By Jan Zita Grover

Contemporary dog feeding practices in North America are more a function of humans’ shift to cities and commodity farming than dogs’ needs. Since roughly the mid-19th century, people have cast about for convenient sources of food for their companion animals. These clearly don’t include game, or rodents, or even scraps from humans’ meals: increasingly, people don’t produce significant amounts of scraps, and most don’t like buying perishable meat scraps for their pets. Moreover, cleaning up after dogs is something that many people dislike doing. The result is the American pet food industry.

According to the American Pet Products Association (APPA), pet food is the lion’s share of pet retail, which is itself the eighth-largest retail business in the United States. It is even larger than the movie or music businesses, note nutritionists Marion Nestle and Malden C. Nesheim in their recent book Feed Your Pet Right (Free Press, 2010).

Central to this $17.4 billion (2009) pet-food business is commodity farming and the super-high protein diets of contemporary dogs. Commodity farming has made grains, particularly corn, very inexpensive for dog food manufacturers. That’s why many supermarket-grade foods list corn as the first or second ingredient by weight (often the first is water). High-protein ingredients—socalled “meat meal” and “meat by-products”—include rendered animal skin and flesh and rendered animal fats, “chicken meal” consisting of ground chicken from large battery operations, and wheat gluten.

Most dry dog foods boast of their high protein content: amounts between 22–24 percent are not uncommon. Dogs do not need such a high protein content in their food. As far back as 1974, the National Research Council’s Committee on Animal Nutrition commented on the possible harmful effects of high-protein diets on dogs (including hip problems in fast-growing, large breeds), but pressures from the pet food industry kept its remarks from becoming public. Nestle and Nesheim have resurrected some of that research in Feed Your Pet Right, including this one:

“Based on the accumulated professional experience of some of its members . . . the Subcommittee, as well as the Committee on Animal Nutrition, continues to share a general belief that prolonged intake of high-protein diets can be harmful to dogs.”

High-protein foods are a marketing ploy: high-protein foods produce smaller, firmer, more concentrated droppings, and this is what market research has told the pet food industry that customers are looking for. (The exceptions to high protein need are working dogs like herding and sledding dogs—if they’re actually doing work.)

As the huge 2007 recall of 5,000 different wet and canned pets’ food demonstrated, some manufacturers have attempted to boost the protein content of their low-value foods by adding wheat gluten. To keep the cost as low as possible, this ingredient is imported from Chinese manufacturers, some of whom added melamine to the gluten sent in 2007 to Menu Foods, the Canadian co-packer that produced pet foods for so many North American brands. (Nestle’s Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, 2008, traced the factors leading to this pet-food crisis and led to this second book on the pet-food industry.)

Because there is little oversight of the pet-food industry—the federal Food and Drug Administration was unable to demand recalls of the pet foods in 2007 that had poisoned and killed hundreds of dogs and cats. Recalls remain voluntary. Animal and human health, as Nestle and Nesheim emphasize, cannot be separated into pet and human. “We only have one food supply, and it must be safe for all eaters. A food-safety system that protects pets should also protect people, and vice versa,” she said.

Until that protection becomes available, your only guarantee that your dogs are being fed safely is to feed them yourself. Your dogs can thrive on a vegetable-and-grain diet, but they love meat and have the gut to digest it, raw as well as cooked, and if your dog is very active, he or she will need some.

Especially when you begin to start cooking for your dog, include some meat. A big soup bone is an excellent way to flavor their food. Buying pull-date meat from a trusted source is another excellent way to include meat at a low cost. If you have meat or fish scraps from your own meals, it is possible to add those to your dogs’ meals.

There are several advantages to cooking for your dogs beyond the obvious one of knowing what is going into their food and ensuring that it is healthful. Some of the other benefits may include the dog’s thirst from dehydration is likely to decrease, and her or his coat may become softer and shinier. Best of all, you are decreasing the likelihood of your dog developing allergies or continuing to be allergic. Commercial diets are by definition repetitive, and repetitive diets are an excellent prescription for developing or sustaining allergies. By feeding your dog a varied, fresh diet, you are decreasing the likelihood of allergies.

If you choose to experiment with the BARF diet (raw meat and bones), make sure that you are feeding your dogs only hormone- and antibiotic-free meats and bones—in other words, organic ones.

It is possible to feed your dog well on commercial foods, and local retailers sell some good ones. The Whole Dog Journal publishes an annual assessment of commercial dog foods for consumer review.

Jan Zita Grover teaches cooking and spinning classes at Mississippi Market in Saint Paul. One of her most popular classes is Cooking for Your Dog.