We offer delicious home cooked meals. Why Not Do The Same For Our Dogs?

Homemade dog food it has a more honorable history than I thought.

In 1966, ur-food writer MFK Fisher reviewed pet cookbooks in The New Yorker, and in the late 90s, Jeffrey Steingarten he recorded the events of chef Daniel Boulud “The French Soup of Dogs and Their Owners” on his pooch in Vogue.

French food writer Frédérick E. Grasser-Hermé said My dog ​​makes recipes (My Dog Makes Recipes) in 2001 and held an opening party where dog guests were served bones filled with caviar. Finally published in 2014, Judith Jones – the editor of Julia Child, Edna Lewis, and many other famous people – wrote. Love Me, Feed MeHavanese cooking style with recipes like roast beef shoulder with broccoli rabe and lamb and potato hash. Martha Stewartin 2022, blog of the food that comes from his garden he eats. Nara Smith, in 2026, continues the line as an influencerserving fresh meat rescue puppy, cabbage, and sardines.

These days, and more than 87 million dogs are kept as pets in the USthe state of their health has become very bad: There is red light treatment and longevity pills. But food remains the most difficult thing for many owners. According to a study by the American Veterinary Medical Association that took more than ten years, there have been about 3 to 8 percent of people who cook for their canine companions.

I am currently one of those people.

When I got my dog, Benny, in 2019, I worried about what to feed him. I gave up meat in 2011, but I didn’t think it would be good to feed organic meat. I couldn’t see myself eating him again. He is a large, active dog, weighing 70 pounds; I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to cook for him properly. So I fed him commercial dog food that his vet approved, topped with fresh farm eggs, roasted vegetables, and sardines. We went on with our lives.

Then, in early 2026, Benny was diagnosed with lymphoma. I began to ask myself again and again with the same thoughts as all the gourmands who came before: If food was so important to me and I didn’t want to have the same dry food all the time, why did I expect my dog ​​to be happy and healthy?

I immediately began researching how to make healthy homemade dog food that would help him maintain weight, strength, and energy during the six months of his treatment. But when I did, I felt like I fell down a rabbit hole and couldn’t figure out MAHA from science.

There were websites that looked like they hadn’t been updated since the 90s, Facebook and Reddit threads where people debated whether or not to get rid of potatoes, and concerns about fat that I hadn’t thought about since Atkins went out of style. Did dogs, the first type of domesticated animal, at some point in recent history simply eat whatever the people around them ate? And yet, it seemed that if I didn’t have access to a pound of organ meat or to keep a dry powder of oysters in my larder, I shouldn’t even try.

To understand why the world of dog food seemed so complicated, I spoke with Jonathan Stockman, a board-certified veterinarian and assistant professor at the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine. He has noted that the home-cooked dog food market has been growing for at least 15 years, and says the “melamine problem” is where it all started.