In this episode of the Roadtreking RV Podcast, we talk about food: The food we prepare and eat ourselves in our RV, and the food we serve our pets.

Plus, we have a whole bunch of listener comments and questions, tips on finding the best deal for an RV, RV News, the RV Calendar and an Off-The-Beaten-Path Report.

Mary Jane Curry, the new RV recipes writer for the Roadtreking.com blog, is our special guest. And Jennifer has a special report on the need to very carefully select the food we serve our pets.

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Complete Shownotes for Episode 77 of the Roadtreking RV Podcast follows. To jump directly to that part of the podcast, just click the time hyperlink:

JENNIFER'S TIP OF THE WEEK - Healthy Dog Food

This tip is a long one and it has to do with proper feeding of our pets and it comes from Bill and Peggy Bechtell, who recently wrote us to congratulate us on the addition of Bo, our now three-month-old Norwegian Elkhound puppy. Since well over half of all RVers travel with pets, we figure this will interest many. [spp-timestamp time="6:21"]

Anyway, here’s the note from the Bechtells:

“We love to listen to your podcasts and met you both in Montana last year, the day before Jennifer went to the hospital. I wanted to recommend, ‘Taste of the Wild’, dog food for your new dog. We had a beautiful Labrador who was given three months to live. We took her to a holistic vet recommended by the oncologist. She changed her food to the above, and gave her supplements, which allowed her to live two and a half more years. The changes in her coat and energy due to the food were amazing. Any dog food that has, “meat by products”, as an ingredient is made from some pretty disgusting things, sometimes even including euthanized dogs and cats in the country from the SPCA, and veterinarians, road kill, and animals too ill for us to eat. So, our pets are eating cancer and flea and tick medications. I verified this with a friend that works at the SPCA, a veterinarian, and a nationally known dog trainer.”

That is quite the revelation isn’t it? We spent a couple days researching this and found that while the pet food industry as a whole denies the part about euthanized dogs and cats being used, some pet foods indeed do contain them. In the shownotes, Here's a link to just one of many such reports we found that quotes a top industry expert saying as long as it says the food is from meat by-products or meat meal, there’s no way to know and, he claims, even dead dogs and cats are considered a source of protein. Disgusting!

The fact is almost all the major pet food manufacturers do sell food made with meat by-products, which is a rather vague term that indeed has some pretty disgusting things. So our decision is never choose a food that has such a vague term.

Mike and I have learned that human food with GMOs and additives and chemicals is not good for us and is linked to lots of our chronic diseases. So it figures that pet food, made under even more questionable regulatory standards, also contains bad stuff.

In fact last year on an RV trip, our previous dog, Tai, became very ill with pancreatitis. A wonderful vet we found in Georgia had us show him the food we were feeding him, a well-known national brand. The vet showed us how high it was in fat content. The ingredient label showed the minimum fat content of about 16%, as I recall. It hardly ever shows the maximum, the vet explained, which often exceeds 50-60% and, in Tai’s case was a direct cause of this life-threatening disease. We got him on a lower fat dog food and he immediately improved.

The pet food industry is very strong and while I don’t want to pick a fight with them, let me say we have sought out a quality grain free dog food made with quality meats, low fat and lots of protein. We ended up choosing the brand the Bechtell’s recommended, Taste of the Wild. We got ours from Amazon but have since found a local pet store that carries the brand.

Anyway,