Lucky Dogs

Shiny, happy puppies. 

At our house, we eat almost no processed food. Our choice isn't about deprivation, it's about food that is both healthy and delicious. We are, admittedly, big time foodies, and my love for cooking is almost pathological. Every year I have enjoyed growing more and more of what we eat, and every year I'm learning more about how to preserve what we grow. As a result, we rarely eat anything that comes in a box, or from the middle of grocery store. Because my husband is both a Doctor of Chiropractic and a Doctor of Naturopathy, our farm dovetails nicely with his practice. Patients will often comment that it's nice to know we practice what we preach.

A few years (and two dogs ago) we were featured in our local newspaper in an article about alternatives to traditional dog feeding. At that time, we were feeding our dogs a high quality, holistic brand of dog food, supplemented with things like raw or cooked eggs, cottage cheese and some other supplementation. One day when my parents were visiting, my Dad came along on a dog-food run. When he saw the price of the grain-free dog food I was buying, he said, "Wow. Or you know, we could just go buy them some sirloin." Which made me wonder.

Why was I buying this processed food in a bag and feeding it to my dogs? We don't even eat cereal at because it's so toxic (yes, even organic cereal is toxic.) Organic cereal was my last processed food strong-hold because I viewed it as a "healthy snack." We didn't change our way of eating overnight, but the more I read, and the more I realized what I was actually eating, I just didn't want to put anything made from a slurry, extruded, and heat-processed into my body anymore. Yet here I was, buying a ginormous, expensive bag of processed meat/veggie pellets for our dogs.

Local real-meat dog food.

So when my husband was buying our meat from a local farm (so far we've only raised chickens) he asked about dog food. Guess what? They have it. Their dog food is made of actual ground meat scraps with NO filler and cost one quarter of what I was paying for dry dog food! It also cost 1/4 as much as the frozen dog food in our local big name pet-supply store.

Interestingly, the third ingredient in the big name frozen dog food that rhymes with 'Kill Jack' is something called 'cereal fines.' What are cereal fines you ask? I wondered too. Wikipedia to the rescue:
Cereal Food Fines are a byproduct or left-over of breakfast cereal food processing. Usually the source is unknown and sometimes this product is used in low quality dog food. The quality is unknown and fines may contain possible chemical residue, sweeteners or other additives. A patent definition states that they "often will contain a significant quantity of sugar. Generally, the total sugar content of the deformable core will be in the range of about 15% to about 27%, preferably about 18% to about 20%"

AAFCO defines cereal food fines as "particles of breakfast cereals obtained as a byproduct of their processing."

The third ingredient in expensive, frozen, big-name store dog food, billed as "fresh" and "healthy" is ground up sugary breakfast cereal. Yes, really. 

About $1/lb from the co-op.

So here's what we do instead. About once per week I make the biggest possible batch of organic brown rice using a rice cooker. (I am not a kitchen gadget girl, but trust me, if you're human and you're reading this, just get yourself a rice cooker.) My dogs are giant, so I brown 3# of frozen dog food. It smells like ground beef, because that's what it is. Each dog gets 1 1/2- 2c brown rice and half the browned dog food. Every few days I either add an egg or some veggies (frozen peas, chopped carrots, spinach, etc.) If we have any dog-appropriate leftovers, I throw them in. Today I had a little chicken. Stir it, cool it, feed the beasties. I've read that the ideal mix is 40% meat, 30% veggies, 30% starch. This is so much healthier than processed, bagged dog food with fillers that our dogs are not built to digest. If you buy your meat locally, ask if they have dog food. Your dogs will thank you!

Brown rice, egg, chicken scraps.

Browned dog food.

The waiting really is the hardest part.

Karly Aslaksen Golojuh and her growing farm can be facebook-stalked at Kayak Farms.