Give Your Cat Good Home Cookin'
You'll save money and have a happier, healthier pet when
you . . .
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By B. Marian Rogers
I'd like to be able to tell you that my tabby got
sick just reading the label on a can of her food . . . but
honesty makes me admit that she can't read print that fine.
I can, however, and the list of ingredients made me feel
wretched.
Along with "modifieds", "by-products", "dioxides",
"hydrochlorides", and other "ides" and "-antes", there was
actually artificial coloring!
"For whom?" I asked myself. "For the cat, who surely
doesn't care ... or the owner, who even more surely
wouldn't eat the mixture?"
I would never dream of feeding myself or my family an
exclusive diet of preservative-laden, artificially colored,
modified, canned by-products . . . and I certainly felt
that my furry friend deserved better nourishment than the
commercial kitty dinners seemed to offer. In fact, I saw no
reason why I couldn't make nutritious meals that a feline
would like just as well as—and maybe a whole lot
better than—canned food!
Furthermore, since the price of cat food has kept pace with
inflation (the brand I bought three years ago, for 18¢
a can, now costs 38¢!), I figured that my own
homecooked cat-meals couldn't be much more expensive than
store-bought victuals!
After studying a lot of labels on "nutritionally complete"
diets for cats, I broke down the ingredients into several
main groups: proteins (liver, egg, fish, chicken, and beef)
with their own fats and oils . . . starches (wheat gluten,
soy flour, and modified starches) . . . and the various
vitamin supplements.
FREE INGREDIENTS
My first stop was the meat counter at the grocery store,
where I asked a number of questions and made some
interesting discoveries. Large fish, I learned, often
arrive whole but are sold in fillets, steaks, and other
dressed forms. Heads, tails, and bones—and all the
meat attached to such pieces—are thrown away. I
offered 10¢ a pound to cover the cost of the plastic
wrap, but the butcher insisted on giving me the castoffs
for free.
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