Daily Dosage: Kibbles in your breakfast bowl

Taste-tested and approved

Scan through the lists of studies released in the hundreds of medical and health journals each year, and you start to feel a little confused about why we’re doing this, but have yet to cure cancer.

Case in point, from a February 2009 study at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. Researchers hoping to optimize the taste and texture of cat food used human participants to eat and evaluate different brands of kitty cuisine.

Using these techniques, 18 flavour attributes (sweet, sour/acid, tuna, herbal, spicy, soy, salty, cereal, caramel, chicken, methionine, vegetable, offaly, meaty, burnt flavour, prawn, rancid and bitter) and four texture dimensions (hardness, chewiness, grittiness and viscosity) were generated to describe the sensations elicited by 13 commercial pet food samples.

According to the study, participants required significant effort – both nasal and salivary – to tell the difference between some of the brands. The challenge to distinguish Friskies from Iams indicates “considerable complexity in the products assessed.”

There are actually so many jokes here, I’d rather just leave it to the reader. But can we take a moment to reflect on the sweet irony? Usually when a cat is in a lab, it’s because we’re shaving him, infecting him with cancer and injecting a viral pathogen into him. But how can we be sure Fluffy is happy come mealtime? Taste test his food. Obviously.