This is a Sunday Sound-off post, in which I, or another CatCentric team / community member, gets personal with you and dishes out opinions, rants, book reviews, and so on, straight up and uncensored! This one’s from Renee Morin, a raw feeding advocate and author of The Dog’s Dish. 🙂

Yuki and the chicken, by Louise Balmforth.

“But I don’t have the space to feed fresh a fresh diet!”

I hear that a lot in the reasons why people who want to feed a fresh diet stick to feeding strictly commercial processed diets.

Absolutely, if you have the space, you can definitely use it up easily doing a fresh or raw food diet by preparing larger batches of food for the freezer, shopping in bulk, ordering supplies online, getting meat from hunters, or from friends clearing out their freezers, and such. Some raw feeders even have entire freezers or multiple freezers for their cats and/or dogs, full of options to last months and months. And, yes, being able to do it that way can help keep costs down, but, not having that space doesn’t have to hold you back; it just means doing things a little differently.

I share a home and have limited space: a bar fridge in my private area for our fresh produce, a shelf in the communal freezer, a cupboard for the dogs dry goods and dishes, a small box in the shared fridge of “on the go” foods for the dogs. I decided lack of space was not going to be a deterrent to me feeding the way I wanted to feed my dogs.

It means shopping more regularly and not often anything in bulk. I shop for meat and raw dog food every 2 weeks. I shop for fresh 1-2 times a week, and, before it spoils, I freeze the fresh we didn’t quite get to finish on time. I prepare the food by meal, by day, or by a few days at most. Not in batches that will last for weeks or months and need freezer space.

But, doesn’t that take more time: shopping so often, starting from scratch all the time? No. I suspect about the same time as it takes people to prepare big batches of dog food for the freezer. Sure, more than just scooping kibble into a bowl or opening a can…but…some things in life are just worth finding the time…especially those that may give you more time together in the long run.

Here are some photos. My fridge box with stuff that’s up next. My cupboard where I can see at a glance what I’ve got and what I need (eg out to get some sardines today), along with glass bowls, plates, and their dog bowls (in the dishwasher right now). The freezer has a bin for produce type items, meat and fish, some almond and coconut flour and ground flax tucked in the back. There’s always a package of green tripe on the go and ground chicken backs, and we’re rotating through turkey, lamb, and goat in our commercial whole prey raw patties. I buy their patties in meats I don’t usually eat myself and they get DIY meals out of meats we share like chicken, beef, bison, and salmon.

Don’t let space hold you back; you’ll be surprised what you can do even if you don’t have any!

#FeedFresh