What’s the main ingredient in AFB’s dog-food palatants?
“Liver,” says Moeller. “Mixed with some other viscera. The first part that a wild animal usually eats in its kill is the liver and stomach, the GI tract.” Organs in general are among the most nutritionally giving foods on Earth. A serving of lamb spleen has almost as much vitamin C as a tangerine. Beef lung has 50 percent more. Stomachs are especially valuable because of what’s inside them. The predator benefits from the nutrients of the plants and grains in the guts of its prey. “Animals have evolved to survive,” Rawson says. They like what’s best for them. People blanch to see “fish meal” or “meat meal” on a pet-food ingredient panel, but meal—which variously includes organs, heads, skin, and bones—most closely resembles the diet of dogs and cats in the wild. Muscle meat is a grand source of protein, but comparatively little else.
Animals’ taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. “That’s driven their sensory systems down a certain path,” Rawson says. This includes the animal known as us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. On the African veldt, unlike at the American food court, fats, sugar, and salt were not easy to come by. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food. And wide spreads in general.
Like dogs, humans also need a broad range of vitamins, minerals, calcium. We’re omnivores. Early man didn’t throw away the most nutritious parts of a carcass. Why ever do we? In 2009, the United States exported 438,000 tons of frozen livestock organs. You could lay them end to end and make a viscera equator. Figuratively speaking, they already ring the globe. Egypt and Russia are big on livers. Mexico eats our brains and lips. Our hearts belong to the Philippines.
What happened here? Why are we so squeamish? How hard would it be to go back to our healthier origins? For answers, we head to the Canadian Arctic, last stronghold of the North American organ-meat dinner.
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* Moeller, who has tasted the naked Cheeto, likens it to a piece of unsweetened puffed corn cereal.
? Or that’s what we think we like. In reality, the average person eats no more than about thirty foods on a regular basis. “It’s very restricted,” says Adam Drewnowski, director of the University of Washington Center for Obesity Research, who did the tallying. Most people ran through their entire repertoire in four days.
* This explains the perplexing odor of swamp water on certain floors of the Monell Chemical Senses Center during the 1980s. The basement was a big catfish pond.
* Not a Campbell’s product.
* Gone are the colored pet-food pieces of the early 1990s. “Because when it comes back up, then you have green and red dye all over your carpet,” says Rawson. “That was a huge duh.”
* My brother works in market research. One time after he visited I found a thick report in the trash detailing consumers’ feelings about premoistened towelettes. It contained the term “wiping events.”
* The Holy Grail is a pet food that not only smells unobjectionable, but also makes the pets’ feces smell unobjectionable. It’s a challenge because most things you could add to do that will get broken down in digestion and rendered ineffectual. Activated charcoal is problematic because it binds up not just smelly compounds, but nutrients too. Hill’s Pet Nutrition experimented with adding ginger. It worked well enough for a patent to have been granted, which must have been some consolation to the nine human panelists tasked with “detecting differences in intensity of the stool odor by sniffing the odor through a port.”
* As is jalape?o—though according to psychologist Paul Rozin, Mexican dogs, unlike American dogs, enjoy a little heat. Rozin’s work suggests animals have cultural food preferences too. Rozin was not the first academic to feed ethnic cuisine to research animals. In “The Effect of a Native Mexican Diet on Learning and Reasoning in White Rats,” subjects were served chili con carne, boiled pinto beans, and black coffee. Their scores at maze-solving remained high, possibly because of an added impetus to find their way to a bathroom. In 1926, the Indian Research Fund Association compared rats who lived on chapatis and vegetables with rats fed a Western diet of tinned meat, white bread, jam, and tea. So repellent was the Western fare that the latter group preferred to eat their cage mates, three of them so completely that “little or nothing remained for post-mortem examination.”
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Liver and Opinions
WHY WE EAT WHAT WE EAT AND DESPISE THE REST