There's a plate of homemade offal/On the kitchen window sill

December 10, 2005 2:41 AM

Dick Van Patten Eats Dog Food Presumably because he's old and poor. But not like the neighbor lady in that one episode of "Good Times." Kids like it, too and so do the continental Europeans and the Quebecois.
posted by Mayor Curley (41 comments total)

I don't think I could get my dog to go for Hobo Chili.

Postman Chili though, he'd be onto like a flash.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 2:45 AM on December 10, 2005

"Chinese takeout" for dogs?
posted by matteo at 2:56 AM on December 10, 2005

Ok, I don't get it - what does eating dog food have to do with eating horse meat?
posted by funambulist at 3:37 AM on December 10, 2005

Its like Ramen Noodles. Chicken flavor? Got it. Beef? Sure. But... Oriental flavor?
posted by hal9k at 3:40 AM on December 10, 2005

Description of the last link is a little unfair. Horse meat is good, a bit like a cross between venision and steak. Impressively, I even scored a horseburger a few years back on the slopes in a French ski resort. Declicious: it made American on-piste cuisine taste a bit like, well, dog food.
posted by rhymer at 4:25 AM on December 10, 2005

Hobo chili is a flavor of human food? What?
posted by grapefruitmoon at 5:07 AM on December 10, 2005

We have one of our dogs on the Duck & Potato variety of the line as we try and identify an allergy. The foods are pretty good as far as the ingedients are concerned. My wife (who is a vegetarian) ate a few pieces of the kibble.

I am not sure what the point of the post is though, especially with the chosen tags.
posted by terrapin at 5:17 AM on December 10, 2005

I've had the Oriental flavor ramen, and it doesn't really taste all that much like Orientals.
posted by alumshubby at 5:19 AM on December 10, 2005

Top Five Ingredients in Various Popular Dog Foods.

Using the Mayor's logic, Kentucky Fried Chicken sells dog food.

Oh, and because I'm Quebecois, I love pointing out this interesting tidbit about a local zoo:

The best example of this is the outbreak of bovine tuberculosis in 1993. After two antelopes died, Agriculture Canada placed a massive quarantine on Parc Safari. The details concerning what eventually turned into the massacre of 650 animals become hazy after this point. What is certain is that since it was difficult for Agriculture Canada to establish which animals actually had tuberculosis, about two-thirds of Parc Safari’s residents were shipped to an undisclosed slaughterhouse. On closer inspection of the corpses, however, it was discovered that many of the animals were free of the disease.

What would you do with thousands of pounds of freshly killed exotic animals? If you were a Parc Safari official, you’d sell as much as possible on the wholesale meat market and give the rest to the poor. Twenty-seven carcasses, approximately 10,000 pounds of zebra, miniature horse, pony and donkey meat, were donated to Montreal food banks and a homeless shelter, to be divided up and distributed for Christmas dinners.
From Maisonneuve Magazine
posted by furtive at 5:21 AM on December 10, 2005

I remember heargin that most cat/dog food is made of reprocessed feathers and meat mechanically separated from bones.

I wouldn't be surprised to find mad cow disease in that stuff, unless it's boiled to high temperatures ?
posted by elpapacito at 6:06 AM on December 10, 2005

elpapacito, the reason why people are so scared of mad cow is because prions (the very simple, self-replicating molecules that cause the disease) are not killed by most sterilization processes. They snicker at boiling water. An autoclave won't kill them either.

So 'sterile' surgical instruments wouldn't necessarily be prion-free, meaning that if Creutzfeld-Jacob gets loose in the general population, it could easily spread in hospitals and suchlike until they improve their sterilization. And given that CzJ has a 20-year onset, it might be in the health care system for a LONG TIME before we knew about it.

