Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Cat Food

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedy podcasters/writers David Christopher Bell and Tom Reimann (Gamefully Unemployed) for a look at why cat food is secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

Hey folks, this is episode number 46 of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Four! Six! And if you've heard any of the past few episodes, you know I want to give you digital art to celebrate episode 50. Five-zero. I'm running a membership drive toward that goal and toward other goals, too. I'm excited to say all of those membership drive goals are extremely reachable.

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and then backed them, we would blow out all of them. We would be completely done and then some by a wide margin. And that's why I think this is a great problem. I think it's pretty easy for us to get to 10% and to get there. I know some of you just don't have the means to support this podcast right now. And I totally understand that. And I'm rooting for you. I'm also pretty confident more than 10% of you do have the means to support it. So if you're able

to come through, if you're able to back SifPod, this drive would be over. A bunch of immediate benefits would come your way. A bunch of future benefits would come your way. And this podcast can keep on airing, keep on being a thing. Again, that's SifPod.fun to back the show, to be part of that 10%. Thank you for hearing me out on that. And hey, here's a free podcast for you. Cat food, known for being dry, famous for being wet. Also, nobody thinks much about it. So let's have some fun. Let's find out why cat food is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is.

My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone. Two amazing guests return this week. David Christopher Bell and Tom Ryman are comedy makers, podcasters, live streamers, and more. They make that stuff under the shared name Gamefully Unemployed. Also, Tom is an associate editor at the great entertainment website Collider.com. Dave is a writer of films and writer of scripts for the fantastic Some More News YouTube channel. These guys are multi-talented, busy, awesome, and I'm so glad they're back. Also, I have gathered all of our zip codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that I recorded this

on the traditional land of the Catawba, Eno, and Chicory peoples. Acknowledge Dave and Tom each recorded this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech and Chumash peoples. And acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode. And today's episode is about cat food. You've heard of cat food. You've probably purchased

cat food if you have a cat. Also, on this show, you will hear me talk about both of my cats, who I think about kind of all the time. Really, really the cats of me and my fiance. We co-own them. One of them is a long-haired adult male cat. His name is Watson. And then we have a short-haired female kitten. Her name is Birdie. She's approaching 10 months old, so leaving the kitten stage soon. But Watson the boy cat, Birdie the younger girl cat are cats. And I scoop food for them and dump food for them kind of constantly. And I, you know,

I realized going into this that other than asking the vet if the brands were okay and figuring out amounts, I never really thought about what cat food is or the history of it or the science of it or all the things that we do on this show. I was thrilled to discover it. Let's let you discover it too. Please sit back or keep meowing to me, even though it is not yet dinner time. Admittedly, I have not yet taught you to read a clock, but I feel like I can't. So that's the situation. I'm sorry. Anyway, you'll get your food soon. Here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with David Christopher Bell and Tom Ryman. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Yeah, you bleeped swears and I'll try to limit my swears, but I am going to be saying the word sh**ty a lot.

Cool. Because it's probably the most reflexive way I describe a cat's face. Cool. And expression. Sh**ty is really the only adjective you can use to describe cats. Yeah, you click on any of these pictures, and that's a sh**ty little face. And it's like, oh, that's a sh**ty little cat. Yeah.

They're sh**ty little cat faces yeah it's just gonna happen do you guys want to just hop into it and yes i say it's i feel like we're in it i feel like we're in it yes i feel like it's begun yeah maybe it's begun david bell tom ryman it's so good to have you here. I always start by asking people their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. How do you feel about cat food? I'll take this one first, Dave, so you can be quiet. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel pretty good about cat food in general.

Look, I'm glad that it's out there. I'm glad that we put our heads together and made a food that's just for cats. I'm glad that we did that. I'm going to put our heads together and made a food that's just for cats. I'm glad that we did that. I'm going to push back here. I am against cat food. I own a cat. Really? I mean, all right.

I'm glad the cat's alive. Don't get me wrong. But her cat food is disgusting. She only likes the disgusting stuff. she only likes the disgusting stuff most of her cat food can be best described as like the slosh that you'd find on the bottom of a dumpster like especially outside of like a seafood restaurant like it's always just the most disgusting uh wet waste mush yeah she doesn't like the pate she doesn't like she likes the like real gross weird she's also allergic to grains so we try the hypoallergenic and a lot of that is disgusting so well you also

have to factor in that you have an especially useless cat yeah that's true i grew up with like five different cats and we fed them all kinds of cat food. You know, everything from just like the straight dry stuff, you know, which is fine. It's just fine. I used to eat that when I was a little kid because why not? It's there on the table. Whoa. My dad convinced me to eat some as a kid. Yeah.

And then, yeah, you have like the gross canned stuff that's like anywhere between 40 and 70 percent liquid. Right. Yeah. Like the gravy-h wet stuff yeah yeah that stuff's sloppy and it has like petroleum jelly in it for some reason or at least it seems like it helps with hairballs really all all pet food is like uniquely disgusting but i'm glad i'm i'm a glad mario over here uh i'm glad that it exists i'm glad I'm I'm I'm a glad Mario over here. I'm glad that it exists. I'm glad we have cats.

Mama Mia. Tom, get out of that pipe. Anyway, feeding cats. Woo hoo. I want to you're both wonderful. I want to double back for a second. You both mentioned that you tried cat food and ate it as children is that right yeah yeah yeah dom do you want to start or i could start i don't there's not really much

of a story there i think if a lot of people particularly anybody who grew up in a house full of pets have probably tried pet food at least like the dry kibble because at some point particularly when you're a curious toddler or literally toddler like a curious like seven eight year old with no concept of your own mortality or like poison control so you'll just put things into your mouth um and you're like you want to see what you want to see what the dog has been eating you know and and also i don't mean to say you guys are weird or something because i with you have encouragement from my my now fiance brenda i i tried it like a couple days ago in the run-up to this i was like okay what's going on and i tried a little bit of it's costco brand maintenance cat it's the dry food our our cat watson likes a

lot birdie has a kitten kind but uh it was pretty foul i didn't like it it's like old meaty cereal yes the dry food in a bad way right it tastes like bitter cereal I didn't like it. It's like old meaty cereal. Yes. The dry food. In a bad way. Right. It tastes like bitter cereal. Yeah, it tastes like bitter cereal. I just want to share, it was, for me, it was because my mom worked nights and my dad would watch us, and he ran out of things to do with us.

