[rcvassallo]

>> claiming you can go on and on on just one food source for long periods of time without extensive testing is just irresponsible.

How can pets tolerate eating the same food for a long period of time? Most cat and dog owners get one brand of food for their pet and stick with it for years at a time.

Are our digestive systems really that different?

[DanBC]

Most pet food is made by a few manufacturers. They have a lot of labs testing and refining different recipes.

There are foods for fat pets; foods to clean teeth; food for kidney health.

Pet foods have considerable number of patents. Talk to British people about dog excrement, and there are people of a certain age who remember dog poo being white and furry. People want a food that produces a nice firm stool, that's easy to clean up. Anything too loose and they think the pet is ill (even if it isn't).

There's a lot of money in pet food.

Notice, also, that pet food is often a mix of biscuits and meat, or just meat, or just biscuits. These are solid foods. Water is extra. No-one so far has taken the nutrients a pet needs and blended these into a glop.

[justincormack]

Indeed there used to be whole areas of Usenet devoted to the mystery of white dogshit and why it had gone away....

[rcvassallo]

Thanks for pointing out some of the finer details on pet food, very informative.

Still, my basic point still stands, that our pets do just fine on essentially a single source of food. Why would it matter if it was blended into a glop? My cat has food allergies so he's been fed a single high-quality hypoallergenic food for over 3 years now. It stopped his excessive itching, made his fur softer, and he generally shows all signs of being very healthy according to the vet. I'm sure all the lab research contributed to the cat food's effectiveness and it would be great to see the same happen with Soylent.

[papsosouid]

You vastly overestimate the quality control, safety testing, and labelling requirements of pet foods. Pet food does not need to be certified, or pass any tests to be sold. Pet food is labelled according to AAFCO guidelines, which merely specifies how much protein/fat/calcium/phosphorous and a few other things are required. That's it. Those pet foods for fat dogs and old dogs and young dogs and kidney health and shiney coat and furballs and clean teeth are just ordinary pet food. They do not need to be different in any way. The manufacturer can literally put the exact same food into all of those bags, and none of the claims on them need to be verifiable.

>Talk to British people about dog excrement, and there are people of a certain age who remember dog poo being white and furry

That is because they remember dogs eating meat. Now dogs eat corn. There is no patent on dog food that makes white poop.

>Notice, also, that pet food is often a mix of biscuits and meat, or just meat, or just biscuits

This is for the benefit of marketing the product to people, it has nothing to do with nutrition.