That, pretty much, is why people are so worried about it. It's the perfect disease to use the health care system against us.
posted by Malor at 6:47 AM on December 10, 2005

eight is enough if you raise them on dog food
posted by pyramid termite at 6:51 AM on December 10, 2005

I gotta admit, in some commercials, the dog food looks better than some restaurant meals I've paid for.
posted by jonmc at 7:18 AM on December 10, 2005

I worked on a ranch that had its old horses butched for the european market. Old Boxer isn't just made into glue now. He gets served on the plates of discerning europeans.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 7:23 AM on December 10, 2005

I remember I once was in a supermarket and found a can of cat food labeled "Horsemeat Cocktail," and asked my mom to buy it. We did. The cat didn't like it.
posted by jonmc at 7:34 AM on December 10, 2005

I remember heargin that most cat/dog food is made of reprocessed feathers

LOW QUALITY dog food is, that's why you should avoid ingredients like the very generic "meat by-products" because the standards for what can be called that are extremely low and do include things like blood-soaked sawdust, beaks and feathers. The better-quality foods (the "super premium" ones) use human-grade identified meats and meat meals, like "fresh whole chicken" or "lamb meal" (which is not to say that what we consider offal can't be good for dogs, but unless it's specifically identified, like "beef hearts" or "lamb lungs", which are fine, it can be all kinds of ick, and can also vary wildly from batch to batch, which can cause your dog problems). The DVP Natural Balance line of foods are great, I've fed it to my dog, and I'm definitely a crazy dog lady who does all kinds of research into what I feed my dog (I think they have too little fat in some of the varieties, but other than that, they're great), I will definitely take a look at this new stuff. Feeding better food to your dog is more cost-effective than feeding crap.
posted by biscotti at 7:38 AM on December 10, 2005

Van Patten is lending his name and likeness to a new dog food formula that claims to be indistinguishable from a home-cooked meal for humans.

Most recipes I have seen for cooking for your dog have no salt-- that would make stew pretty damn tasteless for humans. So if this commercial dog food is "indistinguishable" from human food, then I would guess it has more salt, sugar, and msg then my dog needs.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 7:51 AM on December 10, 2005

I would seriously doubt that, Secret Life of Gravy, the other foods in DVP's line are extremely high quality and healthy (they are on the Whole Dog Journal's list of approved foods, and the WDJ's standards are very high).
posted by biscotti at 8:18 AM on December 10, 2005

Presumably because he's old and poor.

I think this is unfair. The article doesn't suggest this, and it doesn't sound like the ad does either. I saw Van Patten at a screening of Soylent Green a few years ago (he was on a panel for a discussion afterwards), and he looked healthy and happy.
posted by bingo at 8:36 AM on December 10, 2005

[expletive deleted], slaughter of horses for human consumption has been the target of some serious efforts to get it banned. I'd have sworn I saw something that this had passed, but the long-term bill seems to be stalled. Apparently there have been a couple of amendments to other bills that were only valid for a year. I don't think any of them would prohibit the use of horses for dog food, though (and why it's okay to feed horses to Fido but bad to feed them to Jean-Jacques if he wants them is not all that clear).
posted by dilettante at 8:43 AM on December 10, 2005

I ate horsemeat in Switzerland at a pretty nice restaurant. It was unremarkable. But the fact it is grass-fed makes it a shoulder above most cow meat.
posted by stbalbach at 8:54 AM on December 10, 2005

My cat's breath smells like cat food.
posted by brain_drain at 9:03 AM on December 10, 2005

I remember heargin that most cat/dog food is made of reprocessed feathers and meat mechanically separated from bones.

Potted Meat Food Product may contain mechanically separated chicken, mechanically separated pork, partially de-fatted cooked pork fatty tissue, partially de-fatted cooked beef fatty tissue, and some various chemicals. You can get it at your local supermarket next to the pickled pigs' feet and the canned weeners.

I used a can of the stuff as a theft-deterrent when I owned a car. I've heard that you can eat it, too.
posted by carsonb at 9:06 AM on December 10, 2005

I don't get the bad rap for horsemeat. It seems like a meat that would naturally be more cleaner than, say, pork -- compare the living conditions of the average horse to that of the average pig and that seems fairly obvious. You certainly don't see horses digging into a steaming pile of their own feces, for instance.

Much more unappetizing things are sold as perfectly proper human food, like pork tongues (it's a Quebec thing), pork rinds, chicken feet, duck tongues, etc.
posted by clevershark at 9:40 AM on December 10, 2005

Here they have: cow tongue, pig feet, cow intestine ect., I also heard pickled pig lips are popular in luisiana.
posted by IronLizard at 9:47 AM on December 10, 2005

Iggy Pop likes dogfood
posted by hortense at 9:51 AM on December 10, 2005

The pickled sausages I'm so fond of contain beef hearts and beef lips according to the package. Yum.
posted by jonmc at 10:28 AM on December 10, 2005

I've eaten horsemeat. It was delicious. Strange but damn good!