So he would do blind taste tests, and he'd usually feed us condiments or something like that, but he fed me cat food and then i spent like a week eating it because it was kind of delicious at the time yeah maybe a child's palate likes it better that's curious maybe it was a certain dry food it didn't taste like much it tasted pretty bland i remember yeah but i like that brenda i feel like brenda just wanted you to eat cat food and like really pushed for that yeah she's just been waiting this this whole time for

for a reason to convince you to do oh and she tried it too she gave moral support and tasting support there yeah yeah yeah do you eat everything you do a podcast about so far the and i guess this is insulting to the hostess people this is the second thing i've tried because i was going to tape about it and the first was twinkies i had just never happened to have twinkies we i my my dad really liked all the like chocolatey hostess so we always had ho-hos and stuff i never had a twinkie tried it and i think i got an expired one it was weird huh yeah that's uh you should try it again it's it's impossible to say like it might just you're where you you eat the twinkie and you're like i think it might have been expired it's i i don't know whether or not that you just experienced

how a twinkie is supposed to taste yeah you might have experienced the freshest of Twinkies. Right. No, I think they just, the way Twinkies worked is they made like a billion of them in the 30s, and we've just been coasting on that. We just changed, we update the wrapper every couple of, every generation or two. It's just a huge barrel. It's a Twinkie-shaped barrel, actually. Yeah.

It looks like Twinkie the Kid. Yeah. There should be a law where they have to print the president at the time or the World Series winner at the time. Or it's like the American flag and you're like, 48 stars, that's an old one. Wow. Yeah, it's an old Twinkie. Something to tell you.

He's like flipping a buffalo nickel or something you're like oh this is yeah this is a piece of history this twinkie i've already i've already eaten it i don't know but and uh so now okay all three of us have eaten cat food and that's great and and we all not wet neither of us none of us have eaten wet cat food. I've not eaten wet cat... No, that's a bridge too far for this old bear. Yeah. I haven't had the wet either. I have thought about which wet cat food I would eat if I needed to, but I've never actually eaten.

Because I think there's one brand that puts like little wedges of cheese, like little bits of cheese in it. And I was like, of all the cat foods, that looks the most delicious in that it looks the most edible. It's still not good. Cheese. Yeah, little nubs of cheese. This is some Wisconsin brand, isn't it? It's good.

Or I have hypoallergenic cat food that the cat won't eat, and it's duck. And she won't eat it. It's freaking duck. I figure if like an earthquake happens and I'm buried under my apartment, I'm going to be snacking on that duck. You can eat this jellied duck meat. Yeah, exactly. That's like also injected with bone meal and like tuna eyes and weird. Have you read the ingredients on pet food? It is madness.

No, yeah, no, I have not. Uh, again for this tape, again. Yeah.

Wow. It's a, it's real dystopian when you read some of the lists of ingredients on the back of it. It's like, Oh, this is what they were feeding the people in the back of the train and snowpiercer oh yeah it's some real soylent green business there yeah right it is it is older previous pets yeah i mean some of the some of the animals listed in the

ingredients could conceivably be kept as pets okay yeah one of the listed ingredients is just horse fears horse yeah horse terror fear oh this is good this is like 28 it's the fear of horse yeah it's it's it's got it's like it's like one third of your daily value of horse terror yeah what a what a freaky food pyramid that would be just a screaming horse on top of it great terrified horse at the top oh that's the pyramid we should have on our money too yeah i want a screaming horse pyramid on the back just a screaming horse yeah less unsettling about that eye i guess yeah yeah yeah it would just be one bulging horrifiedified horse eye. Yeah. Oh, man.

Looking over its shoulder. Well, also, horses lead so directly into a lot of this show. I think we can get into the first fascinating thing about the topic. Our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And that is in a segment called, Oh, when the stats, oh, when the when the stats oh when the stats go marching in how sif pod wants to share those numbers oh when the stats go marching in that was beautiful beautiful i'm glad we were all here for that thank you yeah that's a that's a solid one

gather the cats they need to hear this I'm writing this down on my calendars that I know the exact date and time bring my kids here let them see it this is the day

that the stats came marching in. And that name was submitted by Vivek Radhakrishnan. Thank you, buddy. And we have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky as possible. Submit to SifPod on Twitter or to SifPod at gmail.com. And there's not a ton of numbers.

I mostly just want to establish the size and scale of cat ownership. It's just amazing that there's so much cat food in the world to sustain this oh yeah the the first number here is the approximate amount of u.s households that have a cat that is 42.7 percent dang 42.7 percent of u.s homes have a pet cat of some kind wow yeah they're like a parasite when you think about it like they don't do much and they're all they're just here living off of us uh yeah they're just fluffy they're just a fluffy parasite yeah yeah yeah yeah a fluffy beloved parasite yeah totally yeah exactly yeah no i love my little parasite yeah She's looking at me right now. I do think everybody should see their cat hairless at some point, just so you know exactly what this creature is.

