Fresh Seafood in Nebraska?

YES!  I finally connected with who I believe to be the freshest, most reliable and direct source of fresh, flown-in, wild caught, seafood in Nebraska.  The man’s name is Andrew Vounv and he used to own Midwest Seafood in Lincoln. He knows all of his fisherman personally and the fish arrives fresh on Friday and is delivered to you on Saturday morning. He is a small scale distributor so even if you are only wanting enough fish for one meal each week, he is happy to provide it. He is also willing to vacuum pack for freezing if you won’t be able to eat your fish right away.  Andrew is the salmon provider for a select few specialty stores in Lincoln, so there is some cost savings by buying direct from him. Right now there are 2-3 customers ordering from Seward so if we get this going and there is a large enough customer base out here, he will consider delivering to Seward.  Until then, orders must be picked up on Saturday mornings at the Casey’s gas station on HW34 by the Kawasaki plant.  He delivers all over Lincoln on Saturday so if you can’t meet him at the designated time, you can meet up with him elsewhere in Lincoln.

He sends out an email each week letting you know what he has coming in that week. You simply reply with your order.  If you want to be on his email list, please email him directly at andrewseafood@neb.rr.com.  If you have additional questions, you can call him at 402-310-7781. I will forward a price list as soon as I get it.  I would be interested in taking turns to make the Saturday morning pick-up so please let me know if you are interested.  Also, please forward this message to anyone you know in Seward who may be interested in fresh seafood but is not a member of this yahoo group.

Buy Fresh Buy Local In Nebraska

Got "Raw" Milk?

With the recent release of the movie Food Inc., I'm feeling good about our efforts to consume locally produced, fresh, unprocessed foods. Many of you already know that our family consumes fresh, unpasteurized milk straight from cows raised on organic pastures and fed their natural diet of green grass. We've been drinking this type of milk for about 8 years after being introduced to its health benefits by the Weston A. Price Foundation. In fact, all of our children were weaned from the breast straight on to raw cow's milk shortly after their first birthdays!

This might sound crazy to some of you and that's understandable because most people are not aware of the fact that there are two types of raw milk produced by farmers. One type is "raw milk intended for pasteurization" and those cows are normally found in larger numbers in confinement dairies and rarely have access to fresh green pastures. The animals are given antibiotics and hormones and live a short and stressful life being pushed to produce as much milk as they possibly can. Their milk is collected by a milk processor and taken to a pasteurization plant where it is cooked to very high temperatures (which is absolutely necessary to make it "safe") before being bottled and delivered to your grocery store shelf.

The problem raw milk advocates have with pasteurization and ultra pasteurization is that cooking milk to such high temperatures kills off not only the bad bacteria which may or may not be present, but it also kills off the beneficial bacteria, protein and enzymes. There is also a lot of controversy over just how many vitamins and minerals are destroyed by pasteurization but the very fact they they have to "add back" to the milk ("vit. D enriched") should tell you something.

The type of milk we drink is "raw milk intended for human consumption." This type of milk is carefully collected from cows consuming their natural diet of green grass, grazing freely on organic pastures, never given any sort of antibiotic or hormone, and enjoying a stress-free, long life, often only being milked once a day. Grass-fed cows are also much less likely to contain harmful pathogens in their gut compared to grain-fed cows. A Google search on "grain-fed cows and e coli" will reveal solid science on how the corn-based diet acidifies the cow’s digestive tract. Under normal circumstances E. coli O157:H7 is killed by stomach acids. But the increased acidity in the cow’s stomach allows for the more acid resistant E. coli bacteria to survive and thrive. When these acid resistant E. coli enter the food supply, it is especially dangerous because a person’s primary defense against E. coli, stomach acid, is now useless.

After thoroughly researching the safety and health benefits of fresh, unprocessed, unadulterated milk, we decided this type of milk was clearly the better choice for our family. The next step was to identify a "safe" raw milk producer. Using criteria provided by the Weston A. Price Foundation and Raw USA Standards, we set out to find safe, raw milk in Nebraska!  RealMilk.com has a listing of raw milk producers in our area and we choose to buy milk from the Branched Oak Farm in Raymond.

Shaking The Hand That Feeds Us

There was no school today so the kids rode along with me to pick up milk. Our winter milk source, the Divino Nino Family Farm in Palmyra, Nebraska is about an hour and fifteen minutes from our house. Either I or our friend, Sue Briggs drives to this farm every Friday to pick up fresh, whole, unpasteurized, unhomogenized whole milk from grass-fed Guernsey cows. These pastured cows are never given antibiotics or any type of hormones and are fed a natural diet intended for cows, GREEN GRASS! YUM! You can see the whole role of film from the day

HERE.