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Cause we force them to
My thoughts were: At the mercy of their owner for one. Then a simpler obligate carnivore’s taste buds and brain reward system vs an easily bored omnivore with thumbs and unga fire.
Cats can be pretty different with food preference compared to each other. My two aren’t super picky. One is allergic to something in kibble so they both only eat wet food. I noticed above all that they vastly prefer paté pucks to a mince in gravy, no matter what flavour any of it is. Seems to leave them feeling fuller too afterwards. Priority: scent, mouth feel, and then taste is considered last is my observation.
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That said, a lot of humans in NA who don’t cook at home are eating the same crap repackaged in multiple ways from the same Sysco supply monopoly served at almost every restaurant :p
There are lots of dogs and cats who crave variety in their diets, too. Like humans, it’s a behavioral thing rather than a nutritional necessity. My shepherd will simply stop eating regularly unless I vary her diet. I usually have three or so options I rotate through to keep her interested in eating. Lots of people add toppers and mix-ins when they have dogs like mine, but I find that only increases food rejection, as smart pups learn to hold out until we sweeten the deal enough.
I worked for a pet food manufacturer, and it amazed me what customers would do to try to entice their picky pets to eat. One guy was giving his dog lasagna, and he was shocked that his dog didn’t want to eat kibble anymore. Imagine that.
We don’t
Everyone is saying “we don’t,” but do need a diet that’s more varied than cats? (for example) If so, why?
Somewhere I read that bread has most of the essential nutrients for humans, except for vitamin C. That would mean that prisoners who were sentenced to bread and water could last many years if they had fruit occasionally.
I guess the kind of bread, and the reduced caloric needs of prisoners, play a huge role here.
Survival =/= nutrition
I’m a living proof that you can eat the same thing every day for decades and be just fine.
I’ve been eating the same thing for almost a year at this point as well.
What do you eat daily?
If the food you’re eating doesn’t contain all the nutrients you need you’re unhealthy as fuck and it will come back to haunt you.
To add on to other peoples answers regarding the complete nutritional makeup of pet food; many animals can make a variety of the amino acids they need to survive with just a few inputs (like deer and cows eating only (mostly) plants), but some, especially predatory animals, cannot. They get those nutrients from the prey they eat, which in turn got them from the plants.
It essentially comes down to which enzymes any given organism can create, which ones their DNA codes for. Humans can’t make a bunch of these amino acids themselves. Many (maybe all of them, not that far into my class yet) of the reactions taking in place in any living organism are entirely reliant on enzymes to catalyze them; that is, without them these reactions would take millions of years to complete.
BTW there are appr. 37x1017 (3,700,000,000,000,000,000) reactions happening in your body every second. All of them (or at least a great majority of them) require enzymes to complete.
We don’t. Burritos exist.
Damn you. Another new white t-shirt with coffee and snot stains. Take my upvote.
need a variety of food to survive?
It’s not true.
Boredom feels terrible while it lasts, but it doesn’t kill you. In the end, humans usually start to get creative after boredom.
Oh, and yes, some food industry has found out things and told you things… yes, they were creative :-)
What about the British? They were starving, and they didn’t get creative. They just kept eating brown goo for centuries.
I like British food. I live in Germany now and if I see another Maultasche I’m going to scream.
We like carbs which are often brown and make for a good hangover food. Not sure about goo though?
I had heard that British cuisine was much more robust before WW1.
Also, if brown goo is meat-flavored, I’d be down for it.
Got a recipe book for the British working class that was written in the 1800s, even that has curry in it.
Are you saying that the brown stuff is curry? I am a fan of curry, but the stuff I make at home is green or yellow.
It is brown goo flavored, and you will eat it until you are completely brainwashed into liking it.
I suppose that’s why we added mild pain to our diet. Mix things up a bit.
Asked my GF who’s an aspiring crazy cat lady:
It’s because (proper) cat food is engineered to contain all the nutrients they need. While it looks like a bland mush of only one thing, it’s more like the cat equivalent of having several full nutricious meals run through a blender. The required variety is built in.
I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too, it’s just not many people want that.
Its called soylent. Been around for at least a couple decades.
Isn’t that basically what Huel is?
yeah. I tried the “nothing but huel for a week” thing and got INTENSE cravings for other foods pretty quickly. I guess the other comments about getting bored are true. You can survive on it - even healthily - but it’s not fun. Maybe you get used to it after a few weeks.
Speak for yourself, bachelor chow would solve many problems for me
Awww shieeet I JUST got done finding a pee’n’gee. What am I gonna do with this thing now?
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I’m convinced you could create such a food for humans too,
You could, and it would be very simple to do so.
1: Take all the food you’d eat for, say, a week. Absolutely everything.
2: Blend it. Maybe add some extra vitamins to make up for the ones that will be lost due to processing.
3: Dehydrate it. (To make it more compact and less likely to spoil.)
4: Compress it into pellets.
Done. You have now created ‘human food’.
