in China in the last several thousand years, so an adult Chinese does not need the lactase enzyme. While there are few cows, there is a lot more tofu production, and this is what Rivella wants. A byproduct of tofu production is tofu serum, just like milk serum is a byproduct of cheese production. Where there’s a lot of tofu, there’s a lot of serum to make Rivella Yellow with. And there’s a lot of tofu in China.

By sticking a few hundred thousand Swiss francs into the development of a Rivella based on tofu serum, Rivella AG can build production centers in China and attack that market on its very own soil in a frantic attempt to cash in on the new Chinese middle class.

The irony of it all is that in some time, Rivella could probably sell their traditional milk serum based “Rivella red” in China instead. There are more greedy Swiss companies at work conquering China than just Rivella AG. If the current trend continues, lobbying by Swiss dairy companies in China will have made all the Chinese lactose tolerant and many Swiss bovine sperm salespeople rich.

The Swiss are already exporting cows to China, and articles written about it don’t even mention lactose intolerance. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is telling its people that milk is healthy.

Yep, sure is healthy to have nonstop diarrhea.

Thanks to Alex’s comment for pointing out Rivella’s huge marketing campaign.

There are some people that claim that goat’s milk is digested more easily than cow’s milk, and that it’s even digestable for people with lactose intolerance. Since I spotted goat’s milk at the store today, I thought to give this a try. I just had a chocolate milk that tasted like a bit like a farm smells, only with a hint of cocoa. I’ll update this posting with my results. I’m very, very, very lactose intolerant, 0.2g are easily enough to trigger several days of diarrhea, so we’ll see if the myth is true. I couldn’t find any scientific evidence for it so far, but I don’t have access to many medical journals, so I might have missed something.

Update 1: I just found this in a journal: “Despite anecdotal evidence and a small number of clinical cases showing that goats milk is a hypo-allergenic substitute for those allergic to cows milk, and tolerated by those with lactose intolerance, there are few data to support this. Indeed, there appears to be more evidence to refute the claim.” (Frances Robinson, ‘Goats milk – a suitable hypoallergenic alternative?’, British Food Journal, Vol. 103, Iss. 3, 2001)

So I might be in for a very fun Sunday on the toilet. Should’ve checked the journal before

Update 2: To finish this: The goat milk turned out to be surprisingly digestable. I did get feel very bloated for a few hours, but there were no other consequences. I think with the same amount of milk, I wouldn’t have left the bathroom for a bunch of days. So count me as another piece of anecdotal evidence, please.

Do you feel bloated often, especially after a creamy dessert? Do you spend your days silently placing innocent little farts into your office chair, your sofa, your car seat? And do you like to eat milk products, drink milk or eat chocolate? Don’t be embarrassed, then. You might just have lactose intolerance.

Lactose intolerance is a condition where your intestine no longer produces lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose (milk sugar). Instead, you just get gas. A lot of it. In bad cases, and if you don’t stop consuming milk, you get diarrhea and an inflamed intestine.

Actually, you as a human being should not be able to digest milk as an adult in the first place! But in their rather colorful past, northern Europeans and subsequently Americans have developed a genetic mutation that allows them to drink milk even as adults. By far most of the world’s population, however, is lactose intolerant. Entire peoples are. The Chinese, most nations of Africa, the entire country of Thailand and a whopping 75% of African Americans are just a few examples.

What makes things worse is that lactose is used in many non-dairy products, such as sausages or spice mixes, or as a taste amplifier. Lactose intolerant people should be extra careful when shopping. Examine those labels!

Next time you feel uneasy after that chocolate pudding, don’t run to the pill closet and try to battle the symptoms like a fool. Instead, take a break from products containing lactose for two weeks:

* Stop drinking milk
* No more cream in your coffee
* No chocolate
* No cheese (sufficiently aged hard cheeses are an exception)
* Stop using cream for cooking or desserts
* No more candy bars, no Mars, no Twix, no Snickers (real black chocolate is okay, but check label)
* No sausages (Kosher products labeled “pareve” are okay)
* No dried meat (same as above)
* No frozen dishes, TV dinners etc. (check packaging, some contain lactose, some don’t)

If you feel a lot better and more relaxed, if you have less problems with diarrhea and no longer suffer from wave after wave of odorless flatulence: Welcome aboard, you might be lactose intolerant. Perhaps in a later article, I can give you some shopping and cooking hints.

Do check with your doctor to be sure. I take no responsibility for your actions.

My girlfriend thought up an extraordinary salad sauce today that goes well with just plain salad or, as in this example, with a few slices of chicken *and* salad. I’ve never tasted anything like this before, and it was delicious to the very last drop, so let’s not keep this a secret.

For the sauce, you need:

* Honey
* Lemon juice
* Vegetable oil of choice (sunflower oil is a good hint)
* Mustard
* Salt, pepper, herbs of choice

For the chicken:

* Sliced or chopped chicken
* Soy sauce

First things first: soak the chicken in the soy sauce, it has to bathe there for at least 30 minutes.

