After considering the things a dog will eat you might want to change your mind.
Our old dog will often pick up a dry piece of cow patty and go off and dine. He always has food, Purina, We think he must be lacking something in his diet but never can figure what.Many times when he was younger he would bring home a rotting deer leg,I guess some hunter had field dressed one and the coyotes had not found it yet.
As for me just point me at down the snack cracker aisle, gimme some summer sausage and a beer.
I looked at the Purina sites http://www.purina.ca and http://www.purina.com and there wasn’t a trace of Monkey Chow or Rhino Chow or anything like that, not even a product listing… just various types of cat and dog food.
I guess this is just another example of the kind of creeping cultural conservatism and sameness that bedevils us too much already (ref: North American automotive and housing design).
Let’s get some variety out there! Where are the leopard owners and the echidna* owners and the rhino owners? I want my Monkey Chow, dammit! Kangaroo Chow! Sloth Chow!
[SUP]*…and I’m not even sure what an echidna is…[/SUP]
As far as your quest for human style dog food try your local Army-Navy store. They are called MREs.Meal Ready to Eat. Well they aren’t quite that bad.
You can also find concentrated snack food,which is what I think you are looking for, at a sporting goods store with the trail or in the hiking department.
Nah. MREs are still food. They’re like TV dinners that keep for 10 years.
And the Balance bar thing…still too compact. You don’t feed your dog ONE pellet of dog food–you give him a whole bowl of it! Meal-replacement bars are not satisfying, IMO.
I agree with the OP–we need a complete food that also takes up a reasonable amount of space. Cereal-style would be fine. A big bowl of pellets that we could pour milk over, or just eat dry, three times a day.
To clarify my position on the People Kibble situation…
I’m not saying that all I would want to eat would be People Kibble. I actually like good food a lot (see OP for a list of delicious edibles). It’s just that it seems like a waste to nuke a non-nutitious micro-meal, or hit a fast food joint when I just want something fast. I’m not going to taste it; why shouldn’t it be good for me?
The Balance bar theory, is interesting, but I’ve got to go with Toad: "You don’t feed your dog ONE pellet of dog food–you give him a whole bowl of it! Meal-replacement bars are not satisfying, IMO. "
I want a nutritious snack food, which I can pour in a bowl (or, for the ultimately lazy, there’s the eating right out of the bag option), and munch on instead of having to settle for greasy fast food or nutrition-free microwaveables.
As to the idea that it couldn’t taste good, I refer you to Pringles; sure, they don’t taste good either, but they’re edible. And I can’t imagine a more unnatural substance…
So, come on, SDMB. Petition Purina; call your congressman. We want People Kibble, and we want it now!
Oh, and I quit smoking pot years ago. But brain damage is forever…
Yeah, I noticed that too. But the stuff really exists! Just do a google search on “Purina Monkey Chow”, and you’ll get plenty of links at zoos and research facilities.
P.S. I figured out what Chin Chow… “Chin” is for “Chinchilla”!
I just grabbed a box of wheat crackers,one of my favorite snacks nowadays and checked the nutrition facts.
serving size 7 crackers
Calories per serving 140
In order to get 2000 calories you would have to eat one and a half boxes of the things.
Hmmm maybe with summer sausage and a chunk of cheese…
Feed dealers custom mix animal feed every day.
All you have to do is bring them the specs and Waa Laa(sp)
Just for comparison
A 500 lbs calf eats two ice cream buckets of special mixed feed a day. Don’t know what they weigh so lets talk volume.
Thats 10 guarts.
Thats two quarts per 100lbs.
Hell I’d bet you’d be sitting on the stool all day after one quart.
Well, I found http://www.dyets.com/Cerdiet.htm which had among other things, Dog Chow, Cat Chow, Rabbit Chow. Chick Chow. Monkey Chow. Pig Chow! Woodchuck Chow! Gerbil Chow!
No Echidna Chow, though.
I wonder whether Pig Chow would be good for humans? Aren’t pigs are so similar to humans that there is talk of putting pig organs in humans?
An echidna is a spiny anteater native to Australia.
I think People Kibble is a great idea. It is obviously not something that people would want to eat exclusively. But I could see People Kibble being very useful for emergency rations and, as mentioned in the OP, famine relief. If it could also be sold to people as snack food/meal replacement, then so much the better.
