Marketing at its brightest: the LOLCats edition

If you ever watch any of the commercial channels, you might have noticed a new series of adverts for Iams cat food, with a number of our feline friends saying: ‘I am not a vegetarian’.

And of course, cats are most certainly not veggies. Dogs, like us, are omnivores, but cats are straightforward carnivores. They need animal protein. That’s what they have evolved to require.

So the Iams ad is rather heartening, as it stresses that Iams has much more protein than other products.

Now let’s start by pointing out that Iams is not a budget product. Quite the contrary. We’re talking £5.39 for a kilo at Ocado at present, which, as part of its ‘low price promise’, means that it’s no more expensive than the same product at tesco.com.

According to the packet, that size will do one cat for 15 days. Or three cats for five days, in a household such as ours.

Everything on the packet just reeks of expertise and quality.

It was “developed with vetinarians”, apparently. It’s “good for life”.

The packet in front of me talks of “proactive health” for adult cats, “with wild ocean fish and chicken”. That “wild” incidentally, is in smaller letters than the rest of that bit.

There’s plenty more, though.

“Chicken and fish for strong muscles”, it declares. “Prebiotics and beet pulp for healthy digestion” – oh, those lovely whatever-they-are-biotics! “Antioxidants to support a strong immune system” and “7 essential nutrients for a healthy heart”.

And that’s just on the front of a bag – there’s barely a space that doesn’t continue the same message.

So let’s look at what’s actually inside, remembering the maxim that pet food is subject to more rules etc than human food.

Sticking with that wild ocean fish and chicken, I decided that, rather than type out what was on the bag that I have in my possession, I’d do a cut and paste from Ocado’s site (where I purchased it). This is usually entirely reliable.

This is what came up:

“Chicken meal, maize, wheat, animal fat, ocean fish (>4%), dried beet pulp, chicken digest, dried whole egg, potassium chloride, brewer's dried yeast, calcium carbonate, fish oil, DL-methionine, sodium chloride.”

Something struck me as odd, so I looked again at the actual bag. This is what it said:

“Dried chicken and turkey (35%, a natural source of taurine), maize, wheat, animal fat, rice, ocean fish meal (4.4%), dried beet pulp (1.9%), hydrolysed animal proteins, fructooligosaccharides (0.69%), potassium chloride, brewer’s dried yeast, dried whole egg, calcium carbonate.”

So let’s stick with this.

“Fructooligosaccharides”? What on Earth is that? A little research reveals that it’s an artificial sweetener. Okay, it’s a small percentage, but cats do not need sweeteners – artificial or otherwise.

“Beet pulp” sounds fairly healthy though. Ah, well according to Felicity Lawrence, it’s a by-product of sugar production.

Now to be fair to Iams (a Proctor & Gamble company, just so you know), it does seem that that subsidiary’s products do contain more animal protein than others.

I vary my cats’ diet around. At present, they’re just finishing a bag of Purina One Natural Balance. Oh, you wouldn’t believe how healthy that bag looks. It’s “rich in ocean fish” – 18% – and has some “dried poultry protein” and, of course, maize and oats and brown rice and so forth. And blackcurrants, as an antioxidant.

This, to be clear, is a Nestlé product.

Why, oh why, do cats need sugar or artificial sweeteners or even the leftovers from sugar production?

Why do these animals, which Iams in its adverts stress, are most decidedly not vegetarians, need all sorts of grains and rice?

It couldn’t possibly be partly because, as Lawrence explains in Eat Your Heart Out, US agricultural subsidies mean that we have a surfeit of grains going cheap, could it?

As Dr John Briffa points out in Escape the Diet Trap, we tend to think grains are innately healthy, but don’t forget that that is precisely what geese and ducks are fed to fatten their livers up for foie gras, not something containing fat.

We shifted our cats to dried food precisely because the vet told us it was healthier.

Now, looking back, I remember how our locum vet at the time didn’t consider anything about Mack’s condition apart from getting me to buy his food – Iams or something similar – directly from the vet, and having a bit of dental work for him.

The fact that my boy was seriously ill with kidney disease – which I didn’t know at the time – was clearly not the main issue.

And that, as only a very slight aside, should tell us something about the nature and priorities of privatised healthcare.

Now I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would think that the attachment that I – and many others – have to their cats is bonkers.

And that’s fine. They’re absolutely entitled to think that.

But with feline diabetes figures rising, I’m frankly appalled to find that what I thought was sensible and healthy is not necessarily the case.

And who the bloody hell feeds sugar and/or artificial sweeteners to a cat, unless they’re trying to get that cat addicted to a certain foodstuff?

