I don’t have a dog, but if I did, I think I would make its food.

I have two favorite dog foods. Not that I’ve eaten dog food. But if I was a dog, I would definitely eat these foods. The first one is Gaines-Burgers. They were these cellophane packets of some sort of meat-looking stuff, that was shaped like a raw hamburger patty. Imagine if you took some meat-colored Play Doh, put it in that thing where you pull the lever, and hair comes out of the guys head, but the hair is Play Doh, trimmed that hair, formed it into a raw hamburger-looking patty, then heat-sealed it in a clear bag. On the commercials, they would show someone take a packet, open it up, and dump it in the dog’s bowl. Or they would crumble it up, to show that it looked like ground beef. If I was a dog, I would totally think I was eating people food.

My other favorite dog food is Gravy Train. It’s a dry dog food, comes in a big bag, like most dry dog foods. However, once you pour some of this stuff in a bowl, and add the magic ingredient (WATER!), it turns into something spectacular. You stir and stir and hope the food doesn’t topple out of the bowl and stir and gravy appears out of nowhere! Like some sort of Doug Henning magic trick. I can’t think of any people food where you add water, and you get some sort of sauce. Well, besides Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, but there’s a lot more actual cooking involved in that. I guess ramen could be saucy, if you don’t put a lot of water. But again, you need to cook that stuff (or at least use really hot water). Side story: Once, when I was dumb (age 10 or 11), I thought a great way to speed up preparing lunch (which was ramen) during Summer vacation when I would be home alone, was to pre-add the water to the noodle block in the pot, hours before I would eat it. “Then, around 12:30pm when I heat it up, I won’t have to measure out that water, which takes so much preparation time.” Like I mentioned, I was dumb, and forgot the whole “ramen noodles absorb water”-thing. I went to turn on the stove at 12:30, and saw that my noodle block turned into this big, pot-shaped blob of spongy noodles. I still ate it, but it sucked. I like my noodles al dente.

I should state that I’ve never had a dog. I’ve actually only had one mammal as a pet, and he was guinea pig. My family did have a dog, however. But they had the dog before I was even conceived. I never saw it. And they gave the dog away because it kept jumping on my then 3 year old sister. Or maybe she was 5. Who knows? I just know I wasn’t around to enjoy seeing a dog pounce on the members of my family.

Dry dog food looks like shit, doesn’t it? It’s as if someone—some all knowing dog expert/god—said, “Hey, dogs, are you hungry? I got some food for you. I took actual food, and ground it up, mixed it with a bunch of flour, and made little ground-up food Necco wafers. That’s what you’re going to eat from now on. A scoop of this. For every meal. Every day. Enjoy your life!” Old sci-fi books/movies would talk about how, in the future, we would enjoy our meals in pill form. It’s the future right now, and that hasn’t happened. Not because we can’t make meal pills, but mainly because people like eating real food. But for some reason, we think dogs hate eating, so we’ve given them the equivalent of meal pills. And that sucks. Because dogs probably love eating as much as we do. So yeah, if I had a dog, I’d make its food. I mean, it can’t be that bad. Some meat, some rice, some veggies. It’s not like I would have to get the right balance of rosemary, or sous-vide the beef to 55, or else Fido is going to give me a bad Yelp review. Dogs can’t fuckin’ go on Yelp, they can’t even type in the URL. I could basically just be lazy cooking this dog food, and the dog would eat it up, because, hey, it’s there. And maybe this dog would know about the Necco wafer-like kibble stuff, because he had it before. If that’s the case, itwould totally realize that this other food is much better. And since it’s eating normal people food, the dog could eat at the kitchen table, like a normal person. I would never let a dog who eats kibble to eat at the table. That kibble is gross.