Here’s One to Read over Breakfast…
The Department of Biological Sciences at Brock University in Ontario, Canada has successfully refined a methodology to allow for a HUMAN TASTE PANEL to profile the flavor and texture of cat food products (CFP) and their component parts.
Using these techniques, 18 flavor attributes and four texture dimensions were generated to describe the sensations elicited by 13 commercial pet food samples.
The flavor attributes included:
- sweet
- sour/acid
- tuna
- herbal
- spicy
- soy
- salty
- cereal
- caramel
- chicken
- methionine (this is a flavor attribute??)
- vegetable
- offaly (and I don’t think they mean the county in Ireland)
- meaty
- burnt flavor
- prawn
- rancid (yum!)
- bitter
Textures included hardness, chewiness, grittiness and viscosity.
They report that it is “now necessary to determine the usefulness and limits of sensory data gathered from human panels in describing and predicting food acceptance and preference behaviors in cats.”
This reminds me of the old joke asking why no cat food company makes mouse-flavored cat food.
I know that cat food is marketed to appeal to the owner’s taste buds, but how about some truth in reporting? I wanna know which cat foods ranked high on the rancid-burnt-offaly taste-o-meter so that I can steer clear of them.
And I’d like to know how much those poor cat food tasters get paid!
[PHOTO: Independent.co.uk]
I dunno, Namerovsky likes garbage better than any other food. Sometimes he comes home smelling like a dumpster. Lots of offal and rancid, but he’s happy…
Hi Skeezy, Usually, Bosco eats dry cat foods that don’t have much aroma and I’m not about to taste them. When he eats wet cat food, the stinkier, the better he enjoys them! No taste testing of that stuff for us.
Umm… the Woman is glad that is not her job?
MOL, didn’t it occur to them to use cats to test the tastiness of the food. If they had a group of 50 cats and had a simple way to rate the foods on how many cats ate any, how many ate it all and how long they took it would be far more accurate than any human taste panel. Plus what a horrible job for a human!!
Caramel?? Oh-kay. Yeah, they put the weirdest things in pet food.
Yeah, Minxy, I’m with you! Good food is fishy and should smell like fish and then I will eat it all NOW! But if I don’t, that Snooky will come along and eat it; he eats whatever he can take. And my Mom says that job should make for some good conversation openers.