Asked my GF who’s an aspiring crazy cat lady:
It’s because (proper) cat food is engineered to contain all the nutrients they need. While it looks like a bland mush of only one thing, it’s more like the cat equivalent of having several full nutricious meals run through a blender. The required variety is built in.
I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too, it’s just not many people want that.
Speak for yourself, bachelor chow would solve many problems for me
Awww shieeet I JUST got done finding a pee’n’gee. What am I gonna do with this thing now?
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I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too,
You could, and it would be very simple to do so.
1: Take all the food you’d eat for, say, a week. Absolutely everything.
2: Blend it. Maybe add some extra vitamins to make up for the ones that will be lost due to processing.
3: Dehydrate it. (To make it more compact and less likely to spoil.)
4: Compress it into pellets.
Done. You have now created ‘human food’.
That’s what I find so absurd about the “humans need variety in their diet” mantra. If we need some vast unknown combination of things, how is it that letting people loose on supermarkets and choosing their own recipes somehow achieves that, compared to at least some first pass attempt based on macro nutrients?
Because many of our modern staples are fortified with essential vitamins and nutrients.
Ok, what we’ll do is, we’ll take some sort of kibble, A, fortify it, call it “Vegetable Delight”. Then another sort of kibble, B, fortify that, call it “Ox Fondue”. Then another, just like the previous ones, call it, say, “Mystery Surprise”. All fortified. Then you just alternate them. Mondays, A. Tuesdays, B. Then Wednesdays you think C but nope! A again. Then B, then A, THEN B, and then, finally C, so you have something special to look forward to on Sundays.
We also get cravings for specific foods when our bodies are lacking in a nutrient that food contains. I don’t think we have them for every nutrient our bodies need, hence why people can get nutrient deficiencies by accident even when the nutrient they need is available, but there’s some instinctual failsafes for certain ones that must have been scarce or intermittent enough for cravings to confer an evolutionary advantage.
Yeah that’s a good point.
Blending it is pre-digesting it which means it doesn’t travel our bodies quite the same way.
We have long digestive systems for a reason.
I’m not saying it isn’t possible but you’d probably shit funny for a long time
Pemmican! We should be eating pemmican.
That’s true, but we’re not cats.
It’s can be difficult to change a cat’s food. You have to gradually introduce the new food mixed in with the old food, or the cat may just refuse to eat it.
Oh ho ho ho. They will eat. Eventually. Then they get more. Then they complain it’s not enough.
Isn’t that basically what Huel is?
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Its called soylent. Been around for at least a couple decades.
They have.
We don’t. Burritos exist.
Damn you. Another new white t-shirt with coffee and snot stains. Take my upvote.
Cause we force them to
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
You as a human could also live with the same food every day if it covered every dietary need. Especially if you depended on someone else to acquire it and had no choice.
There is an evolutionary push for a rich variety of nutrients obtained from a variety of sources, but the mechanism driving that daily “need” for variety is force of habit and desire for novelty. On top of that, some people are happy to eat nothing but junk and have very narrow tastes. How come?
Also, I can assure you, a lot of cats will periodically stop eating a certain brand or flavor and go through cycles. Does it mean the food isn’t really covering their needs or are they just bored of the same flavor every day? Hard to know, but I would argue your assumption about humans being too different from their pets when it comes to variety in their menu.
To add on to other peoples answers regarding the complete nutritional makeup of pet food; many animals can make a variety of the amino acids they need to survive with just a few inputs (like deer and cows eating only (mostly) plants), but some, especially predatory animals, cannot. They get those nutrients from the prey they eat, which in turn got them from the plants.
It essentially comes down to which enzymes any given organism can create, which ones their DNA codes for *or which microorganisms are allowed to exist within their system. Humans can’t make a bunch of these amino acids themselves. Many (maybe all of them, not that far into my class yet) of the reactions taking in place in any living organism are entirely reliant on enzymes to catalyze them; that is, without them these reactions would take millions of years to complete.
BTW there are appr. 37x1017 (3,700,000,000,000,000,000) reactions happening in your body every second. All of them (or at least a great majority of them) require enzymes to complete.
We do not “need” a variety of food. We eat it because we can afford it and it makes us healthier and happier.
Daily reminder that pet food is a more recent industry and before it existed pets mostly ate table scraps.
I’m a living proof that you can eat the same thing every day for decades and be just fine.
If the food you’re eating doesn’t contain all the nutrients you need you’re unhealthy as fuck and it will come back to haunt you.
What do you eat daily?
Not the other guy but i have been eating the same thing every day for lunch for a yearish now. Chicken, carrots , potato. I found a great seasoning mix that works great and its a decent lunch. I have really bad stomach issues and this keeps that mostly in check. Mostly.
I’ve been eating the same thing for almost a year at this point as well.
Cats and similar animals are adapted to specific environmental niches, but humans are generalists. One of the drawbacks of being generalists is that we’re not specialized enough to fully subsist on any single food source.
We can definitely subsist on a single food source if it’s been engineered to be nutritionally complete like pet food has.
How can I survive off of that, if they’re out of stock for half the year? ;-;
Buy double in the half year when it is available
Usually can’t afford that much upfront, wish I could tho.
I did make the comment in jest, though I appreciate the candor lol
That aside, I don’t have an idea if it’s even a viable approach considering the potential expiration dates and storage condition requirements, assuming one would even be willing to pay the exorbitant price to buy it as their main source of nourishment
Im just pointing out we can make a human food just like we make cat food and dog food and indeed have. Soylent sorta started it but there are a variety of other things now doing the same thing with twists (all vegan or organic, etc) and even before then we had meal replacement shakes and bars and actually there is this emergency food called plumpy nut that is actually made to nurse someone back from severe starvation. All sorts of bunker survival ration bar things to which are fairly common as boat things.
Animal food is usually balanced to contain all the nutriens the animal needs, or most.
Ofc if it’s proper
Well. We always have Soylent green …
…why the fuck did i waste time reading all that
My current cats have Opinions (capital O) about what is or isn’t food. I tried giving them variety, at least in flavour. They don’t want it. The want one specific brand of fish-flavored wet food (in jelly, not gravy). They’ll eat some kinds of fish-flavored kibble if wet food isn’t available. Anything else, they have to be pretty desperate.
At least they both like the same stuff! But the lack of variety is 100% on them, not me.
(My previous cats would eat most things. These two are just weird.)
They keep making solya t/bachelor chow…
Nobody buys it.
But you can 100% meal prep something and just eat it everyday as long as it’s got everything balanced. That’s what pet food is. It’s not like there’s an animal whose flesh is cat food, it’s processed and fortifiex
We don’t need a variety of food to survive. But, generally, we have choice, so we choose to vary our diet because it’s more interesting.
Pets do not have a choice. They eat what they’re given. Or they choose not to and die (a lil cat I was sitting chose that route).
They eat what they’re given. Or they choose not to and die (a lil cat I was sitting chose that route).
What the fuck? Cats don’t just chose not to eat and die. That cat died from neglect.
I was under the impression cats fed on sunlight and heat? I thought the food was just like, a scheme to drain the household economy.
He was well fed and offered different foods. His owners played with him and kept him clean. He didn’t want to eat. They had him tested for allergies, etc but the vet didn’t find anything wrong. They put him on something to increase his appetite. He ate a little. Then he stopped.
From what I’ve seen of cats, he had probably some other health issue that was making him not feel good, and because he felt bad he lost his appetite. Particularly if he was an older cat.
