When I read the thread title, my mind goes back to wild caught or outdoor cultured foods. I just fed my breeders a mix of mosquito larvae, daphnia and a tiny bloodworm I haven't seen before. If I could feed that every day (to my insect eaters), I would.
I have old fashioned window insert fans in the fishroom - 2 of them. They're on timers all day to keep the room cool. When they stop, bugs can get around their blades and into the room. They have grids, but no screens. Usually, in the morning, I look up into the ceiling corners of the room (it's a garage, not in the house) and see a dozen or so mosquitoes sitting up there. By noon, they are gone, and they're not flying out. They're attracted to water and here, that water is full of insect eaters. I see a behaviour change in some of the surface hunting killies, as they are keeping an eye out. Yesterday evening, after days of rain and fog and with clouds of mosquitoes outside, I got a few bites in the fishroom, for the first time. I reset the timers so the fans would run til after all the lights were out. That was too much live food for me!
But you don't get wilder food than that. It's what these fish I keep eat in the wild. Their food isn't irradiated.
The danger in frozen foods is that they tend not to stay frozen in shipping. It doesn't seem to be in the food itself, but in the handling. Feeder fish are little landmines, because of how they're treated. Tubifex are sewage worms. Both are dangers.
But brine shrimp need clean water. Live bloodworms, mosquito larvae, fairy shrimp - they are as clean as fish. In many ways, they can be safer than flake, as flakes and pellets do push obesity a bit.
Buy white fleshed fish, or shrimp, and run them through a blender til they're paste. Add pureed baby food veggies of your choice. Maybe some blendered dulse (seaweed -easy to get where I am). Water soluble avian vitamins can go in. So can spirulina powder and astaxanthin powder. Some undigestable gelatin can be a binder. I'm offering a 1920s beefheart recipe here, except with fish, seaweed and algae and no beef...
Mix it up, roll it out into thin sheets and put it in a large ziplock - flattened so you can snap pieces off. Freeze it.
Buy or grow some zucchini (courgette). Cut it into thin coins with little pieces of wax paper to keep them apart. Freeze a few bags of them. Freezing breaks the fibres so fish can get to the food. Feed Loracarid cats or other herbivores with it. Great stuff - beats old stale algae wafers except you have to net the skins out.
You have human grade foods that get to you through a regulated food distribution chain - it isn't likely to have been thawed and frozen several times before you got it. If you shop around, it's inexpensive. It offers a varied diet you can design to fit your fish with the freshness of a frozen diet (compared to pellets at least). It disgusts the non fishkeepers in your home when you make it though. It isn't always fragrant.
Stay tuned for my cooking show, on an obscure youtube channel near you!
