What Would Happen If You Ate Your Pet's Food?
This is What Would Happen If, a close examination of mundane hypothetical situations. Each week, we look at something that you could do but probably never would, and take it to its logical endpoint. This week: What would happen if ate your pet's food?
We all love our pets. But do we also love… what we feed our pets? Who among us hasn't eyed a dog biscuit or a fresh bowl of kibble and been at least a little curious? I mean, there's generally nothing in pet food that we humans wouldn't otherwise eat. So what would happen if you decided to share a meal with your furry best friend?
Here's the thing about pet food: It's no accident that you might find it somewhat appetizing. It's marketed to you, the animal who buys the food, not your pet, the animal who eats the food. In fact, as Mary Roach discovered for Popular Science in 2013, there is an eternal struggle within the pet food industry between producing food that is appealing to owners and food that is appealing to pets.
In fact, these companies employ human taste testers, to suss out the nuances when changing the recipe or introducing new products. Pets are, after all, famously non-verbose when it comes to elucidating the flavor profile when a company decides to make its food pellets with more fish meal. So while some might be a little hesitant to dive into a fresh bowl of wet food, it's likely that it'll taste fine. If anything it might taste "off" or slightly bland — dogs happen to have much stronger senses of smell than us — but it'll definitely be edible.
Now, I know what you're thinking. You've seen your dog eat its own puke, or munch on a hot dog that's been hanging out in the grass for a few hours. Doesn't our pets', ah, lax interpretations of sanitary conditions translates to their food? Actually, no. Here in the US, the FDA regulates pet food just the same as people food. In other words, there's nothing in pet food that will make you sick.
That said, it's still food, so it's susceptible to the same food-borne illnesses you can find in our own sustenance. A fair warning: If you're reading this and decide to treat yourself to a bowl of kibble from the bag that's been hanging out exposed underneath your sink for the past few months, well, this is probably not going to end well for you.
Pet food might be marketed like human food and regulated like human food, but nutritionally, it's definitely not like human food. On the whole, pet food tends to be protein-heavy and carbohydrate-lean. Relatively speaking, dogs and cats are small and humans are big. Humans just require more energy to run, and thus we need more carbs. Pets, not so much. In fact, cats can't even taste sugar.
What this means is that if you decide to simplify your grocery shopping and go on an all-pet-food diet, you're just not going to get the carbs, vitamins and minerals you need. Writer Anne Kadet ate nothing but pet food for six days, and by the end of it she felt fine, but also had extremely low blood sugar. So you can totally do it, just expect to eventually develop some chronic nutritional deficiency. (Dogs, for example, just produce their own vitamin C)
As much as popular culture loves to denigrate pet food as below human cuisine, the reality is if you ate it, it'd probably be fine. Unlike just about everything else we've tackled here on What Would Happen If, you wouldn't die. Sure, it's not ideal, but then again, there's plenty of human food that's also bad for you.