The sauce: Take a good amount of lemon juice and a tablespoon of honey (nicely filled), then add a tablespoon of mustard and mix it all. Add a small amount (teaspoon, for example) of oil. If you need more liquid, fill up with lemon juice, but also add water as pure lemon juice would make it too sour at this point.

Finally, season to taste. And does it ever taste! Wonderful!

*Note: I had published this entry too early when half the recipe was missing. Sorry! Now everything’s there.*

My girlfriend went off on a work-related BBQ event, but not without leaving me two pieces of her bacon-wrapped chicken. Excavations in the fridge revealed an eggplant and vestiges of cheesy maccaroni. Interesting, but it doesn’t quite fit together. To rescue: the Pot au Fou!

- Take an **eggplant** and slice it up, equal thickness if possible:

[](http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/photos/v/album04/album52/potaufou/CIMG4159.JPG.html)

- Put some **olive oil** into a pot (with lid) that you can use in the oven. You don’t need much oil if you also use bacon, like me! Then add some **meat** that you’ve seasoned. Use more meat, less meat, it’s your choice.

[](http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/photos/v/album04/album52/potaufou/CIMG4161.JPG.html)

- Layer your **eggplant slices** on top of the meat and season them to taste. Don’t use too much salt as it would pull the liquid out of the poor eggplant. I recommend a bit of salt, pepper and paprika powder, plus some garlic. Sprinkle olive oil on every layer of eggplant, but not too much! If there are any holes consisting of non-eggplant, stick some **pasta leftovers** in there. If you don’t have leftovers, you can cook pasta fresh for this dish, but that’d use an additional pot. The horror!

[](http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/photos/v/album04/album52/potaufou/CIMG4163.JPG.html)

- Cover and stick in the oven for **20 – 30 minutes at 180 – 200 C**. The exact temperatures depend a bit on the thickness of your meat. You want the meat to be well done, especially if it’s chicken. If uncertainty overcomes you in the middle of cooking but the eggplant looks finished already, set your oven to only heat from below for a few minutes so the meat gets most of the heat. That rhymes!

- The result might look like this:

[](http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/photos/v/album04/album52/potaufou/CIMG4165.JPG.html)

- Not very yummy? Wrong! Look at it on its own little plate:

[](http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/photos/v/album04/album52/potaufou/CIMG4166.JPG.html)

Okay, it looks like brains, chimp fists and noodles. But don’t let that keep you from making this wonderful dish. The eggplant tastes almost like grilled, and the layers further down suck up delicious olive oil which further amplifies their flavors.

Magnifique!

There’s barely any milk product that you can’t get lactose-free in Finland! We bought [pseudo-Emmentaler](http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/photos/v/holidays/tre2k6/CIMG3814.JPG.html) cheese yesterday, and there’s Gouda too, as well as all sorts of ice cream. Generally, most Valio products are [lactose-free](http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/photos/v/holidays/tre2k6/CIMG3806.JPG.html). Finland is like some sort of fairyland happy-place for lactose-intolerant people, only with considerably less fairies and more beer.

Happiness is me!

I’ve asked Zweifel, the company that makes Switzerland’s most popular potato chips and snack products, whether they know how much lactose is in their food. Huge surprise: they know! Many companies don’t like to give you numbers, though, so I was very pleased to receive an e-mail from Zweifel/Pomy Chips’ Roland Zimmerli. He had gone and asked the specialists at Zweifel for their input, and they compiled a list of lactose percentage of *all* their products. Teh amaze!

I’ve [attached the list for all to see](http://terror.snm-hgkz.ch/blog/files/Laktose_in_g_pro_100g_Fertigprodukt_05.07.061.ods). This won’t do you much good if you’re not in Switzerland, but if you’re a visiting lactose intolerant from a place such as “Foreign”, it might be helpful.

Yay for Zweifel!

Coop is taking an active stance and has released (this week) several new lactose-free products. Among them:

- 3 different flavors of ice cream
- Mozzarella
- Cottage cheese
- Whole milk
- Skimmed milk
- Vanilla-flavored milk
- Chocolate-flavored milk
- Curd cheese
- Cream
- Various yoghurts

This is great news for lactose intolerant people (including Asians and Africans of course) living in Switzerland! Coop has so far been very quiet in this sector, but Migros recently released a new line of soy-based products like puddings and chocolate drinks. This was a response to high demand from people on a vegan diet, but those with LI also profited from the move. That coop targets us specifically with this new line is fantastic. The products are made out of processed dairy milk, no soy involved (in case you’re worried about soy allergy).

Some small manufacturers, such as Breisgaumilch from Germany, already produce lactose-free cream for example, but that was a niche product only available in select stores in Germany. This is the first time such a product makes it to a Swiss mass-producer like Coop, who is present in nearly every larger town.

Olé!

I will try some of the stuff to see if it tastes like mold or toothpaste or newspapers.

Source: A Coop employee posting at the [Libase.de forum](http://www.libase.de/thread.html?threadid=13270&boardid=14).