Friday, October 18, 2019

Excellent food for a cat

On Thursday I had a new experience: I went shopping for baby food. Since Morty's escapade in the wilds, he has been off his feed, sometimes going a couple of days without discernibly eating. His vet and our friends suggested we try feeding him pureed turkey baby food. Some cats think it is yummy.

So there I am in a super market and I can't find the stuff. I'm looking for rows of little glass jars. Isn't that what baby food looks like?

Stupid me. Laura Reiley explains that my expectations are absurdly out of date.

There’s been a boom in unhealthy foods and beverages for children six months to 3 years old, packaged for convenience and often promising to make children stronger and smarter.

Dietary supplements said to boost the immune system. Squeezy pouches boasting 3 grams of protein and 3 grams of fiber. Oven-baked stone-ground wheat “wafflez,” superfood puffs and a baffling array of toddler milks purported to aid brain and eye development.

... “Americans are snackers,” said Mary Story, a professor of global health, family medicine and community health at Duke’s Global Health Institute. “And the food industry is always looking for novel ways to market their products and increase demand.”

... For a scientific report for the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, her team found that 29 percent of toddlers’ calories were coming from snacks, most of which were salty or sweetened processed foods, not fruits and vegetables.

It's not hard to be suspicious about what this will do to these kids later in their lives.

Anyway, I didn't identify the bright colored plastic packets as baby food. They look like snacks -- and maybe nutritionally they are.

But I did find, way at the back of the shelf, out of sight, the last jar of the kind of baby food I was looking for. Morty will grudgingly lick up a bit of it; it passes the feline test.

1 comment:

anita said...

I always keep jarred baby food in the house, against the days when one or another of the cats (there are eight, ranging from 17 down to . . . 4, I think) is off her/his feed. Mine don't much like turkey, but they'll almost always eat chicken. And I keep a jar or two of baby food ham—it must smell stronger, or something, but it frequently perks up a lost appetite when nothing else will.
Also, if Morty is a fish-eater, Iams makes a disgusting-smelling sardine mush that my oldest cat absolutely LOVES. No one else will touch it. I have trouble finding it at a grocery store, but Amazon carries it.