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Completely genuine question

Background

I was just feeding my cat, I was giving her some cat food that had 'duck' on the front and I remembered that I had some of that duck meat when I went to a restaurant and thought it was nice. The cat food looked really tasty so I decided to get out a tablespoon.

My cat was obviously quite disappointed that I had put a spoonful of her cat food into my mouth. I only took one spoonful. I didn't think it was that bad.

Question

Am I going to get really ill? Can I eat cat food again?

Please don't judge me...

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  • 1
    @Max but that question is closed, so it doesn't really matter that it's a cross-site duplicate. :)
    – Catija ♦
    Jul 10, 2017 at 16:33
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    Wet food, a pouch, no refrigeration. I just took it out of a cardboard box. @Catija
    – Featherball
    Jul 10, 2017 at 17:05
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    Don't ever serve it to someone else unaware of the fact, and you won't be judged :)
    – rackandboneman
    Jul 10, 2017 at 19:29
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    Who downvoted it? Given that there are certainly quality standards for pet food, their transferability to human food safety is a perfectly valid question. And I assume most parasites or microbes that would make a human sick would make a cat sick. And I could think of more ingredients that would make a cat sick but no human than the other way around.
    – rackandboneman
    Jul 10, 2017 at 19:32
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    Some people taste pet food for a living dailymail.co.uk/news/article-514630/…
    – David Marshall
    Jul 10, 2017 at 20:19

1 Answer 1

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4

It's perfectly safe.

Pet food has to go through the same sort of preservation methods as human food in order to give it a good shelf life so it's not going to have nasty foodborne illnesses. Cat and human metabolisms aren't too far off, and cats don't require nutrients which are harmful to humans so it won't hurt you one bit.

As for whether it would be healthy to eat long term that's a different story and not for this site.

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  • 3
    Some documentation to support this: popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-02/… . I would note that there are some "fancy" cat foods that are sold raw... which is why I made the comment I did earlier asking if it needed to be refrigerated. :) While cats don't need food to be cooked, humans are more likely to need it.
    – Catija ♦
    Jul 10, 2017 at 22:24

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