“I’m going to let you in on a little secret, I’m the crazy one.” Usually after a glass (bottle) of wine I find myself uttering that sentence to people I’m friendly with but not yet friends. The more people get to know me they realize I’m more “solar panels on the roof” than “bodies in the fridge” crazy. Although I have come across a few people in my life who have made me wonder how many Tupperware containers it would take to make them disappear.
I think back to the classic nursery rhyme…”Make new friends, but eat the old…”, well that’s all I can remember from it but my point is I have a special place in my heart for my oldest friends. I cherish them the most and treat them well, because if/when the time comes, it clearly takes more than one person to bury a body.
Goodness Gracious Ellen, lots of talk about bodies and eating. Well, I just happened to catch a peek of the hot oily bo-hunk (let’s call him husband) getting out of the shower (I’m guessing he’s about a 25 MTC…Medium Tupperware Containers), but more to the point I’ve got food on my mind and I want to get you thinking about BARF. And with that, this article is going to the dogs.
I’m still very close with a friend from childhood, she’s the Statler to my Waldorf for you Muppet fans. Friends NEVER embarrass friends, so I’m not going to mention her by name. She came to me in confidence with questions about dog food and I promised her I wouldn’t use her name.
So Allison and I get together a few days a week and when we can’t we will usually sit on the phone for an hour or so. It usually goes like this…I tell her about a new eco-friendly experiment I’m trying and she sits on speakerphone making me listen to her crushing Styrofoam containers and aluminum cans into the garbage while all the lights and TV’s in her house are on. She’s got a soft spot for my husband and I think she’s his secret steak connection. “Ellen, if God didn’t intend for us to eat animals they wouldn’t taste so good”. This is her totally making fun of me in a sweet, good natured loving way. If she ever got really proper and polite to me then I would know I did something wrong. Oh, I’m no shrinking violet either, I give it right back to her and threaten to empty her garbage bags on her front lawn and take out all the recyclables and speed off into the night with them. Two good buddies, doing the back and forth thing, hilarity ensues. She’s the first one to send me vegetarian recipes and will on occasion save the empty wine bottles we go through for me to recycle…Al is my pal. We live clean in different ways but thankfully she’s as dirty as I am.
So anywho…a few years ago I met a holistic pet chef (for those of you who need a translation that’s a woman I hired to come to my house and teach me how to feed my dogs a “species appropriate diet” or to what most people call real, human grade food and not pet food) and I announced to Allison, “I’m never feeding my two furry babies dog food again, I’m going to cook for them. We’re going BARF up in this mutha!”. She laughed probably at my lack of street cred and then stopped “Oh you’re serious?” And then the laughing picked right back up. She thought I’d lost my mind, or at least needed a job outside the home to keep me busy and to stop researching things like this when my kids were asleep and at school.
Now we fast forward to recent events in the news – Purina is facing a class action lawsuit over alleged deaths due to Beneful. So I happened to be on the phone with Allison when I read about it (we were both drinking wine, so technically that’s “social drinking” regardless of being alone in our respective houses wearing pajamas). She starts freaking because she feeds both her dogs this brand and since there have been so many dog food recalls she had no idea which brand was even safe anymore. “Ugh, OK El, tell me about your Holy Pet Chef thing”. At first I thought this was some kind of Batman joke “HOLY PET CHEF BATMAN!” but I then realized just how hard it must be for her to ask about my methods which she got so much pleasure out of mocking. I was proud of her for reaching out and wanted to be sensitive and non-judgemental. I laughed and laughed and then laughed some more (point, Ellen). Once an appropriate amount of time went by I went to work. I talked her though what I do for my dogs, the types of food, the quantities, all the nitty gritty of my dog-food day. I even gave her a copy of my holistic pet chef’s book where she explains everything and gives recipes. Now thanks to Facebook I’m waking up every morning to pics of her dogs eating their new food and Allison is thrilled.
As I’ve talked about before, my husband loves to poke fun at my whole green lifestyle. On more than one occasion he’s threatened to buy me shirts with sayings like “Dirty Hoe”, “I don’t eat anything that poops”, “Keep calm and put nuts in your mouth”, “Vagitarian”, “Kale makes me horny”. Oh you have NO idea… I’ve got stacks of shirts he’s acquired over the years that I can’t even wear out of the house…“Jesus Saves, But Jews Invest”, “Eatin aint cheatin” and of course my mom’s favorite “Pussy lickers, America’s favorite Kitty Cat Lollipops”.
So now I’m picturing him shopping for a dog sweater that says “Mommy makes us eat BARF”. B.A.R.F. which stands for Biologically Appropriate Raw Food, essentially means feeding your dogs as if they still lived as predators in the wild. 60-80% protein and 20-40% fruits and vegetables. It’s super easy to prepare and quicker than you would think. I watched my husband mix up a raw egg, 1 cup of beef, 1 stalk of celery, 1 carrot, 1 cup of mixed veggies and 2 tablespoons of yogurt into a dog bowl. Start to finish, the dog was eating after about 4 minutes of prep.
I have found that switching my dogs to a species appropriate diet was cheaper than the dog food I was buying, healthier for them and saved me a ton of money in vet bills (my dogs are never sick). Add in the bonus of this being VERY, VERY green because I was feeding them food that was probably going to go to waste in my house. Lots of the produce I give them is the parts of the produce we don’t eat like the tops of the celery stalks, shavings of the carrots I peeled, apples or bananas my daughters deem to “mushy” or God forbid “brownish”…you get the idea. My dogs are walking, barking composters. They eat twice a day and apparently they love it. No more “dog food” in my house, I could never shake the image of rabbit pellets anyways.
So I come down the stairs the other morning in my “I pooped today” t-shirt and there’s husband in his faded “masturbation is not a crime” t-shirt making dog food. This time it’s sardines, bananas, spinach and applesauce. “You’re getting good at that, you should make a bowl for yourself” I teased him.
“Keep it up” he said with a smile. He leaned over, kissed me on the forehead and whispered “I’m guessing you’re about a 19 MTC”.
