Food for alchemist?

[Conradus]

And, yeah, cooking recipes tend to have a stupidly large number of ingredients - but in most cases, a lot of those ingredients can be bought cheaply at the Culinarians' Guild or the Markets. Take, for example, Beef Stew. It has six ingredients: Sunset Wheat Flour, Buffalo Sirloin, Black Pepper, Wild Onion, Sour Red, and Mineral Water. Of that ingredient list, you only need to buy Buffalo Sirloin off of the marketboards (and it's usually quite cheap there). Sour Red can be bought from the Tradescraft salesperson an any of the three cities' markets, the pepper, Onion, and water can be bought at the Culinarian's Guild, and the Flour can be crafted from Sunset Wheat bought at the Guild. The cost of these ingredients when bought from NPCs instead of from the marketboards is insanely cheap, often under ten gil apiece, when you'd pay hundreds or even thousands if you bought from the Marketboards.

Sunset Wheat Flour can be bought directly from the Whistling Miller in Gridania or the Sahagin Vendor up in Halfstone (if you've unlocked the Sahagin Beastmen quests) for 4 gil a throw, which is cheaper than you can craft it