Blending it is pre-digesting it which means it doesn’t travel our bodies quite the same way.
We have long digestive systems for a reason.
I’m not saying it isn’t possible but you’d probably shit funny for a long time
Pemmican! We should be eating pemmican.
That’s what I find so absurd about the “humans need variety in their diet” mantra. If we need some vast unknown combination of things, how is it that letting people loose on supermarkets and choosing their own recipes somehow achieves that, compared to at least some first pass attempt based on macro nutrients?
Because many of our modern staples are fortified with essential vitamins and nutrients.
We also get cravings for specific foods when our bodies are lacking in a nutrient that food contains. I don’t think we have them for every nutrient our bodies need, hence why people can get nutrient deficiencies by accident even when the nutrient they need is available, but there’s some instinctual failsafes for certain ones that must have been scarce or intermittent enough for cravings to confer an evolutionary advantage.
Yeah that’s a good point.
Ok, what we’ll do is, we’ll take some sort of kibble, A, fortify it, call it “Vegetable Delight”. Then another sort of kibble, B, fortify that, call it “Ox Fondue”. Then another, just like the previous ones, call it, say, “Mystery Surprise”. All fortified. Then you just alternate them. Mondays, A. Tuesdays, B. Then Wednesdays you think C but nope! A again. Then B, then A, THEN B, and then, finally C, so you have something special to look forward to on Sundays.
There are powdered meals that are supposed to offer balanced nutrition. I’ve heard of people living off Soylent, Huel, etc. I don’t think it’s good long-term, and the lack of chewing could cause problems. But it is feasible in principle.
I ate only soylent for a long time, and the lack of chewing did cause me some issues: first was bad oral hygiene. I brush and floss twice a day (after breakfast and before bed), yet I still got a cavity. Chewing normal food also cleans off plaques on your teeth, so when you’re not chewing anything those plaques just sit there fucking your shit up. Second (*and this is just my conjecture) chewing causes activity in a certain part of the brain to spike, so if you’re not chewing anything that part atrophies and causes depression. I forget where I read the chewing part though. So, along with the cavity, I also felt generally sad about everything. I would still definitely have it for lunch everyday because the nutrients are there, but yeah, unfortunately you have to chew stuff. I thought about just chewing gum, but those are all chock-full of microplastics so…
lack of chewing
this is also a solved issue with a mature industry
That’s true, but we’re not cats.
It’s can be difficult to change a cat’s food. You have to gradually introduce the new food mixed in with the old food, or the cat may just refuse to eat it.
Oh ho ho ho. They will eat. Eventually. Then they get more. Then they complain it’s not enough.
They have.
You as a human could also live with the same food every day if it covered every dietary need. Especially if you depended on someone else to acquire it and had no choice.
There is an evolutionary push for a rich variety of nutrients obtained from a variety of sources, but the mechanism driving that daily “need” for variety is force of habit and desire for novelty. On top of that, some people are happy to eat nothing but junk and have very narrow tastes. How come?
Also, I can assure you, a lot of cats will periodically stop eating a certain brand or flavor and go through cycles. Does it mean the food isn’t really covering their needs or are they just bored of the same flavor every day? Hard to know, but I would argue your assumption about humans being too different from their pets when it comes to variety in their menu.
How can I survive off of that, if they’re out of stock for half the year? ;-;
Buy double in the half year when it is available
Usually can’t afford that much upfront, wish I could tho.
I did make the comment in jest, though I appreciate the candor lol
That aside, I don’t have an idea if it’s even a viable approach considering the potential expiration dates and storage condition requirements, assuming one would even be willing to pay the exorbitant price to buy it as their main source of nourishment
Im just pointing out we can make a human food just like we make cat food and dog food and indeed have. Soylent sorta started it but there are a variety of other things now doing the same thing with twists (all vegan or organic, etc) and even before then we had meal replacement shakes and bars and actually there is this emergency food called plumpy nut that is actually made to nurse someone back from severe starvation. All sorts of bunker survival ration bar things to which are fairly common as boat things.
Cats and similar animals are adapted to specific environmental niches, but humans are generalists. One of the drawbacks of being generalists is that we’re not specialized enough to fully subsist on any single food source.
We can definitely subsist on a single food source if it’s been engineered to be nutritionally complete like pet food has.
We don’t need a variety of food to survive. But, generally, we have choice, so we choose to vary our diet because it’s more interesting.
Pets do not have a choice. They eat what they’re given. Or they choose not to and die (a lil cat I was sitting chose that route).
They eat what they’re given. Or they choose not to and die (a lil cat I was sitting chose that route).
What the fuck? Cats don’t just chose not to eat and die. That cat died from neglect.
I was under the impression cats fed on sunlight and heat? I thought the food was just like, a scheme to drain the household economy.
He was well fed and offered different foods. His owners played with him and kept him clean. He didn’t want to eat. They had him tested for allergies, etc but the vet didn’t find anything wrong. They put him on something to increase his appetite. He ate a little. Then he stopped.
