Food

Chicken and goat milk, with real blueberry, cranberry or egg yolk freeze-dried in. Nothing else.

A cat is an obligate carnivore, and three nutrients show why. A cat makes taurine, but far too slowly to meet its own needs. It cannot turn the beta-carotene in plants into vitamin A the way most animals can. And it cannot build arachidonic acid from plant oils. All three arrive ready-made in meat, which is why a food that stays close to meat has less to make up for later. B12 comes from meat too, although no animal makes its own.

The gentlest way we know to make meat keep. The food is frozen solid, then the ice is drawn off as vapour under vacuum, at low temperature, so the meat is never cooked. What comes out is the same raw ingredients with the water removed: no preservatives, no binders, nothing added to make it keep.

Very little, which is the point. The water leaves as vapour instead of being cooked off, so the protein and the heat-sensitive vitamins come through largely intact. It is the same reason freeze-dried fruit still tastes of the fruit.

Room temperature, somewhere dry and out of the light. A cupboard is right. They do not need a fridge and should not go in one, because moisture is the one thing freeze-dried food cannot take.

Goat milk is easier on a cat than cow's milk, and here it's freeze-dried into a small treat rather than poured into a bowl. That makes it gentle on most cats. As with any treat, a few a week is plenty.

A splash of water over a freeze-dried bite puts the moisture back, and most cats take it happily that way. Beyond that, keep water easy to reach: a wide bowl filled to the brim, away from the food, suits most cats. Cats are not strong drinkers, so the easier you make it, the more they take.

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