Recently, my parents asked me for cat food recommendations. As I began researching cat food, I noticed something: browse a major pet retailer such as Chewy or PetSmart, and many of the popular options come from a handful of large manufacturers. Check their ingredient lists, and you may find corn, soy, rice, wheat, peas, or potatoes.
That made me wonder why are these ingredients in cat food? Cats are carnivores, so wouldn’t a diet made mostly of meat more closely resemble what they eat in the wild?
Many of the brands in question are well established and backed by veterinary research. Still, the prevalence of plant-based ingredients in commercial cat food surprised me. My first guess was cost. Corn, soy, and other widely grown crops are relatively inexpensive, so they may help keep production costs down. In that sense, as the proportion of plant ingredients rises and the proportion of meat falls, are cats’ diets becoming more “vegan”?
Replacing some meat with crops may also call for a reassuring explanation or a persuasive marketing message. Search online for cat food recommendations, and you’ll often see popular, crop containing brands recommended by pet owners and veterinarians alike. I’m not an animal nutritionist, and I haven’t studied veterinary medicine, but I find that popularity puzzling. Owners often say their cats have eaten a particular food for years and lived long, happy lives. That’s meaningful, but it doesn’t tell us whether another diet might have supported their health even better. And pet food marketing is aimed at us, the owners, not the cats.
A common response to concerns about plant ingredients is that the source matters less than the finished food’s nutritional profile. If a food is complete and balanced, the argument goes, its ingredients are less important. That reasoning makes some sense, but it leaves me with questions. If we can formulate a nutritionally complete food for cats, why don’t we rely on similar ready made meals for ourselves? Perhaps we could, but human nutrition is still complex and not fully understood. It seems reasonable to be cautious about assuming that our understanding of pet nutrition is complete, too.
I also wonder how closely commercial diets resemble what cats eat in nature. A cat that catches a bird or rodent will consume some plant matter indirectly, through its prey’s stomach contents. But I imagine that amount is small compared with the plant ingredients found in many commercial foods.
Digging deeper, I found that there are claims of major pet food companies doing more than just manufacturing food, they fund studies, sponsor veterinary programs. Now, that doesn’t mean the science is automatically compromised, nor is there an easy way to prove the credibility of those claims. But when a few companies control the market and shape the research used to evaluate their own products, it’s fair to wonder how much control they have over the narrative.
And this may not be just a pet food issue. Could something similar be happening in our own diets? Not necessarily because we are eating more crops, but because we are increasingly relying on ultra-processed foods built from cheap crop derivatives.
I don’t have clear answers to all these questions. But the debate has made me think more carefully about what goes into our food,both our pets’ and our own.