Yeah, what it's hiding. There's an odd thing we did one time with Watson, because he's a long-haired cat. We just, I don't know what to call it. It's not combing, but we pushed his hair back. We were like, how much cat is under here? Much smaller cat than I anticipated. It was mostly fur and then a little, a little guy in there, you know? Yeah. They're like little spiders in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just hiding and all that fur. Linda and that cat ownership. That's, that's one of the main ways Americans have pets. It's also,

it's an approximate number. It's from an industry survey by a group called the American Pet Products Association. The one more common pet is a dog. 63.4% of households have a dog. And 67 have something. Just any kind of pet, including dogs, including cats. Okay. I was also able to find similar numbers for Canada.

There was an industry group there called the Canadian Animal Health Institute. They did a 2020 survey and found that 58% of Canadian households have a dog or a cat or both. So a majority have a dog or a cat, and that's not too far behind the U.S. there. Yeah. I feel like you're gonna find that worldwide i'm trying to think of what maniac country like yeah isn't loving pets but like i i feel like that's everywhere we we we love yeah little animals right we see animals and we're like i want to be their friend yeah or i want i want them to work for us uh Because they'll work for, like, oats. Like, it's a good relationship.

Yeah, and in Kat's case, mice. Like, yeah, they'll do it. Mice, yeah. Like, I don't know if you'll discuss this, but I heard that, like, we clearly messed up dogs. Or wolves. Kat's, I always heard, like, didn't really change. Like, to be domesticated by us. Because we just sort of let them do their thing. And it's weird that we did that, but we do.

We're just like, yeah, you can stay here. We'll get way into it a little later. But yeah, the experts seem to think that of those things, we didn't really train cats to hunt vermin. They were just already doing that. And then we formed an agreement with them, basically. basically yeah yeah yeah we just put them inside our homes yeah it was like you know what you've been doing just do that in here and they're like got it i think they're adorable because it's like you literally take like any other predator and shrink it down and that's funny right like if you had a small bear or a small shark and you give them the same sensibilities that's all a cat is you just took a tiger made it small

and it can't do anything about it it still has the sensibilities of a tiger where it's like i just want to like murder but it's like oh but you're tiny so you can't you can't kill me so i'm going to pick you up and i'm going to put this clothing on you. And there's nothing you can do about it. That reminds me of a weird wrinkle to my relationship with house cats, which is that I didn't have them growing up. And then before I owned house cats, I was a zoo tour guide. And so when we first got cats, I kept being like oh he's doing such a lion thing and other

people were like what are you talking about and i was like oh i'm more familiar with lions i guess that's just my thing but you started with lions yeah but it reminds me of this lion i know this lion i'm like personally acquainted with yeah that's a bigger name drop honestly than saying like i bumped into david schwimmer This lion I'm personally acquainted with. Right. That's a bigger name drop, honestly, than saying I bumped into David Schwimmer. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know this lion. His name is Chester.

Yeah. And the lion knows you. If you guys see each other, the lion's like, hey, what's up? Yeah. That is pretty awesome. Yeah. You're in a precarious situation in the wilds or something and you see a lion coming up and the group is like really tense like oh no it's a lion and you're like no never mind i know yeah squinting in the

horizon like no guys it's all right we're gonna be okay it's chester it's chester i think we're gonna be all right i know this lion is that chester i know this lion i mean if you ever watched the the christian the lion video that happens in that because it's about the guy who raised a lion led it out into the wild i mean this is just like a viral video so who knows what darkness is behind it but from the viral video uh and then he sees it in the wild and it hugs him it like jumps up it basically like love tackles him which there's got to be a moment where that lion's coming at you where you're like god i hope he recognizes this is gonna go in one of two extreme directions but then the wild thing is he introduces him to

other lions just like hey this is like my friend and the lions walk up and he could pet those too and it's like this is weird you're like have an in with these lions now yeah he's like no he's cool i vouch for him he's cool yeah they're like are you sure because he's just meat like you're just he's one of them pink things apparently chester knows him i don't know i don't know oh great he's he's coming over here he's coming over here god dang it all right chester's always bringing his pink friends, man. Yeah, bringing his stupid pink friends by. I don't know what to do with this.

With the worldwide nature of the house cats, the other quick number here is, again, these are like loose industry surveys, but they think there's about 92.4 million american cats so that's more than one per four people damn it's a lot of cats another industry group called the european pet food federation says that europe and russia put together have 102.7 million cats and more cats than any other pet type wow that's too many cats'll say it. I'll be the one who says it. All right, yeah. It's a lot of cats. There's a lot of cats. It's too many.

That's too many cats. And we'll also, in the bonus, we'll hit some other countries. But the next number here is $30 billion U.S., billion with a B. And this is a 2017 estimate of annual spending on american pet food so not just cats but pet food 30 billion dollars okay yeah yeah that does that doesn't surprise me like pet pet owner pet ownership is an extremely lucrative industry to get into any kind of like pet products yeah i would say roughly 10 billion of that is is food that is sniffed once by a cat and ignored. That is a conservative estimate.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So 2017, they estimated $30 billion of U.S. spending on pet food. In 2009, which is less than 10 years earlier, they only estimated $18 billion of pet food spending. So in less than 10 years, it jumped from $18 billion to $30 billion. And according to The Economist, they have a magazine called 1843. They say that that's mainly explained by people buying more expensive food. Like the pet population went up a little bit, but it's mainly we started spending more money on the food for our pets

and probably still are doing that. Here's the thing. This is the reason why I have a lot of variety for my cat, or at least this is my thought process of it. As we mentioned the fact that dogs, you put down anything and they're like, oh boy, I love you. Thank you so much this is amazing yeah like when you think of them as guests or sorry when you think of them as prisoners because like my cat she can't leave she's can't she doesn't i mean if she left she would have uh an amazing final few hours of her life

but like you know i mean mean is they're they're prisoners we keep them and it's for their own good yeah but it's like she doesn't get to go to the grocery store so i'm like what do you want do you want this do you want that like i'll get you a variety because this is like your life and like i don't know i don't want to eat the same thing every day i don't want to be in some dystopian household where I'm eating like a puck of meal every day. So I want her to have variety. Yeah, that's fair. I was just going to say, I don't think if you could take her to the store with you, I don't think anything would improve.