I have a suspicion it was sashimi-style: aka, "raw." I had it in a deli sandwich, after the German shop-owner got a mortified look on her face and told me that I might want to reconsider. It was labeled in German, and I had no idea what it was: it just looked interesting.

Anyway, the taste was sweet, clean, and oh-so-good. Two thumbs up for horsemeat in my books!
posted by five fresh fish at 11:36 AM on December 10, 2005

The central european delicacy of tatar (very lean ground beef and raw egg yolk) should be - in it's most pure form - made with raw ground horse meat.
posted by jedrek at 11:54 AM on December 10, 2005

Oh ok I get the connection now. Well, then, because all sorts of meat ends up as dog food, you could say all meat is dog food, regardless of the cuts.

I don't get the bad rap for horsemeat.

clevershark, I don't think it has much to do with how appetizing/unappetizing or clean/unclean it's thought of, but with the idea that a horse is more of a domesticated animal in a way than a pig or a cow. Because people like horses, and riding horses, it's not thought of as food.

It's not very coherent to have objections to one kind of meat because you like the animal, but that's how it works. Unless you're a vegetarian.

Anyway, the taste was sweet, clean, and oh-so-good.

five fresh fish, the Italians have a version of bresaola that's dry cured horse meat rather than beef. It has a strong taste but is indeed sweeter than other cured meats.
posted by funambulist at 11:59 AM on December 10, 2005

I got yer horsemeat...right here.
posted by horsewithnoname at 12:54 PM on December 10, 2005

A lot of French and Belgian chefs cook their frites in horse fat, which, according to Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten is the best way. [read Jessamyn's review of Steingarten's occasionally amusing book here]
posted by kosem at 1:45 PM on December 10, 2005

Ok, I don't get it - what does eating dog food have to do with eating horse meat?

Precisely what I was thinking. That "European" link said nothing about dog food, as far as I can see.

I have no idea at all why someone should object to eating horse meat more than cow meat. No idea at all. None.
posted by Decani at 7:08 PM on December 10, 2005

I ate horse-meat (smoked) and it was very nice. I also ate dog, and that wasn't bad either. I'd eat human meat too, if other protein was scarce. All these hang-ups people have about what they eat...
And vCJD? It's just like climate change, it takes too long before we'll notice it, so let's just ignore it. Because ignorance is bliss. And overpopulation can be solved.
posted by kika at 7:50 PM on December 10, 2005

Funambulist and Decani: horse meat has historically been used mainly in canned dog food in the U.S. - or so we believe. An attempt to look that up left me in some doubt as to whether it's current practice, but I'm pretty sure horse meat was an ingredient in Alpo when I was a kid.
posted by dilettante at 9:23 PM on December 10, 2005

dilettante, thanks, I'd sort of guessed that from the comments...

kika & decani, I'm not saying it's *stupid* or *absurd* to have objection to eating horse meat, of course I understand that. But no, it's not comparable to cannibalism and no not even to the idea of eating pets like dogs and cats.

Say, aren't cows beautiful animals too? lambs? what about deers? elks?

I'm just saying, when you think about it, if it comes to ethical objections then the only coherent thing is to be a vegetarian. That's all.
posted by funambulist at 5:02 AM on December 11, 2005

OK, between Richard Pryor dying, the Myspace Deaths thing, and me turning in my two weeks' notice last week, the universe can stop f*cking with me aaany time now.

Aaaaany time.
posted by deusdiabolus at 5:14 AM on December 11, 2005

"I used to love Doggy Chow, too!"
posted by Durhey at 10:47 AM on December 12, 2005

if it comes to ethical objections then the only coherent thing is to be a vegetarian. That's all

Yeah, but the pesticides, man. And did you know carrots scream when you uproot them? ;-)
posted by Decani at 5:55 AM on December 14, 2005

I don't get the bad rap for horsemeat.

It's predictably emotional. National Velvet and all that. Same with cats and dogs.

But no, it's not comparable to cannibalism and no not even to the idea of eating pets like dogs and cats.

So why isn't it comparable to eating cats and dogs? Horses and pigs (and chickens) are good pets (if you've got the room for manure).
posted by mrgrimm at 10:11 AM on December 14, 2005

Yeah, but the pesticides, man.

Local organic. Know your farmers.
posted by mrgrimm at 10:12 AM on December 14, 2005