Shame on you, Iams – and you’re not even the worst.

A good healthy smell!

One of the residents of Hackney City Farm.

One minute it seemed that I was up to my eyeballs in the intricacies of work, on the busiest press day for some considerable time, and yet almost the next, it was a bright, sunny Saturday morning on Broadway Market, and I was sharing the crumbs of my breakfast sausage roll with a starling, who was hopping around below, metallic livery glistening in the light.

There were other things to revel in as the morning unfolded. Now I could just walk down the road toward Broadway Market, but I rarely do.

It’s much more interesting to cross that road and walk alongside the Regent Canal, at the back of an estate.

This isn’t a towpath side, and the bank is fenced off.

It’s a tip in many ways, but for all the careless trash that has been thrown in with the weeds, it’s also bursting with life. Squirrels are often visible, leaping from tree to tree. Yesterday, one was running around with what appeared to be a slice fruit loaf in its mouth, stopping every so often to have a proper munch.

Above, a great tit was on watch duty. Still higher up, smaller birds sang their songs.

And it’s a stretch where the changing of the seasons always seems so subtle yet obvious: from spring buds on trees that drape beyond the rusted railings to reddening leaves in the autumn. It always seems that I spot the changes here first.

How different it was this morning, as day came up to reveal a canopy of featureless grey.

But the week ahead not only beckons – things were required of today.

I toddled down to Columbia Road for the first time this year, pausing in Haggerston Park to admire more evidence of the turning of the year; pale green strings of bells, tinged pink in places.

Les was in his shop – so I was able to organise potting compost and, as he suggested, organic seaweed feed. He’ll bring those up later in the week.

But there was no joy on the subject of something to dig into the heavy, clayey soil at the back.

“What you really need,” he said, “is proper manure”, and went on to say that it was a pity I didn’t have access to a car, since nearby Hackney City Farm would probably give (or sell) me some.

Oh well. Wandering back along the market, I mused on whether I could get anything appropriate from Bradbury’s ironmonger at the top of Broadway Market.

But then, since my journey could easily take me past the city farm, I thought I’d pop in to enquire.

In the tiny shop, the ladies heard me out and suggested I look in the farmyard for someone called Stuart.

The yard itself was a bustle of hens clucking around, while one volunteer worked in a stall at the far end of the cobbles.

The smell – ah, the smell!

I remember that smell fondly from all the childhood visits to farms. It is, as my (honorary) Uncle John would say, “a good healthy smell!”

There were also signs everywhere, warning that it wasn’t a good idea to pet any of the cats you might see, since they’re working farm cats and can ‘get a bit grumpy’.

Stuart, as it happened, was busy in the kitchen; a vast man with a bandana around his head. After hearing me explain my mission, it also became clear that he was entirely the wrong person.

But he led me to an office where two women were on duty, with various of those grumpy, hard-working farm cats sleeping around the place in various spots.

It was a superbly productive conversation.

Later this week, I’ll pop down – it’s just a short walk through the park – and they’ll give me as much manure as I need. I get it free because, living so close by, I count as "community". And they'll lend me a wheelbarrow to bring it back too.

Now that’s going to be serious metropolitan sophistication!

But nothing could be better for what I want.

Fortunately, the weather looks decent over the coming week. Tomorrow and on Tuesday, in between trying to find a boiler engineer, waiting for my mini greenhouse to be delivered and making marmalade, I’m aiming to weed and sift the rest of my patch.

It’ll be backbreaking, but it has to be done. And once it is, then everything will get a bit easier.

Once the manure is dug in, it’ll get to rest for a couple of weeks. And then I should be able to start sowing directly into the bed.

In the meantime, I’m reading Felicity Lawrence’s Eat Your Heart Out: Why the food business is bad for the planet and your health.

I’ll go into more detail at a later date, but it doesn’t make for pleasant reading – even when you don’t actually eat vast amounts of processed food.

But it’s yet another swathe of information that makes me wish for a simpler life – and also convinces me of how worthwhile it is to grow as much of my own food as possible.

My little experiment in the car park is actually rather more than just a bit of messing around.

While it gives me pleasure in and of itself, and while the mere exercise of gardening is probably good for the health, the more I learn about the state of our food industry, the more I realise that it’s good for me in other ways.

Okay, let’s not go over the top with what I can achieve in such a small space, with limited time and very little knowledge or experience.

But if knowledge is power, then knowledge about food also gives an edge to such exploits: an edge that says that it isn’t just a bit of playing around.

The next few days should be busy and a bit testing and also fun.

The coming months will be fascinating.