No, I have before, actually. And it didn't go well. Right. Wait. Like she was in a little backpack or something? She was like. Sort wait like she was in a little backpack or something she was like sort of i was in i was leaving the first time i came to los angeles i was moving back to massachusetts i had to drive and for like maybe like a day i was technically homeless not really you know i mean i was just getting ready for my trip and so i had her in a little cardboard case

and i had to go get some stuff at the so i had her in a little cardboard case and i had to go get some stuff at the grocery store and it was great because the case didn't look like it would have a cat in it so you'd be like standing in line and you'd hear like and they'd like turn around and look at me and i'd really like every now and then her paw would like slowly reach out and grab a stranger like clawed a stranger who would turn around she was a real disruptive animal in this little cardboard box i'm gonna she didn't help you select the food though it's my i tried well i put it put her in front of it but yeah you're right she did not help me select for her she doesn't have much input to give well she can't speak english and that's a

big problem she also can't read so yeah also all you can really do is just buy it and put it in front of her and see whether or not she eats and see if she'll eat it yeah it's trial and error it would be so much easier if they could speak i feel like also there it used to be when you look at older movies and tv shows the idea of like the extremely pampered pet used to be something that we jeered at yeah like we put it in we put it into a movie or a tv show as a shorthand for a character we weren't supposed to like like somebody that was just like really doting over a pet you know what i'm talking about yeah many disney villains yeah sure many many disney villains uh the wretched lady from gremlins like there's it's it's it was

a thing for a while like several decades of film and television yeah and then like over the past like 10 or 15 years it's become more normal sort of like with like the the rise of stuff like we write dogs and you know like doggos and that sort of that whole attitude i think the internet helped yeah yeah yeah the internet sort of helped make being extremely doting on your pet way more normalized even though to me it's still like deranged behavior i think the final factor i think the final factor though is our generation and the likeliness of us having enough money to have kids yes yeah it's a lot of just people like, what am I going to do?

Have a kid? No, I'm going to put, I'm going to try to strap these bat wings onto my cat and take pictures because I'm putting in, you know, like I have energy. I have like,

I think there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, I have like some of the energy that you could put into having a kid, but I got this cat. So I'm going gonna just dress it up and like make a youtube channel i don't know i think that's a whole thing yeah even even i feel like houseplant culture it's also partly that it's like oh i can i can take care of these that's cool yeah yeah exactly yeah i think there's an element of that with with anything any living thing that

you have to keep and take care of for sure i just think there's an influx in like a generation who's just like i don't know about kids like the climate change and the monies and all that and maybe i'll just have this cat and i'll put it in a baby stroller you know off of that we are going to a short break, followed by a whole new takeaway. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because yes, listening is mandatory.

The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. podcasts thank you and remember no running in the halls i think we can get into the first of three takeaways for the show and this is a large one there's a lot to it takeaway number one based on my research there have been three general styles of cat food three general ways people have like done the practice of cat food. Three general ways people have, like, done the practice of cat food. Can I guess? Yeah, like Chunky, Rocky Road, and...

Yeah. And Freaky Gravy, yeah. Freaky Gravy, yeah. Fruity Yummy Mommy? I don't know. Yeah, it's a... And this is a, like, entire history of civilization thing.

Ah. The three general styles, we'll just give them to people now. The first one is cats feeding themselves as freelance farm laborers, like catching vermin. Oh, right. And then the second version is cats being fed leftover meat, in particular industrial horse meat. That was a whole thing we came up with. particular industrial horse meat that was a whole thing we came up with and then the the third version is cats being fed a specific version of human food more or less okay that's kind of the three ways we've done it over time and those are those are sequential because that that kind of makes sense yeah they've they've overlapped but they happen they were like invented in that order

yeah right man you know like all the jokes about like shipping the horse off to the glue factory and stuff like that like yes that used to be like byproduct used to be how we filled in a lot of gaps in society which is like well you know it's it's we the industrial revolution just happened we're in the middle of a depression we're not we haven't quite hit world war ii that's gonna bring us back so it's like a lot of stuff was uh like putting tape over a crack in the wall you know what i mean so yeah we were definitely just like i don't know what's ever left over from this sheet of bologna we made there's some cat food put that in a can because it's like you're not gonna kill a whole separate baloney

creature you know the the wild baloney that roamed the midwest yeah um the baloney snakes yeah the baloney snake sure yeah but yeah whatever happened to the baloney nickel i miss it you know having that on the back of it was great oh yeah it's it really it really made you feel like you belonged like you were part of something, looking at that bologna snake on the back of that bologna nickel. The nickel itself was made of bologna. I think that's one of the reasons why they had to take it out of circulation. Yeah, they didn't last very long.

Coin slots, you couldn't really put it in a coin slot. Yeah, they just got all gunky after two or three transactions. But they were delicious. All the taste of other people's hands oh yeah oh man i would just i would eat all of my as it's a bright-eyed bushy-tailed young kid entering the workforce i would eat so many of my paychecks that's what they would say don't eat i don't eat no bologna nickels like that was the that was the sting my grandmother said. Yeah. I just had a vision of those old Illinois and probably other state toll booths where you throw a handful of coins into it. Just somebody throwing meat into that.

Yeah. It's like hitting the attendant in the face. You're basically throwing little lunchable meat at them. Well, let's talk about the cat food stages, because the first one basically starts from the dawn of human agriculture. There's a great article in The Atlantic called How Cats Use Humans to Conquer the World. That's by Sarah Zhang in 2017. And she has like a super fantastic short description of this it's quote sometime around the invention of agriculture the cats came crawling it was mice and rats probably

that attracted the wild felines the rats came because of stores of grain made possible by human agriculture and so cats and humans began their millennia long coexistence end quote right oh that makes sense i love that you described it as freelance earlier yeah because that's that is how it is it was just like we're hiring these cats and in exchange they get all the mice they can handle i remember i i lived i grew up in a farm town and i had friends who had like cows and stuff and you'd go into the barns and yeah, it was filled with these, these little cats. Just these like work, like they just have barn cats, you know, and they'd have kittens and they just. You'd, uh, you'd literally have, yeah.

