Less Impact Cats eat homemade food

The cans never made it to my tally. While I avoid canned foods for us because of the BPA issue, I don't include them in the tally because it's impossible to separate out the weight of metal vs. plastic. Still, regardless of the plastic lining, this is a lot of waste. Yes, the cans can be recycled. But imagine how much energy could be saved if we could avoid the cans altogether!

(Our cats could never tolerate dry food.)

So, I went in search of homemade cat food recipes. I found all kinds of conflicting opinions. There are those who insist cats must eat raw meat to be healthy. And there are those who feel that cooked meat and grains are fine. Not wanting to short-change my pets, I called the Nutrition Clinic at the U.C. Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. They create custom homemade diets for pets. Unfortunately, not until they are over 1-year old.

Well, the time has come. The kitties had their 1-year birthday a couple of weeks ago. So I tried again. Success. The nutritionist referred me to their affiliated web site www.petdiets.com. You fill out a quick questionnaire for each animal (they create diets for dogs as well) reporting its gender, weight, neuter-status, etc. and then select a protein source and a starch source from drop-down menus. The computer does the rest. I chose chicken, and knowing that my cats used to have digestive problems any time they were fed grains, chose sweet potato as the starch.

Here are the ingredients in one day's worth of food for 11-pound Arya:

4 ounces of cooked white chicken meat
1/4 cup of cooked mashed sweet potato
1-1/2 teaspoons of butter
1 red scoop of Balance It supplement

I ordered the supplement (unfortunately, it's not sold in stores), and it arrived the next day. Here is what the ingredients look like:

Weekly waste will be 1 waxed paper butter wrapper. Bi-monthly waste will be the plastic supplement container. And the occasional shipping box. If I order more than one bottle at a time, I'll cut down on even that.

Read the full article here.

Beth Terry writes about finding alternatives to plastic and tracks her own plastic consumption and plastic waste at www.FakePlasticFish.com. Why Fake Plastic Fish? "Because if we don't solve our plastic problem, they could be the only kind of fish we have left." Please stop by and leave a comment!