BARF

That, by the way, is the acronym for Biologically Appropriate Raw Food.  For those of you who wonder about my new raw cat food endeavour, here's the process:

I ring up my tuktuk driver and ask him to take me to Lucky Supermarket, which still has the best prices I've found on the chicken parts.  Yes, the Cambodians pay much less at the wet markets, but as a white foreigner, I've still not managed to negotiate prices lower than Lucky's. My biggest gripe with the supermarket is that everything comes on those damned polystyrene trays, so every batch of BARF means five of those trays go into the waste stream.  

When I get home, I start by laying out the non-meat ingredients:

Egg yolks, vitamins E and B-complex, fish oil capsules,
and virgin coconut oil, made locally by Coco Khmer

I mix all that with a cup or two of water and set that bowl aside.  Then I take my two whole chicken carcasses and rinse them thoroughly to remove any surface bacteria.

Considering that I'm a vegetarian myself, I'm a bit alarmed by how much I relish using my meat cleaver. WHACK! Off come the wings and legs.  Then I slice the meat off the body and cut it into chunks. This gives the cats something to tear and gnaw at, which is excellent exercise for their jaws and teeth. The rest of the bird goes into the meat grinder, bones and all.

It's a toss up which delights me more:  my heavy Thai meat cleaver, or my ruthless Russian grinder. It gobbles up drumsticks and backbones with aplomb. 

If I ever do this on a larger scale, I think I'll probably need to invest in an electric grinder, but this one gives at least my right arm a good workout, and there's no part of it that's likely to fail or break.  

200g of chicken livers; 400g of chicken hearts

One of the raw cat food proponents describes her recipe as "reverse engineering a mouse".  When cats catch rodents or birds in the natural world, they eat the whole beast. One of the essential ingredients of cat food is taurine, an amino acid which is highly concentrated in the eyes and brains of rodents. Chicken hearts provide the necessary taurine in this recipe, and the livers...  well, they provide a bunch of nutrients, which is a good thing, because grinding them up is probably the most revolting step in the whole process. At least the organs go through the grinder quickly.  Blech.

Then I mix it all together -- the non-meat ingredients, the chunked and ground chicken and the ground organs.  

Et voila! BARF.  

Each batch will fill five ice cube trays.  Once frozen, I empty the trays, putting the BARFcubes into zip-lock freezer bags.  

Yes, these are ice cube trays that I use only for cat food.
I don't relish the thought of BARF-infused gin.

After filling the five ice cube trays, there is just a wee bit left over, and like kids who hang around the kitchen waiting to lick the bowl when Mum makes chocolate chip cookies, my fuzzbutts are lurking just around the corner.  Maneki, of course, won't eat anything until Crumpet has convinced her it's not poisoned. Paranoia didn't pay today -- Crumpet licked the bowl clean.

nom nom nom ...

So, here are the economics of this little exercise:

One batch of BARF will feed my two cats for 14 days.

The rough cost per batch is $16.  

Time, including prep-work and clean-up:  about two hours.

My current freezer, however, can only hold two batches of BARF. If I am going to do this on a commercial scale, even small-scale, I have to invest in a chest freezer -- an expensive item, both to buy and to run in a country with very high electric tariffs. The question, of course, is how large the potential market for this luxury cat food might be.  Maybe I should make up some brochures and put them at the Agrovet Clinic, just to explain what the raw food is about, why it's so great, and contact details to obtain a sample. The vets had told me they would promote my BARF, so I guess the next step is to see how many cat people will actually pay for something that is colossally superior to Friskies... but 4-5 times the price.  As for me, I'm thrilled! My home-made raw food is about 1/3 the price of the high-end commercially canned foods and 1/4 the price of the freeze-dried raw.