Like I would have a couple of people that I knew that would have to like go get like a mouser, you know? Yeah. And it was funny because the solution is like we're infested with these mice what do we do i don't know infest it with cats because they would just be they're just like larger mice but they like but they won't eat the things that you want yeah there's a this atlantic writer she interviews leslie lions who is a feline geneticist at the university of missouri and is she is she two lions in a person like the oh yeah i'm just clocking that name wow uh yeah

does she not understand the irony the perfect irony of her name and she devoured the atlantic She pounced on the Atlantic, right? It was a horrible incident. Wow. So Dr. Lyons, huh? They say that the domestication of cats was pretty completely separate from the domestication of dogs. We domesticated dogs to, at first, be helpers with our hunting and for security and later to like herd sheep. And it was a lot of training them for that. And it happened earlier in time. But she says, quote, cats have done since before they were domesticated what we needed them to do, end quote.

Right. And it's a thing where as soon as we had stores of grain in permanent farming communities cats showed up as freelance workers to kill the rats that were going after it that was the deal i like if our crops had early on been threatened by flies more than mice we'd be sitting here with like pet spiders i feel like like that's cats are just spiders they're just yeah they serve the same purpose i've been in a couple of pretty dismal apartments and i've i've had situations it was i've been in situations where like the infestation problems were so severe that i was like i am seriously considering just going and getting a bucket of spiders yeah just dumping them in this house. Oh, wow. And they're just having a great time.

Because at the very least, those spiders won't mess with my food. No, yeah. I know this isn't about spiders, but the only sin of spiders is they creep us out. They're generally pretty chill otherwise. They're just like there to eat flies. Yeah, wow.

You can share a house with a spider if you're not freaked out by it. Yeah, it's just like a cat. Yeah. Having a cat. Yeah. Having a cat made spiders cuter to me because she's spider-like. She scampers. She hides under things like a little tarantula. And she's got like weird beady eyes.

And she eats bugs. She's a big spider. Man, that's amazing. Yeah, it's the same thing. Yeah, because I use the cat for the same reason we had cats or at least it's a perk which is that like yeah i don't see bugs often because she eats them all she hunts them down and she eats them we never had problems with mice growing up yeah because we always had three cats in the house, like minimum. Yeah, exactly. It's a problem you don't really notice anymore until you're in a place where there aren't cats around.

Right. And then you will start to see mice if you're not, you know, vigilant. With cats, you see parts of mice. Yeah. But Amy, after a while, they'll stay away. Yeah, yeah. After a while, they're like, there's a monster there that'll mutilate us there's a terrifying sociopath monster that won't even eat us sometimes it just wants to kill us

yeah that's cats man yeah linda and with the cats eating eating vermin in particular we're pretty sure that's how humans brought them worldwide too right The Atlantic article covers a major study of DNA remains of ancient cats. They sampled 352 ancient domesticated cats, some of them as old as 9,000 years ago. And some of them were mummified cats from the British Museum. They really searched far and wide for ancient cat DNA. from the british museum like they really searched far and wide for ancient cat dna and they found that all modern domesticated cats originated either in what's now turkey or what's now egypt and probably from the agricultural communities there those were some of the first ones and then from there they followed world trade routes and would like sometimes be brought

on ships as rat catchers they they just kind of spread with humans from there. Yeah, I've read a couple of historical novels and also just straight up like histories about a couple of different ships. And yeah, they would always bring like at least a cat to keep rats and stuff out of their food stores. Right. Yeah, and then like you have a buddy too

depending on how friendly it is but it works both ways and it's really like hiring them freelance or like it's almost like the cats downloaded the uber app and started driving you know like it just maybe this is profitable for me here we go uh uber has the negative connotations and practices but you know what i mean and now like now there's hardly any working cats like they're just they're coasting yeah like it's it's a real well-played cat situation like i was saying like like i was saying dave you don't see a lot of the work they do yeah a lot a lot a lot of the a lot of the work kitten is doing is the fact that the mice know she's there i don't know if that's true well she's met a mouse

once i've seen kitten and a mouse once and it lasted 45 minutes and the mouse got away completely unharmed kitten mostly just played with the mouse we like the mouse just negotiated like it played dead it tried to fight back like the mouse was fighting for its life. Kitten didn't know that. And then the mouse just got away. And it was like, good job, kitten. Way to play with a mouse for 45 minutes and let it go. And I guess it could have gone back and told its other mice friends like, hey, we got to get away. Like there's a, it's not a smart one, but there's a cat.

So maybe she deterred mice that way. I don't know. But like right now she's currently in a basket curled up in a ball and that's mostly what she does. Nice. So I feel like she's not, I don't think, I don't, I don't know what work I'm not seeing. It's like very anticlimactic Tom and Jerry. It's like, oh, it's like, it's like when they reboot Itchy and Scratchy and there's no conflict

anymore. Like it's. Yeah. That's exactly what it what it was yeah just standing around looking at it scratchy checks his watch yeah well so so we have this first system of cat food and it's never gone away like i my my grandparents their cats in iowa on the farm were this way. It's a thing still places today. But starting in the late 1800s, mid-1800s, we start to get a second style of cat food, which is mainly cats being fed leftover industrial horse meat by humans, like an intentional cat feeding system where a person does it. And the main reason for this is industrialization and urbanization. In the mid-1800s, a lot of countries started moving from the farm building big cities.

