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

In 1966, food writer MFK Fisher reviewed pet cookbooks in The New Yorker, and in the late ’90s, Jeffrey Steingarten chronicled the act of cooking chef Daniel Boulud’s “French Country Soup for Dogs and Their Owners” for his dog in Vogue.

The French gastronomic writer Frédérick E. Grasser-Hermé publishes Mon chien fait recipes (My dog ​​makes recipes) in 2001 and hosted a launch party where invited dogs were served bone marrow topped with caviar. For its final publication in 2014, Judith Jones, editor of Julia Child, Edna Lewis and many other great foodies, wrote Love me, feed mean ode to cooking for your Havanese that includes recipes such as roast beef shoulder with broccoli rabe and lamb and sweet potato hash. Martha Stewart, in 2022, blogged about the farm-fresh foods her own canines eat. Nara Smith, in 2026, continues the lineage as an influencer, serving meat, cabbage and sardines to a new rescue pup.

Today, with more than 87 million pet dogs in the U.S., the world of dog wellness has gotten even more extreme: There’s red light therapy and longevity pills. But food remains the most delicate issue for many dog ​​owners. According to a pair of American Veterinary Medical Association surveys spanning more than a decade, there has been an estimated 3 to 8 percent increase in those cooking for their canine companions.

I’m part of that demographic now.

When I first got my dog, Benny, 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 vegan kibble to a natural carnivore. I also didn’t see myself preparing steaks for him. He is a large and active dog, weighing 70 pounds; I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to continue cooking properly for him. So I gave him commercial dog food recommended by his vet, and topped it off with farm-fresh eggs, steamed vegetables, and sardines. We continue with our lives.

Then, in early 2026, Benny was diagnosed with lymphoma. I began to question myself again and again with the same line of thinking as all those sweet tooths who had come before: if food was so important to me and I wouldn’t want to subsist on the same dry food all the time, why did I expect my dog ​​to do so happily and healthily?

I immediately began researching how to cook nutritious, healthy dog ​​food at home that would allow him to maintain his 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 argued about whether or not to peel sweet potatoes, and concerns about carbs that I hadn’t thought about since Atkins went out of style. Hadn’t dogs, the first domesticated animal species, at some point in fairly recent history, eaten what the humans around them were eating? And yet, it seemed that if I didn’t have access to pounds of organ meat or kept powdered dried oysters in my pantry, I shouldn’t even try.

To understand why this world of dog food seemed so complex, I spoke with Jonathan Stockman, a certified veterinary nutritionist and assistant professor at the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine. He has noted that homemade dog food has been a growing trend for at least 15 years and suggests the “melamine crisis” as the point of origin.