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. 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 don’t. Burritos exist.
Damn you. Another new white t-shirt with coffee and snot stains. Take my upvote.
need a variety of food to survive?
It’s not true.
Boredom feels terrible while it lasts, but it doesn’t kill you. In the end, humans usually start to get creative after boredom.
Oh, and yes, some food industry has found out things and told you things… yes, they were creative :-)
What about the British? They were starving, and they didn’t get creative. They just kept eating brown goo for centuries.
I had heard that British cuisine was much more robust before WW1.
Also, if brown goo is meat-flavored, I’d be down for it.
It is brown goo flavored, and you will eat it until you are completely brainwashed into liking it.
I suppose that’s why we added mild pain to our diet. Mix things up a bit.
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.
How can I survive off of that, if they’re out of stock for half the year? ;-;
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.
Buy double in the half year when it is available
Usually can’t afford that much upfront, wish I could tho.
If you think about it, for the past hundreds of thousands of years we’ve been regionally locked in our areas so variety is a loose term.
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’.
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 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.
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.
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.
They have.
There are powdered meals that are supposed to offer balanced nutrition. I’ve heard of people living off Soylent, Huel, etc. I don’t think it’s good long-term, and the lack of chewing could cause problems. But it is feasible in principle.
I ate only soylent for a long time, and the lack of chewing did cause me some issues: first was bad oral hygiene. I brush and floss twice a day (after breakfast and before bed), yet I still got a cavity. Chewing normal food also cleans off plaques on your teeth, so when you’re not chewing anything those plaques just sit there fucking your shit up. Second (*and this is just my conjecture) chewing causes activity in a certain part of the brain to spike, so if you’re not chewing anything that part atrophies and causes depression. I forget where I read the chewing part though. So, along with the cavity, I also felt generally sad about everything. I would still definitely have it for lunch everyday because the nutrients are there, but yeah, unfortunately you have to chew stuff. I thought about just chewing gum, but those are all chock-full of microplastics so…
lack of chewing
this is also a solved issue with a mature industry
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.
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.
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.
Kongbap says nah, it’s all you need to survive.
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
I have a low burnout rate with food, and there are probably meals that I could just keep eating repeatedly. Note that these are multi-ingredient foods so could theoretically offer balanced nutrition and be flavored to a preferred taste.
I don’t do so for several reasons: cost, availability, convenience, sharing meals with others who have different food preferences, and simply because I still prefer variety.
Not sure that’s a universal thing with cats. Unless she’s really hungry, the current feline resident of my household most definitely will turn her nose up at a dish if it’s the same as she was fed in the last meal.
How is it that I find everything cute when a cat does it?