IMHO, it should:
a. have a long shelf life, like dog kibble
b. Be in a compact shape/size for easy transportation.
c. Be palatable.
If it was shaped and packaged like saltines or graham crackers, that would be good. It could be munched as-is, or softened with water to make a porridge for small children and people with no teeth.
I sometimes make homemade kibble for my dog. It contains a variety of whole grains, powdered milk, etc. It is pretty tasty, actually. I doubt I would eat it as a regular part of my diet, but if I was truly hungry, I would gladly eat large quantities. I don’t see why Purina couldn’t make something that tastes at least as good.
Well now, we should definitely be able to come up with some recipe that could be used for Sapien Chow. If anything essential is missing, I’m sure someone will point out what it is and how we can add it.
So let’s start with a good base:
Crushed Total cereal
Scott Adams (creator of the comic strip “Dilbert”) toyed around with the idea of creating a simple, portable food product that would supply loads of nutrition. The result: the Dilberito, a vegetarian burrito that comes in four different styles. They do sound kinda tasty…
Having just read yet another book about our hardy forefathers, I suspect pemmican could double as “People Chow”. So to the Total add: shredded dried meat, fat, dried berries, etc. Mix, form into cakes, let dry, then eat.
Hmmm. that’s a little confusing. You’d think that the purina.com site would at least have a “looking for Monkey Chow…?”-style link to Purina Mills.
Anyway, in Purina Mills’ site I found a picture of Mazuri Primate Feed (i.e. Primate Chow). Would that work? Humans are primates, right?
Of course, the lack of market demand might be due to those pesky “restaurant” and “grocery” businesses occupying most of the target mindshare. Advertise, dammit! Start a saturation campaign to get People Chow into every living brain on the planet!
[SUP]I’ve been in marketing too long… <whimper>[/SUP]
Now you’re in “chicken and egg” territory, manny. Perhaps market demand could be created.
In my conception of Person Chow, it’s primary market would not be the general public. If it would mainly be used for famine relief and emergency rations, then I could see that organizations like the Red Cross and the military would be the primary consumers. As far as the general public goes, I would expect survivalist types to buy it, too.
If it was reasonably tasty, and/or there was an embellished version (like fruit&nut) it might have appeal to ordinary folks. Backpackers might like it. If it was cheap, people on tight budgets might eat it sometimes. People may even eat it as a meal-replacement convenience food. Who knows?
But I could see that there is a place in the world for a portable, non-perishable foodstuff that a person could live on indefinitely.
My grandparents once babysat my sister and me for a week. Every morning I would pour out a bowl of cat kibble for my grandfather, pour milk on it, and bring it to him to eat in bed.
At the end of the week I told him what I had been feeding him. He spent the rest of that morning chasing me round the outside of the house with a toy plastic lawnmower (the first thing he grabbed) shouting “I’ll tannyazzle your backside!”
I really had to move to keep ahead of him, and he kept after me for the entire morning. It was like a marathon with the devil. Judging from his energy level, I’d say the cat kibble must have been pretty good stuff.
I’ve sometimes proposed making People Kibble, and having sacks of it in grocery stores, free for the taking, instead of food stamps. This, plus some formula for babies, should be all that people need to live. For the widest applications, People Kibble should be made of vegan ingredients (this would eliminate dietary restrictions) and be available in varieties that don’t include meat.
I could go on and on about this, but I’d have to start up a new thread in GD.
Manny, good-tasting people kibble would create a market demand. How do I know this? The success of places like McDonald’s and companies like Swanson’s. There is a market for cheap and easy food. If that food was nutritive and available with a long shelf life and zero preparation time, people would buy it in droves.
This issue is also a public health concern. Obesity-related diseases are on the rise. This is due in no small part to the fact that all low-priced food is nutritionally inadequate, and contains huge amounts of simple sugars and lipids. Eating healthy isn’t cheap or easy. People chow would change that.
So people, lay off the monotony issue. Nobody but the desperate would eat it all the time, and then it would be a vast improvement over the current diet of high-fat, high-sugar foods eaten by that social class. What the OP asked, and what we all wish to know, is ‘Is people chow possible?’, ‘Is people chow feasable?’, and ‘Would people chow have a long shelf life?’ All other topics are tangental and should be taken to other threads.
(Note: I’m tired of seeing good threads like this one highjacked, especially by moderators who should know better.)
