Home Prepared Meals

Preparing pet meals at home has many advantages. Doing so does take a basic understanding of the nutritional requirements of pets. Before embarking on the rewarding adventure of making your pet’s meals from scratch, we highly recommend taking some time to learn about all of your options. Two of our favorite online learning sites are:

• Lew Olson’s website, www.b-naturals.com
• Mary Straus’ website, www.dogaware.com

The benefits of preparing your pet’s meals at home are:

• Ingredient control
• Little to no loss of nutrients through cooking
• Variety and
• Freshness.

There are many ways to go about beefing up your pet’s diet. Here are just a few:

• Raw - This is the most nutrient-rich pet diet. Raw can be purchased from your local butcher or grocery.
• Pre-packaged Raw - For folks that do not like handling raw meat excessively, pet food companies such as Oma’s Pride, Primal, Blue Ridge Beef, Bravo or Aunt Jeni’s sell pre-packaged meat products.
• Adding fresh animal protein - Fresh meat (raw or lightly cooked) can be added to commercial kibble in a 50:50 ratio without concern for upsetting the meal’s nutritional balance.
• Pre-mixes - This is a very simple way of making homemade pet food. You add the meat source. The dehydrated premix contains veggies, oats, etc. and just needs hot water added to it. Dr. Harvey's, The Honest Kitchen and Sojo’s are makers of very good pre-mixes.

Against The Grain Pet Nutrition is a company that does things differently. We are a small business that is excited about offering pet owners better choices in pet nutrition. We believe that choosing appropriate pet food (be it commercial, raw or home prepared) is the most important factor in any pet's preventative health, convalescence and longevity.  Our name - Against The Grain - reflects our strong passion to provide pet owners with the knowledge to make healthy decisions about pet care even if we go ‘against the grain' of popular thinking.