Screw the byproducts...

Gravy was an important food group in the Filip household back in the day. I would dare think that at least 60% of our meals involved it. There was steak and gravy...fried chicken, with gravy...pot roast (you better believe that meal had some gravy)...worse of all was this dish called "chili meat gravy". Oh, it was terrible, but my dad loved the stuff, and my mom (who ruled the kitchen) loves my dad, so we ate it. Now, at the same time, we got many of our vegetables from the farm, and a majority of the meats we ate came from our own pasture, so maybe I had that going for me. All in all though, I think I could have eaten a little healthier as a child.

When I moved on to college, I made friends from outside the gravy belt, and my diet improved. As I ate better, I felt better. I found that I had less headaches, and my energy really improved. I haven't looked back since. Around the time I graduated veterinary school, I was starting to consider the possibility that maybe the same applies for our pets. Of course, I wasn't all the way there by the time I started working in the summer of 2003. I remember a few weeks into my job, I was recommending a therapeutic diet for a cat's diabetes. I had plenty of studies demonstrating that the particular formulation I was recommending dramatically improved clinical outcomes, and worked hard to explain that to the client over the phone. The client didn't want to use the food because it contained a good amount of byproduct in it. While I would love to think that my memory is failing me on this, I am pretty sure the conversation reached a point where I exclaimed "screw the byproducts and just use the damn food". I don't think I ever heard from them again.

I chuckle to think back to that embarrassing incident because these days I feel much more like that client did at the time. I think we have to be much more critical of what we are feeding them... Let us consider byproduct, which the Association Of American Feed Control Officials defines as...

"The non-rendered, clean parts, other than meat, derived from slaughtered mammals. It includes, but is not limited to, lungs, spleen, kidneys, brain, livers, blood, bone, partially defatted low temperature fatty tissue, and stomachs and intestines freed of their contents. It does not include hair, horns, teeth and hoofs. It shall be suitable for use in animal food. If it bears name descriptive of its kind, it must correspond thereto."

Part of my veterinary training included having an understanding of the beef industry and the workings of an industrial slaughterhouse. When processing beef, a lot of times you are going to be seeing portions of an animal that is extremely bruised from repeated antibiotic injections (you know, for the natural infections they may pickup in those lovely feed lots). Other times you see muscle that has had bots and other creatures migrate through. None of this stuff is what you would ever consider eating, but it has been deemed fit for our pets. Now I hear the argument that in the wild cats will eat all different portions of their prey, but lets not forget that they are not hunting within our industrial food complex. I think there is an important difference, and you won't hear me say "screw the byproducts" any more these days. Like I replied to an earlier post, we vote with our dollars. It's time we demand that more pet food companies step up the quality.