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9. Provisioning Man’s Best Friend: The Early Years of the American Pet Food Industry, 1870–1942
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 9 Provisioning Man’s Best Friend: The Early Years of the American Pet Food Industry, 1870–1942 Katherine C. Grier For food-history scholars, “food” typically means what human beings eat, and yet over 60 percent of American households also shelter tens of millions of other eaters: pet animals. According to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, we spent $16 billion on commercial pet food in 2007, mostly to feed cats and dogs.1 The story of this particular food chain has been unexamined, however. This chapter focuses on the development of dog food, particularly canned dog food prior to the 1942 ban on the use of cans for the mobilization for World War II. The emphasis here is a discussion of just what went into those cans. As with many other aspects of the pet industry in the first half of the twentieth century, evidence for the production, sale, and use of commercial cat and dog food is scattered widely, challenging to compile, and tricky to interpret. This is because the pet food industry was built on scores, perhaps hundreds, of small producers, many of whom served local or regional markets. Even when the large Chicago packers and the major animalfeed millers got into the business, pet food was a relatively small part of their product lines for several decades, although it was one more way to wring value out of the inevitable inefficiencies of processing on a large scale.2 The relative invisibility of pet food also reflects the fact that this is also a story about animal bodies, parts or whole, that people will not or cannot eat. Except for periodic flurries of regulatory activity, people did not want to think about what was in those cans and what it suggested about industrial meat production. (As I prepared this essay for publication, the public outcry over contaminated ingredients imported from China for use in pet food was already dying down; people were having a difficult time critiquing a problematic processed food when it has become such a fundamental part of their shopping and food preparation habits.) What did American dogs eat before their owners were able to pick up cans and paper bags of prepared food at their local supermarkets? The quality of dogs’ diets depended on the characteristics of the households they occupied. Dogs were beneficiaries of each household’s supply of food scraps. Except in the largest cities, housewives oversaw the processing of a wide array of raw materials for family meals; in the case of meat, they often handled animal parts with which almost no modern consumers are familiar, such as hearts or calf heads and feet. Thrifty cooks knew how to use these parts, and what the family absolutely could not or would not eat went to the animals that were part of the household, along with leftover starches and vegetables. Fond dog owners cooked up “dog stews” or simply scraped all plates into the dogs’ dishes and added other kitchen refuse such as bones. If a family was prosperous, so was the family dog. In families of more limited means, dogs were not as well fed, and since even the larger cities tolerated wandering dogs, these animals fended for themselves in the streets and gutters. Both owned and ownerless dogs were still part of the ecology of the towns and cities where large numbers of animals lived and worked, and where municipal services were limited at best.3 (I leave the exact components of their diets to your imagination.) To a large extent, commercial dog food was, and is, the packaged industrial food scrap that supplanted table scraps, especially once meat packers got into the business. This statement must be qualified somewhat because in the early years of dog food manufacturing, some operations were in the business of creating “health food” for dogs. Big packers eventually appealed to consumers on the basis of dog health, but dog health food companies were often in the business of making whole-grain-based health foods for people too, and their ingredients reflected that. The dog food industry originated in Victorian England in the 1860s with a company named Spratt’s Patent Limited. James Spratt, an American businessman visiting England, apparently saw stray dogs eating discarded hardtack on the London docks and decided to package similar biscuits for sale to kennel owners. Around the time of Spratt’s eureka moment, the British military establishment was engaged in experiments to...