Adventures in Homemade Cat Food

By Andrea Scarpino

Homemade cat food: meat, eggs, vitamins all whizzed together into a concoction only a cat would eat. Except my cats won’t eat it, just look at me with evident disdain and concern. And when they do venture to taste what I’ve put in the bowl, they insist on violently vomiting it up—and then some. It has to be a medical miracle of sorts that they’re producing so much vomit while eating so little. Yesterday, one vomited an obscene amount on a cushion that he has now spent hours obsessively licking even though I cleaned it up. This morning, he vomited on an empty egg carton I had put on the floor near the back door to recycle.

Homemade. Because I’ve decided that I should make more ethical choices in what I feed my cats. The pet food industry is essentially a dump for all the meat by-products that aren’t fit for human consumption. And much of it contains ingredients like grains that cats shouldn’t be eating anyway.

I’m also worrying a lot these days about CAFOs—contained animal feeding operations. Basically, small concrete and metal areas where hundreds to thousands of animals are contained and raised to be slaughtered. The Environmental Protection Agency defines a CAFO as “agricultural operations where animals are kept and raised in confined situations” and which “congregate animals, feed, manure and urine, dead animals, and production operations on a small land area.”

Notice the definition doesn’t include the word “farm.” Because they’re not farms; they’re production lines, feedlots. The EPA says a large CAFO can include 10,000 or more pigs, 55,000 or more turkeys, 125,000 or more chickens. Confined, remember, in metal and concrete, with drainage ditches leading urine, feces, blood, dead animals, hair, antibiotics, spilled feed to vast lagoons of waste.

This worries me for many reasons: the health of the people who work and live near these operations, who wake each morning to fumes released from the waste lagoons; the environmental costs of raising so many animals in such poor conditions; the health costs to the humans who consume these animals; the harm to the animals; the ethics of it all. And my possible support of CAFOs through what I feed my cats.

Even though I don’t eat meat, even though I only consume organic and free-range dairy products (although there are a host of complexities there), could I be supporting CAFOs by buying cat food with “chicken by-products”? Most likely.

So I bought two pounds of local farm-raised organic ground chicken and mixed it with a vitamin powder made for cats. It smelled vile. I may or may not have gagged while processing it. But this would be the only way to ensure, I reasoned, that I wasn’t supporting a CAFO. Except my cats won’t eat it. Or eat it and vomit profusely—out of spite, I’m convinced. Essentially, I’ve fed them nothing but McDonald’s for 13 years and now, suddenly, I’m changing the rules.

Of course, I think I’m changing the rules for the better. But no one seems to be able to convince the cats.

Andrea Scarpino is a frequent contributor to POTB. You can visit her at:

– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto