On Kibble
When a cat eats her natural diet of small prey, she does so perfectly. The rough tongue scrapes, the teeth slice, and the acid in her stomach breaks down the bones. The texture of an entire body in her mouth brings the cat good health and great joy. The mouse’s blood hydrates her, the crunching bones clean her teeth, and the tissues, muscular and fatty, the cartilage and guts, provide her perfect nutrition.
The prey animal’s body is comprised almost entirely of protein and fat: these are the two things – the only two macronutrients – that any cat needs. Carbohydrates are not on this list. Nor do cats need to eat vegetables. Cats do not crave a “balanced diet.” They have such great and singular need of meat, they are classified as “hypercarnivores” like piranhas and crocodiles.
They are not like people, who can dine off any old dumpster of broccoli and peanuts. While we get our vitamins and minerals from such things as fruit, cats get them from their prey’s organs and bones, never deviating from their single food source to meet every health need. They simply must have pure meat. There is no other way for them to live than for others to die.
Food does two things for you and for your cat. The first thing is it gives you the material needed to physically exist as a body. The second thing is it gives you the energy to move that body around and lead your life. Humans use protein to build the body, and carbohydrates to power it. But cats use protein not only to build and maintain the body, like we do, but for their daily energy as well. If a cat doesn’t get enough protein, it all goes to daily energy; bodily maintenance is neglected, and the cat faces serious health effects.
Any mainstream commercial cat food is going to be nutritionally complete, meaning it has everything a cat needs to not go blind, wither away, and die. The kibble company acquires meat by-product from slaughterhouses, along with other industrial chaff usually related to the commodity crops that are most heavily subsidized by the federal government.
These materials are ground, mixed, and pressure cooked and then dehydrated into powder. The powder is mixed with more additives and certain vitamins, becomes doughy, is shaped into pieces, and then cooked again. The final product is then sprayed with fat à la Dorito dust to make it highly palatable, as well as preservatives to keep the tasty layer of fat from going rancid. This results in a convenient and nutritionally acceptable bag of food for you to buy at Krøger.
Any meat, even meat by-products, will be expensive at the scale of multinational kibble production, so this is why the meat is diluted with carbs like rice, wheat, potatoes, oats, and above all corn. Colorful carbohydrate ingredients like sweet potatoes can also be used by pet food companies to add an attractive splash of color to the bag of kibble, luring human shoppers who are biological omnivores naturally drawn to such things.
So, while kibble flavors are often advertised as “beef and potato” or “chicken and rice,” as though the company were proudly presenting a home-cooked meal for your son, the potato and rice they have mentioned were included for the sole purpose of cutting costs, and are now doubling as a marketing ploy. I cannot emphasize enough that cats do not need, and in fact should not be eating, things like this which grow from plants. The exception being beautiful green grass.
So you may be an ardent cat owner who now resolves to feed your cat only pure meat. But peruse the cat food aisle at your local pet shop, and you will be stumped. For one thing, feeding your cat premium foods with names like “primal” and “pure bites” will cost you about $1,100-$1,900 per year per cat. Inflate this by 3% or so for every year your cat lives.
At this price, one would expect the “pure bites” being sold as a “raw ancestral diet” would be, in fact, pure meat. One would expect a kibble that befits the hypercarnivore. But after meat, the third ingredient in this food is kale, and the fourth is celery! The bites also include nuts, cranberries and blueberries, as well as… wow… cilantro and ginger. This colorful and well-seasoned repast is ideal for the human plate. But as cat food goes, it’s just another form of meat-cum-filler that maximizes profits by reducing expense.
Certainly, one can compare this top-shelf kibble’s ingredient list to the ingredients of, say, Me0w Mix, and draw conclusions.
Food 1 top ingredients
Rabbit and ground bone
Rabbit Livers
Organic Kale
Organic Celery
Organic Pumpkin Seeds
Organic Sunflower Seeds
Food 2 top ingredients
Ground Yellow Corn
Corn Gluten Meal
Chicken By-Product Meal
Soybean Meal
Beef Tallow Preserved with Mixed Tocopherols
Animal Digest (?)
As a rule of thumb, the first few ingredients in cat food should always be meat, otherwise your cat is subsisting on, in this case, Fritos. So one food here far outshines the other, marketing ploys notwithstanding.
But the point is: whether the brand is health-food-coded or agribusiness-coded, you will never find a kibble that does not include non-meat filler ingredients.
When advertised as “grain-free,” they use other carbohydrates, like winter squash. When advertised as “raw,” it is cut with something uncooked like apple. When advertised as “limited ingredient,” it will use a smaller diversity of fillers and focus on something like peas.
What they will not advertise, cunningly, is the carbohydrate content, which all of these marketing terms are meant to obfuscate by implying that there are no carbohydrates at all. In many cases, however, carbohydrates form about a third of the nutritional value of even the most premium commercial cat foods - as is dictated mathematically by listing meat as the first two ingredients.
There will be no kibble that is pure protein and fat, because that is not a product, that is a body.
So, insofar as you are going to feed your cat kibble and not squirrels, and so long as you avoid feeding your cat anything made primarily of corn, I would recommend whatever kibble has the lowest carbohydrate content that suits your budget.
There is more than one way, however, to feed a cat - kibble being simply the least perishable and therefore the most convenient and, in that sense, somewhat enforced upon those of us who work for a living and don’t have time to live life; our cats being, thank god, one floating log we can cling to in the white water of our days.
More on cat food next time: Foods that are Wet
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hillary