A strange television commercial came on during my daily date with Alex Trebek yesterday. (I'll take "You Can Have Me Anytime For Free, You Jaunty Ageless Canadian Romeo" for $2000, please, Alex). Usually I try to keep my game face on for Jeopardy, but this commercial (please watch it on YouTube) had me rolling around on the carpet. Fancy Feast has a new line of "restaurant-inspired" Elegant Medleys cat foods in flavors like Wild Salmon and Whipped Egg Soufflé with Garden Greens—that's right, for your cat. I love the cat in the commercial, white as a mafiosa's floor-length mink, with the pinched, quasi-inbred features of an unmistakable aristocrat. The chef is all business, pulling on her white chef's jacket, staring herself down in the mirror as she fixes her toque to her head as if to say, "This is it, this is what I went to culinary school for." As she hauls a gleaming wild salmon out of an ice bath and cuts a filet out of its jewel-tone flesh, she is positively trembling with the desire to impress little Snowflake, a furry quadriped who probably craps into a bucket of clay and licks herself for breakfast.
I was ready to say that this was all ridiculous—a cat food that premiered at the Aspen Food and Wine Festival? Are you kidding? What's next? Will I be served a can of it at Jean-Georges? But I was swayed a little. The marketing made wonderful use of restaurant jargon--that syrupy gunk that the chunks of cat food sit in is now called a "reduction." "Delight her," they say, with cat food that is "artfully prepared." They don't just want to give your cat the energy and nutrition she needs to bat at string and rub her face onto stuff; they are quite seriously pretending to offer cats a pleasurable sensory experience akin to the ones we associate with dining out. So, out of curiosity, I set up a little taste test using a friend's cat, the much-touted Fancy Feast, and a can of regular wet cat food that was eight times cheaper. Dilsey, my fluffy test subject, went first for the regular cat food, ate a bite, and then tried the Wild Salmon Florentine with Garden Greens. She finished it all, and then refused to eat the other stuff. I couldn't believe it, but maybe these folks at Fancy Feast were on to something—they had instantaneously spoiled Dilsey, who ordinarily would have been ecstatic over any kind of wet
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