According to historian Maureen Ogle, the US went from 7% of the population in cities in 1820 up to a quarter in 1860, and then a majority not long after that. And the UK did that even earlier, especially in London. And so with people in cities, they also either liked having a cat around or wanted a rat catcher around. And so, especially in London, you start to see a new profession called the cat's meat man. And the cat's Meat Man is someone of any gender. There were women and children who did this and the job title was still Cat's Meat Man. But it's someone carrying like a wagon of low grade meat on regular routes around the city and like shouting to people that they have meat. All the descriptions remind me of hot dog vendors at baseball games.

It's like, cats meat here, get your cats meat, and then they would sell it to people to feed the cats. That is... I love... Sorry, Tom? I was just going to say I've never wanted to have a job more than to be the cats meat man. Well, the cats, they love them, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Apparently they would follow them around town right he'd have a line of cats behind him like an ice cream truck yeah exactly um it's just funny because i love that olden times it feels like every problem was solved with just dude in a cart yeah it's like yeah just have a car guy in a cart walking around like doing that thing and they just walk around the city and you wait for them to come. Like, yeah, what an elegant solution. You just wait for the cat's meat man.

Like, how did the cat's meat man make money? Yeah, so they existed because of the particular situation of mid-1800s, especially British society. Because you have so many horses doing so many jobs, and then they either get old or die. And so then there was a whole set of businesses called knackers. And what a knacker does is, it's sort of like, it's like an animal slaughterhouse, but the goal is not to get edible meat. The goal is to get bone and gristle and all this stuff that you can turn into glue and gelatin and soap and a bunch of like products. And so then these businesses are just like churning through the discarded horses of English society. And then they have a bunch of

horse meat that absolutely no one wants except cat's meat men. And so that sort of invents this job where people buy discarded horse meat from weird factories at rock bottom prices and then sell it around town for cats. That became a whole business. An entire scenario exploded into my mind where it's just these people frantically like, what do we do with all this horse meat? And then the cats, meat man walks in triumphantly,

and it's like, I've got a few ideas. I'm still stuck on one part, which is when you said sell it around town to cats. Like, you mean the cat's owners. Oh, yes, yes, that's right. I'm imagining a delightful cat economy happening here where the cats are tipping the cat's meat man. I don't know.

Little cats with bow ties and tipping them money. Can you imagine? They were conducting transactions with the cats? Just like, what do you have on you? All right. You have a rat's tail. All right. I guess I'll take that.

They just bring them little trinkets and things around town yeah you know capitalism yeah sure yeah teach cats to pick pocket cat it's very hard to say yeah i want to um point out because you you posted an uh illustration yes and i just oh yes the cats yeah yeah but the cats they got their little faces you posted an illustration. Yes. And I just... Oh, yes, the cat's meat. Yeah, it looks amazing. Yeah, but the cats, they got their little shitty faces. Like, it's an old picture of a cat.

They still got their little shitty faces. It's constant. It's a constant. Yeah, it's a constant. It's just funny. Since we drew cats, like, they really haven't changed. It's that thing where you can find, like,

ancient, like, scrolls with cat marks on them from the like cat prints and ink where it's like oh so they were always just they didn't they just don't care they don't care what we're up to they're the same no matter what yeah and there and it's that also that like city thing we have today of stray cats everywhere was even more common then oh yeah yeah. There's an amazing article we'll link from long reads. It's by writer Carrie Fry, where she talks about the cat's meat man job. And there was an 1868 newspaper article that estimated London had over 300,000 cats at the time. Wow. And so then you had plenty of work for people who, cause also there's no like diploma to

become a cat's meat man. You can just buy some horse meat and start doing it. So a lot of people start doing this. And it's so common that there were popular songs about cat's meat men and the writer Charles Dickens, when he was a kid would sing one around the house. The lyrics were down in the street cries the cat's meat man, fango dango with his barrow and can and this was just like what victorian children did they were like you know what's fun the cat meat horse guy boy everything about that yeah yeah these are terrible being alive being alive during that time just was terrible yeah when you're a child and you're genuinely excited for a man selling meat to cats and you're like oh the cat's meat man is here it's like oh what a

bummer time you live in you know this is like yeah this is the the days where kids would go outside and play with sticks and rocks and that's all they had i don't know well the it sounds awful the one other like even more terrible victorian detail is that another one of our sources for just documenting the job of cats meat men is the jack the ripper records because the the second victim of the ripper they like interviewed everybody who lived on that block just for witness testimony. And so there's a bunch of records of a cat's meat man named Harriet Hardiman who lived there. A bunch of interviews with her about, did you see the rip or do this? It was all over English society, this job. I mean, if they're making money, I would do it. We discussed that. Because yeah,

you're just getting followed by cats a lot right you're just hanging out with cats yeah it works yeah and you get a walk you know yeah sure yeah and you just become a cat parade I don't know I mean you're a cat ice cream man I don't yeah yes and possibly Jack the Ripper because now

my new theory is that that's who Jack the Ripper was a cat meets man sure it's a perfect way to dispose of all the organs he stole Because now my new theory is that that's who Jack the Ripper was, a cat's meats man. Sure, it's a perfect way to dispose of all the organs he stole. Yeah, you got the knife on you, like you're just, yeah. It's as plausible as anything else, yeah. It totally works. Oh yeah, you could get like a couple hours of a podcast out of it, like a true crime out of just this half-assed theory, yeah.

True crime out of just this half-assed theory, yeah. And so we had this intermediate stage of people starting to, because this is some of the first major intentional feeding of cats, other than farmers giving scraps some of the time. And then this third style is what has become modern cat food, where cats are more or less receiving human food. It's formulated a little differently, but it's basically the same thing. And a great source for a lot of this is a book called Pets in America, A History. That's by Dr. Catherine C. Greer, who's a history professor at the University of Delaware. And she says that a firm in Victorian England called Spratz Patent Limited is the originator of both dog food and cat food. But they mainly started with dog food

because there was still this belief that cats can just kind of feed themselves. And then once they did finally start selling packaged cat food, the advertisements mainly sold it as better than old horse meat. Like the main sales pitch was you don't have to get weird old industrial horse meat.

