Add this to the list of things I never thought I would attempt: seeking out cat food at a fashionable cafe and then tasting it. Voluntarily.
To be sure, it is gourmet, small-batch, Brooklyn-made, locally sourced cat food. Matt Rosenberg, who first developed the recipe, tells me the multivitamin in it is made for humans.
Rosenberg, along with co-founders Jenny Tran and Shabnam Azadeh, started their company, called From Scratch, in 2012. They use human-grade ingredients to make premium cat food that is stored in the freezer, unlike conventional shelf-safe cat food. Even though Rosenberg “hates to use the word artisanal”, you could argue their production is just that.
While there are any number of pet lovers who will whip up a special dinner for their fluffy soulmates at home, making commercial cat food is another story.
The industry does have its regulations, and unlike human food, cat food has to be nutritionally sound. Cats, it seems, can’t live on Twinkies and Cheetos like the rest of us. Rosenberg spent a lot of time researching cat nutrition to get the recipe just right, and had it tested in a lab to make sure all the amino acids, minerals and other needs of a cat would be met.
Locally sourced cat food might sound a little extreme, but Rosenberg says he gets calls from people complaining that From Scratch food is cooked when their cats are “on a strictly raw Paleo diet”, or asking if the oats in the food were processed in a facility that also processes foods with gluten – which makes artisanal cat food sound pretty ordinary by comparison.
From Scratch at one point held the distinction of being the only offering for non-humans at the weekly Brooklyn foodie market Smorgasburg. The makers stopped attending this year because most of the customers they found perusing their wares were from out of town, and there is a limit to the number of times you can tell a nice German couple that taking frozen cat food on a plane back home is probably not a good idea.
But From Scratch still markets its food at other human-only institutions.
I ventured to Williamsburg in search of fresh cat food to try. I don’t have a cat, but I figured I could momentarily skip forward to my senior years to test out what all the fuss was about. The manager at Urban Rustic, which sells Porto Rico Importing Co coffee and fresh sandwiches near the park, told me the store was all out of the feline meal. At Gourmet Guild, an upscale cafe that carries fine (human) foods, Jee Song, an employee, lit up. From Scratch had a real following of diehard fans, she said, but Gourmet Guild has not carried it in a while. It was hard to get customers to think about going to the fridge for cat food, she explained, but pet food is moving towards human-grade ingredients and small, fresh batches. Those guys are ahead of their time, she wistfully assured me.
My last stop was the only actual pet store on my list, PS9 Pets, a cute little place full of tiny kittens rolling around in front of a giant cage. They had just sold out, they told me after a careful inspection of two fridges. A woman who had come in earlier that day had walked out with the last four containers. And so, alas, my cat food-tasting adventures were not meant to be.
Fortunately for me, Rosenberg and his partners had done the tasting already. So what does cat food with human-grade meat (specifically turkey leg) and no preservatives taste like? According to Rosenberg, it is like a bland turkey pâté, with maybe just the tiniest sour note from the multivitamin. I am not sure that sounds that much better than Purina.
