But sometimes we get to eat at Chez Panisse. That's what happened to me when I interviewed Marion Nestle and Mal Nesheim about their new book -- "Feed Your Pet Right" (Simon and Schuster Free Press, May 2010) -- over one of the best lunches I've ever had -- goat cheese salad and a beautiful Moroccan chicken from Soul Food Farms.
And cherries and cappuccino for dessert. I mean, this is why I went to journalism school.
The fact that we had a fantastic free-range discussion of "Feed Your Pet Right," their experience researching it, and some of the aftermath of its publication was just the (totally organic) icing on the (sustainably produced) cake.
Marion told me this book was originally supposed to be a chapter in her book "What to Eat," which took shoppers on a tour of a supermarket's aisles and helped them understand food labels, health claims and, well... what to eat.
But the book was already getting too long, so the chapter didn't make it. And it was a good thing, too, because when Marion looked at the labels on the pet food in the grocery store, her Ph.D. in human nutrition was absolutely no help to her in understanding them. For that, she turned to her partner, Mal Nesheim, who has a Ph.D. in animal nutrition. From my column today in the San Francisco Chronicle/SFGate.com:
If it strikes anyone as odd that even a Ph.D. human nutritionist had to consult a Ph.D. animal nutritionist to understand a pet food label, there's a reason for that. "Compared to the human food industry, the pet food industry is is much, much less transparent," Nestle says. "They are awash in secrecy."
She adds, "It's an enormously profitable business with no organized consumer base in the way that you have with human food. After all, their food is fed to dogs and cats, who can't pick up the telephone and call the companies."
Most pet owners, Nestle says, are no more able than she was to understand a pet food label.
"They don't know what the whole 'complete and balanced" thing means, or what most of the information on the label means," she says. "It's all inexplicable to them."
That's not all, Nesheim says. "There are all these products out there, and pet owners don't realize just how many of them are being made by the same companies, but sold under different brand names. Nestle, Purina, Mars -- these companies make dozens and dozens of brands, and the lists of ingredients are just not that different from each other -- although the prices, and the marketing campaigns, often are."
The lack of transparency made "Feed Your Pet Right" a much harder book to research than its human counterpart. For instance, many pet food manufacturers refused to let them into their facilities.
"Although the ones that let us in were all right," says Nesheim. "Hills, Bravo -- they impressed us. The Waltham plant in England (owned by Mars) was wonderful. The dogs spend their days interacting with the staff, and there are people on the payroll whose entire job is to play with and walk the dogs."
I ask if he assumed the companies that wouldn't let them in -- which included Purina and Procter and Gamble -- had something to hide. "Either that, or they were afraid of animal rights groups," he says. "There are lots of questions being asked about animal testing, including on pet food, and I think a lot of them are frightened of that."
Read it here -- including what they think about home-prepared and raw diets.
Photo: Marion Nestle and Mal Nesheim at Chez Panisse.
What a great job that would be, keeping dogs happy, as long as the "testing" being done with the dogs is benign.
I have no affiliation with this site, but it is the place I learned the most when I decided to feed my dogs raw. Mary Straus is a huge gift.
http://www.dogaware.com/
Posted by: Erich Riesenberg | 07 June 2010 at 08:00 PM