This will be better for your cat. That's a good sales yeah so it's a very direct progression yeah it's not bad thinking about this stage do you think raccoons look at cats and they're like ah they got in there before we could oh i feel like raccoons could have easily been cats like because they're just prowling the streets looking for food like that it sounds like cats are basically raccoons at this point where it's just like or like a little before this where it's like yeah we feed them sometimes they hang out yeah a lot of the same skills sure yeah yeah yeah yeah i feel like but they got like a little pause they could like i don't know they could do they could do like like more more work i feel like they could do more work for us, but whatever.

Yeah. True colleagues. Yeah. So this is just one company? Yeah. That basically... And then others kind of picked it up and did cat foods and things from there. But jumping to the modern day, if you're listening to this in the United States or in another country where this podcast is popular, your cat food basically gets made the way human food gets made. We've jumped to a situation where they are different foods, don't eat your cat food, but there's a lot of ways they're similar. One of them is that the cat food regulations are often

the same as human food regulations. The US Food and Drug Administration holds cat food to the same sanitation and safety standards. The U.K. has a food standards agency that does that. And also, Vice interviewed Catherine Michelle, who's a board-certified veterinary nutritionist and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. She said, quote, I'm not saying it's true across the board, but some of the standards in pet food plants are way beyond what i've seen in manufacturing plants that make food for humans and oh that's that doesn't surprise me at all shame yeah does not surprise me at all like what i was talking about earlier just how normalized we've gotten towards uh just uh people who um like i, the deranged behavior of pampering your pets,

and it's just become so mainstream and normalized that does not surprise me. You know what I mean? I don't know. Oh, yeah. I get that. It's weird how people behave about their pets, I think. Me and Hana, we've been watching a lot of, like, a specific Pomeranian in, I believe, Korea. We watch a few cat channels channels and we're watching animals with

better health care than us like we're like that's what it's like watching these animals like where the owners will like prepare these cooked meals for them every night and it's like that is i will eat that i'll i'll be your dog would you can i your dog? Because that food looks way more nutritious than anything I'm eating. I don't know, we love it. interviewed this nutritionist, the writer of it is a journalist named Denny Watkins. He said that, quote, dog and cat food can contain meat from the same farms that produce the chicken and beef on your dinner plate. He said like the nicer cuts often get reserved for humans, but if you're into eating that animal, it's probably being fed to your pet too. I love the word often there. Yeah. Often get reserved for humans. Not not all the time not even all the time so i guess the lesson here is eat cat food it's delicious no it's not it's bad for you well we'll talk about that okay but uh okay but also there's one like interesting wrinkle of this thing is a

thing i'd never thought about which is that because it's the same animals and also because it's under the very similar or the same regulations for human food, you can't manufacture pet food that's made of rats or made of mice or made of other... Like rodents, the cats eat. It wouldn't be weird. That's all the cats want. Right. Yeah.

But according to a Mental Floss article by Sean Hutchinson, rodents are not sanctioned to be grown as a food source in the U.S. And the USDA doesn't have official inspection procedures for mice. So it's illegal to farm mice or rats for the consumption by anybody. So you can't do it. That's interesting because, I mean, like we were talking about earlier, you can freely buy mice and rats as feeder animals. Yeah, but you can't manufacture pet food from them. But you can't process them. That's interesting. That's interesting that we make that distinction.

Yeah. With any modern cat food, as long as it's not somehow some kind of unlicensed weird bottom shelf thing, As long as it's not somehow some kind of unlicensed weird bottom shelf thing. It's made to the legal standards of human food with the same ingredients as human food. We'll also link some British government guidance that they've released on how exactly businesses in the UK can produce human food and pet food in the same facility if they want to. It's the same. But that takes us to takeaway number two for the main show takeaway number two you a human should not eat modern cat food and the main reason is the minerals this sounds like a dare you you should not do it i'm i'm not

a doctor but don't do it and uh the main difference is they've worked so hard at this cat food they very specifically formulated the nutrition for cats and it's loaded with stuff that you don't really want right unless it's like unless you're um like a island of dr moreau if you've been like turned into a half cat, I assume you have to eat some amount of cat food in that case. If you're Feruza Bulk in Island of Dr. Moreau, you're going to have to eat a little bit of cat food. I know I said I'm not a doctor before. I am a Dr. Moreau and I can actually advise you all on this. Yes.

Be sure once your head changes or whatever, that's the time. Yeah. Get in there right i mean if you're in a bind or if your dad does it to you uh then yeah eat the cat food i guess generally speaking it does seem like a bad idea yeah and this is and these last two takeaways for the show are pretty short but this one is that that the main difference is that cats, compared to us, cats are kind of obsessed with eating minerals. Their food is overloaded with it. And that's packed into something called ash.

And if you look at the label on cat food, like I checked our Fancy Feast before taping this, it has ash listed as a key material and what percentage. And that ash is a bunch of minerals. It's also a lot of the bone and tendon material of the animal that went into it. And the informational blog of Chewy.com, the pet supply site, they say that, quote, cats require roughly 2% ash content in their diet to meet their mineral needs, end quote. And that's not something that you need as a person. You need some minerals, but it's different that checks out like uh yeah it just simply put that what they're designing for cats i'm glad i'm like i'm i'm glad it's not the same as people i guess oh yeah because if it was then it's like why am i even buying cat food why can't i just like cook myself a nice meal and make

a little plate for my cat you know they can't really eat our food so we shouldn't eat theirs right that's fair yeah and even because yeah a lot of ours they can't eat and then um popular science interviewed don jackson blattner who's a registered dietitian with the american dietetic association and she says that humans can technically eat cat food because of the safety standards and everything, but the mineral-rich ash would be the worst part for you. And she also couched all that in,

like humans can eat cat food in the sense that your body can process lots of stuff that's bad for it. And my favorite quote from her is, quote, technically you could safely digest a baseball, end quote. So, like, you can eat cat food in the sense that you'd survive, probably. But you don't want to do that. What I'm hearing here is that you can eat a baseball and survive. And that's kind of cool.

