Farm Fresh Foods throughout Florida

Archive for the ‘local food’ Category

5 Reasons to Buy Local Food

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

1 – Food grown locally tastes better and is better for you. In the time it takes to get produce from harvest to the table, it loses a lot of important nutrients. The shorter travel distance, the more nutrients are preserved. Eggs from free-range chickens, grass-fed raw milk, and grass-fed beef are fresher and last longer when they are purchased locally.

2 Reduce global warming pollution and gasoline demand. Instead of traveling many miles on fossil fuels from farm to table, your food travels from your local farmer to your table, saving the planet. When you buy locally grown and produced food in Central Florida, you are also helping preserve the Florida agricultural landscape.

3 – Keep the money in the community. For every 100 dollars spent at a locally owned business, $45 goes back into our community. For every $100 spent at a chain store, only $14 comes back. Local food also keeps your taxes in check because local, independent farms contribute more in taxes than they require in services.

4 – Buy what you want, and not what someone else wants you to buy. Small businesses and farms choose products that are based on what their customers want and what is in season instead of relying on a national sales plan. Eating local food that is grown in season rather than eating food shipped from faraway places like Chile, also keeps your body in tune with the environment.

5 – Create jobs and better wages. Locally owned businesses create more local jobs and, in many cases, they provide better wages and benefits than chain stores do.

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Raw Milk vs Cloned Milk

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

I recently came across a website that floored me.  The website is http://www.cyclonedairy.com/ and turns out to be an April Fool’s Day prank.  It was all done to inform the public about the dangers of cloned food.  In January 2008, the U.S Food and Drug Administration declared milk and meat from cloned animals safe for human consumption.  This is the first step in allowing foods from cloned animals into our food supply.  Instead of addressing the deplorable conditions of the industrial food system we move headlong into a potential science fiction horror story.
Real milk- Grass fed raw milk, as advocated by the Weston Price Foundation, is one of  nature’s perfect food.   Real milk has a built in immune system to protect from potential pathogens provided the cows are fed correctly. Raw milk also retains all the enzymes intact which allows for  complete digestion.  Raw milk from cows fed grass is also high in vital nutrients, especially CLA.  CLA is a type of fat recently discovered to melt fat, protect from cancer and put on muscle mass.
Cloned foods on the other hand open up a Pandora’s box of issues.  There have not been extensive long term studies of these practices and the public would be sitting ducks to say the least.  Let your voice be heard.  Even in Orlando we can stand up against cloned food.

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Farm Fresh Eggs

Friday, March 27th, 2009
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Eggs are a nutrient powerhouse!  Better yet eggs from hens allowed to roam far and wide.  These types of eggs of course are becoming more available to us in the Orlando metro area.  As the demand increases so will the supply.  There is of course confusion with the terms so I below I wanted to give you some definitions:

Cage-Free: The idea here is that hens are allowed to move about unrestricted. However  this usually means that hundreds if not thousands of birds inside a building with artificial lights.  They can be feed the same genetically modified feed.  The same goes for organics cage free  except they get organic feed.   Hens should be out on grass, in natural sunlight, fighting for the bugs and other insects. Such an operation can happen here in Orlando with our sunshine year round.

Free-Range: This term is similar to the one above and the one most of us see in the local grocery store.  Like cage free, the USDA has no rules on what can be considered free-range or not.  It is presumed that free-range hens are allowed to roam outside, but that simply is a small fenced in area.  Again for truly free- range eggs seek out local farmers.

Pastured:  The is a very recent term and means the hens are allowed outside and forage on green grass, bugs  and supplemented with some feed.  The biggest dangers here are predators and farmers are always on the look out for them.  In the Florida sunshine these make some of the most nutrient dense foods available.

Farm eggs nutrients:

These are the nutrients  found in truly pastured eggs: Vitamin’s A,D and especially rich in the B vitamin choline.  The phyto-nutrients lutein and zeaxanthin have been found to be essential to prevent macular degeneration.  Finally, pastured eggs are excellent source of omega 3 fatty acids.

So remember in Orlando your local farmer is the bet source for local farm fresh eggs.

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Local Food in Orlando

Saturday, March 21st, 2009

As many of you might have already noticed, finding local sources of local farm fresh food is difficult.  The Orlando metro area, which once had thriving agricultural enterprises, instead is filled with urban sprawl.  Fortunately, the times are changing.  People in Orlando are searching high and low for free-range eggs, fresh milk, local organic produce, and much more.  Many have formed co-ops and bring in food from around the US.  While commendable, I’m of the opinion that we should support and source food from around Florida and Orlando as much as possible.  There some obvious obstacles of course, chief among them is the price of land.  Second we need suppliers of natural, non-toxic feed for the animals.  Third, we need laws to encourage the growth of local meat processing operations.  I do not mean the large slaughterhouses on an industrial scale but rather small mom and pop operations.  Smaller operations are easier to keep clean and you can build a personal relationship with them.  Can you imagine the return of your local butcher that offers grass-fed meat, lamb and truly pastured chickens?  So what can you do?  Buy local first.  Follow the 80-20 rule.  Try to buy a larger portion of your food locally and the remainder from conventional sources.  Second, write your local, state and federal representatives to make your voice heard.  In these economic troubles, buying locally will have an immediate positive impact.

Please visit these resources below to get started:

Click on Find Local Food

http://www.holisticlivingschool.org/coop

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http://apmarket.wordpress.com/

http://www.localharvest.org/

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