By Stephanie Abbajay

My two-year old daughter sometimes has bad breath. It isn’t for lack of dental hygiene, it’s because she eats cat food.

She just loves it, and we are horrified. Where’s Willa? Someone will say and we will find her outside, hiding, crisscross applesauce under the patio table, with the bowl of cat foot in her lap, crunching away. The cats just sit there and watch her.
Kiss me, Mommy! She’ll say. No way, Jose. Is there anything worse than a cat food kiss? A dry cat food kiss at that.

I am concerned about this habit of hers. And it’s not like we encourage it. In point of fact we have done everything to discourage it. We feed the cats just twice a day and empty their bowl between feedings. But, there are times when we are all running around busy and we will find her, hiding, Cat Chow in hand.

We’ve tried moving the cat food and feeding spot, but then we forget to feed the cats or they can’t find the bowl. But Willa always finds it, even if our intrepid felines can’t.

So, if Willa toddles by the bowl and grabs a handful, is there really any harm? What’s the worst that could happen? Is it really so bad?

I went on the Internet for answers. As everyone knows by now, if you want answers to a weird question, the Internet is both your best and worse source. Yes, you access such reputable sites as the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, but the Web is also riddled with all manner of freaks and degenerates blogging away, peddling their bizarre theories and admonitions.

The serious sites all indicated that little harm would come of Willa’s peculiar crunching, though, given the nutritional content of and ingredients in cat food, it was not advisable as a long-term source of food. Ingredient-wise, cat food is disgusting, even the expensive brands. According to the Animal Protection Institute, “cat food contains slaughterhouse offal, grains unfit for human consumption and waste and by-products, including lungs, udders, bones, blood, intestines, esophagi and possibly diseased and cancerous parts of animals.”

Not good. But there was more food for thought, as it were. Given how cheap cat food is, how good could it be? “It would be impossible for a company that sells a generic brand of dog food at $9.95 for a 40-lb. bag to use quality protein and grain in its food. The cost of purchasing quality ingredients would be much higher than the selling price,” the API said.

So, gross stuff, to be sure.

Along the way to finding this information I discovered a whole community of cat food eaters. I found that lots of pregnant women crave cat food. Something about the high salt and the grease (I craved many things when I was pregnant, but I can assure you that cat food wasn’t one of them). Crazy people, too, seem to crave it. The same people who eat dirt and rocks and twigs often eat dry cat and dog food and doggie treats. If you’ve seen the YouTube video of the woman who pushes her cat away to get at his food, you’ll see the very definition of crazy.

Fortunately, since summer is over, Willa’s consumption has dropped precipitously, and we now feed the cats primarily when we aren’t around, so I think we are out of the woods. But now that I know so much about cat food and the people who eat it, I worry about what’s next for Willa. Could twigs be far behind?

Stephanie Abbajay is a writer living in Dow.