Yeah. I'm going to do that as soon as we're done recording. Yeah, boil up a baseball. That's summer in America, baby. There are people like that. Isn't there't there like that guy who ate a plane because like you can eat anything it just takes time what because it's like yeah if you put yeah because you grind yeah you like grind it all down and then you slowly introduce it into your body and it's like yeah you've technically eaten that thing you know oh

yeah it's not like yeah exactly it's not as impressive when you think of it that way but like you can eat anything if you eat it slow enough you can quote me on that if it just gets through your tubes yeah yeah yeah because the other main thing with why humans shouldn't eat cat food is if you tried to do an all cat food diet, you'd miss a bunch of nutrients you depend on because cats don't need them, so it's not in their food. Vice says that, quote, dogs and cats don't need vitamin C in their diet because they make their own, end quote. So if you switch to an all cat food diet you'd get scurvy like a like an old sailor right away oh okay am i hearing that wait you said they make their own vitamin c does that mean cats are rich in vitamin c i guess so yeah if you ate a cat which i do not i'm not recommending oh but is that a source of vitamin c right like if you ate a cat, which I do not, I'm not recommending, but is that a source of vitamin C?

Right. Like if you were a pirate and you were in danger of getting scurvy. Yeah. First of all, if you're a pirate, you're a lawbreaker. You get no tips from me, buddy. That's true. That's true. Get in line.

But you could eat a cat. Yeah, you shouldn't. Yeah. could eat a cat yeah you shouldn't yeah when the uh the last takeaway the main show is really quick takeaway number three your local birds and mammals are highly likely to become cat food and i think i think people know the gist of this, but thanks to pet cats that are also outdoor cats, if you have an outdoor pet cat, it's like a buzzsaw. It just goes through the local birds and mammals real fast. Oh, yeah. There was studies where they found that they're not eating them either.

That's the thing, is they're basically, going back to Jack the Ripper, they're all a bunch of little Jack the Rippers. back to jack the ripper they're all a bunch of little jack the rippers like they're just serial killers that we let out and they're just they're just murdering the the yeah the rodent and bird population yeah yeah yeah they're uh they're monsters they're just monsters for certain animals yeah they're delightful. for this episode about cat food because they estimated total bird and mammal kills by the regular cats domestic cats but split it up by feral cats and owned pet cats that go outside right they said that in the u.s and europe put together pet outdoor cats will kill about 684 million birds per year yep 684 million uh in terms of like a lot of birds oh yeah in terms of like variety variety and amount i believe house cats are the deadliest feline in the world right

like in terms of i think so yeah yeah in terms of just like sheer amount of souls snuffed out they they they kill the most like a like a lion yeah a lion's scary because they can eat us but like they don't really kill they just kill to eat cats just kill because they see something and they're like i better kill that like they'll they'll never you put them in a room with mice they're like like, I'm going to kill all these mice. I will kill them all. I maybe need to eat one of them, but I see them. They're existing, and therefore I must exterminate them with my claws.

With my terrifying claws. The other number for that group is annually 1.24 billion with a B mammals. So almost twice as many mammals. And right it's not one zebra it's it's a bunch of uh tiny yeah tiny animals they're just wiping out yeah yeah they're little murderers yeah it's why we love them or it's one of the reasons that's why that's why i mean it is literally why we started keeping them yeah yeah yeah we're like these things are really good at murdering things yeah it's truly because if this research is right we didn't train them to do that we just liked that they did it and helped them do it worldwide that's what we yeah yeah they're just serial killers and we were like this works for us so we don't have to do it and they'll do it without remorse. They don't care. They don't even think about it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty great. It's a good deal. It's a good deal. Wow. Go team is the vibe I'm getting at the end here. Go team.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go team. Go team cat. Do it. Team cat. Yeah.

Oh. Team cat. Yeah. Oh, cats. Folks, that is the main episode for this week. My thanks to David Christopher Bell and Tom Ryman for happening to join me in a grand cat food eating experiment. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now.

If you support this show on Patreon.com. Patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the world's most fascinating cat populations. Multiple countries that we didn't cover in the main show, plus some strange happenings beyond those. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show for a library of more than three dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring cat food with us. Here is one more run through the big takeaways.

Takeaway number one, that's a big one. Based on my research, there have been three general styles of cat food. Those are cats feeding themselves as freelance farm laborers, then cats being fed leftover industrial horse meat, and finally cats being fed a specific version of human food. Takeaway number two, humans should not eat cat food, and the main reason is the minerals. And takeaway number three, your local birds and mammals are highly likely to become cat food. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great. David Christopher Bell and Tom Ryman are

the two heads of a fantastic podcast network and streaming channel. It's called Gamefully Unemployed. Gamefully Unemployed. I hope I'm saying that well enough. Also find Tom Ryman's excellent writing over at Collider.com. And David Bell's excellent script writing over on the YouTube News and Comedy Show, Some More News, hosted by Cody Johnston, produced by Katie Stoll, many other pals there too. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. A great article in The Atlantic. It's called How Cats Used Humans to Conquer the World, and that is by Sarah Zhang. A great article from Longreads called The Cat's Meat Man from Dickens to Jack the Ripper, and that's by writer Carrie Fry. And then a great book, it's called Pets in America, A History, and that is by Dr. Catherine

C. Greer, who's a history professor emerita at the University of Delaware. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons. I hope you love this week's bonus show.

And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.