We prepare wonderful meals at home for ourselves. Why don’t we do the same with our dogs?

Home cooked dog food It has a more illustrious history than I could have imagined.

In 1966, your food writer M. F. K. Fisher reviewed cookbooks for pets in The New Yorker, and in the late 1990s, Jeffrey Steingarten chronicled chef Daniel Boulud’s work on “French Country Soup for Dogs and Their Owners” for his dog in Vogue.

Hermé was directed by French food writer Frédéric et Grasser Mon Chien Veet Recipes (My dog ​​makes the recipes) in 2001 and held a launch party where canine guests were served bone marrow topped with caviar. In her last publication in 2014, Judith Jones—the editor of Julia Child, Edna Lewis, and many other great connoisseurs—wrote Love me, feed mea culinary ode to its Havanese population that includes recipes like roasted beef shoulder with broccoli, lamb, and sweet potatoes. In 2022, Martha Stewart blogged about the farm-fresh foods her canines consume. Nara Smith, in 2026, continues the lineage as an influencer, introducing a new savior of beef, cabbage and sardines.

Nowadays, with more than 87 million dogs kept as pets in the United States, the world of their health has become more extreme: there’s red light therapy and life-extension pills. But food remains the most dangerous issue for many dog ​​owners. According to American Veterinary Medical Association surveys spanning more than a decade, there has been an estimated 3 to 8 percent increase in those who cook for their canine companions.

I am now part of that demographic.

When I first got my dog, Penny, in 2019, I was worried about what to feed him. I gave up meat in 2011, but I didn’t think it would be fair to feed plant-based foods to natural carnivores. I couldn’t see myself making steak for him either. He is a large, active dog weighing 70 pounds. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with proper cooking for him. So I fed him a commercial dog food his vet recommended, adding farm fresh eggs, steamed vegetables, and sardines. We continued our lives.

Then, in early 2026, Penny was diagnosed with lymphoma. I started asking myself again in the same line of thinking as all those gourmands who had come before: If food was so important to me and I wouldn’t want to live on the same dry food all the time, why would I expect my dog ​​to do so happily and healthily?

I immediately began researching how to cook nutritionally sound dog food at home that would enable him to maintain weight, strength, and vitality during his six-month chemotherapy treatment. But when I did, I felt like I had fallen down a rabbit hole and couldn’t tell MAHA from science.

There were websites that looked like they hadn’t been updated since the ’90s, Facebook and Reddit threads where people were debating whether or not to peel sweet potatoes, and concerns about carbs that I hadn’t thought about since the Atkins diet went out of style. Didn’t dogs, the first domesticated animal species, eat at some point in modern history what the humans around them were eating? However, it seems that if I don’t have access to a pound of organ meat or keep dried oyster meal in my pantry, I shouldn’t even try.

To understand why the world of dog food seems so complicated, I spoke to Jonathan Stockman, a certified veterinary nutritionist and assistant professor at the UC Davis Well School of Veterinary Medicine. He noted that home-cooked food for dogs has been a growing trend for at least 15 years, and suggested the “melamine crisis” was the point of origin.