Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 26, 1995 TAG: 9510260009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: Every morning we stagger downstairs and feed the Why cat. There are so many different meals: ``Savory Grill,'' ``Captain's Table,'' ``Beef Banquet,'' ``Ocean Whitefish Treat,'' ``Mysterious Turkey Derivative,'' ``Pressed Unidentifiable Matter,'' and our cat's personal favorite, ``Stanky Mush.''
A professional cat-food maker will protest that cat food is not all alike. The traditional ``loaf'' style of cat food is still common, but some loaves are firmer than others, and there are also varieties that don't use a loaf but rather have pieces of meat suspended in a gravy-like sauce.
Nonetheless, taken as a whole, wet cat food (also known by the shorthand ``meat cat,'' as opposed to ``dry cat'') has a certain cat-foodishness, a sense of being a composite, a mixture not entirely comfortable with the condition of solidity.
The reason: Wet cat food has to be pumpable. It initially is a fluid form of meat, and then hardens up only after it is pumped into the can and heated. In order to make the millions of cans of cat food necessary to feed a world of felines, the cat food companies need pumpable meat.
``If it is the loaf variety, it is finely minced up, and that's pumped into the can. The can is filled, it's sealed, and then it goes through the commercial sterilization process,'' says James Sokolowski, professional services manager at Kal Kan Foods.
Sokolowski described the pump as an ``impeller-type'' device with multiple filler tubes that rotate and fill the cans passing underneath. Kal Kan has a plant in England that can produce 4 million one-pound cat-food cans in a single day. So you can see they literally have to pump out the meat.
Q: Why can't a person survive just by eating lots of vitamins?
A: Have you ever noticed, especially after you've just fed the cat, that preparing food is a major hassle? Who has the time to whip together actual solid food with the appropriate sauce? Every night the Why staff has the same ritual: Five minutes to heat up a can of ravioli, two hours to forage through woods and pastures looking for some wild parsley to use as a garnish.
Why not just eat pills?
``You'd have to take a lot of them to get your calories,'' explains Merle Suba, chief chemist for Vitamins, Inc., which makes food supplements.
Consider this: The average person needs about 70 grams of protein a day. Let's say you made protein pills. Remember that one of those big aspirin is 500 milligrams, or half a gram. So to get 70 grams of protein in half-gram tablets would require that you scarf down 140 tablets.
The average person needs at least 2,000 calories a day. A gram of pure fat - which would require a big ol' double-wide fat pill - has only 9 calories.
Of course there's no such thing as a fat pill, or a protein pill, or a calorie pill. And we haven't even talked about roughage, about the fiber your body needs. The point is, though, that the synthetic diet wouldn't work even in theory unless you ate hundreds of pills. So it makes more sense to eat food.
- Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB