FANCY FEAST

I weary of cyborgs! They are ruining my sleep. I could go on and on about implanted mechanical devices for a long long time. Enough! (For now.) Let us speak of other things -

Like what? Like what's with the cat food? That's what!

Wikus van de Merwe evicting aliens from District 9

In District 9 the aliens love canned cat food, as does our human protagonist making the transition to alien. It seems a little gimmicky to put the cat food thing in the script, but while watching this refreshing and brilliant movie, I found myself questioning what could be in cat food that a crustacean would crave? I'm sure you wondered the same thing.

The cat food obviously wasn't making the aliens high, so it couldn't be a drug-like substance. Sure, I could have assumed it was a flavor thing, like some people have for chocolate, but then I wouldn't be able to blog about it.

Fancy Feast cat food. Yum.

It's got the taste aliens crave.

I compared ingredients in seafood Fancy Feast cat food with Wardley Shrimp Pellets, to see if there were any similar ingredients. Wardleys is recommended for feeding your pet freshwater crustacean. I figured the aliens in District 9 might be closer to crawdads than lobsters, even though they are called "prawns", since they hang out on land and don't seem to require a lot of salt(1). Plus, I couldn't easily find the ingredients for prawn food or lobster food online. There are plenty of recipes for cooking prawn/lobster, but none for cooking FOR prawn or lobster.

Wardley Shrimp Pellets

Yum.

Here are the ingredients shared by Fancy Feast and Wardley Shrimp Pellets: shrimp(2); meat meal/by-products; vitamins B-12, D-3, and A; ferrous sulfate; thiamine mononitrate; various forms of calcium; various forms of pantothenate; zinc; manganese; copper sulfate; riboflavin; pyridoxine hydrochloride; folic acid(3); and biotin.

Wardley's also include poultry meal. If I had scrutinized Fancy Feast chicken dinner, we might have had some additional crossover.

Wow! Who knew that cats and crawdads have so much in common? Wait a minute... people need a lot of that stuff too! I wonder if there's more folic acid in beer... or scotch? I will research.

1. Although I wanted to be a marine biologist when I was very young, I know nothing about crustacean essentials. But I did catch a lot of crawdads when I was a kid.

2. Aren't shrimp prawns? Ugh! It's like feeding cattle meat by-products.

3. Wait... isn't folic acid vitamin B-9 or something? Why don't they just say that?