We Make Lovely Home-Cooked Meals for Ourselves. Why Not Do the Same for Our Dogs?

Home-cooked dog food has a more illustrious history than I could have imagined.In 1966, the ur-food writer M.F.K. Fisher reviewed cookbooks for pets 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 pooch in Vogue.French food writer Frédérick E. Grasser-Hermé put out Mon chien fait recettes (My Dog Makes Recipes) in 2001 and threw a launch party where doggie guests were served bone marrow topped with caviar. For her final publication in 2014, Judith Jones—editor of Julia Child, Edna Lewis, and many other gourmand greats—wrote Love Me, Feed Me, an ode to cooking for her Havanese featuring recipes like roast beef shoulder with broccoli rabe and lamb and sweet potato hash. Martha Stewart, in 2022, blogged about what farm-fresh foods her own canines consume. Nara Smith, in 2026, carries on the lineage as an influencer, serving a new rescue pup beef, cabbage, and sardines.Nowadays, with over 87 million dogs kept as pets in the US, the world of their wellness has gotten even more extreme: There is red-light therapy and longevity pills. But food remains the most fraught matter for many dog owners. According to a pair of American Veterinary Medical Association surveys that spanned more than a decade, there's been an estimated 3 to 8 percent uptick in those who cook for their canine companions.I’m now part of that demographic.When I first got my dog, Benny, in 2019, I worried about what to feed him. I’d given up meat in 2011, but I didn’t think it would be fair to feed vegan kibble to a natural carnivore. I couldn’t see myself sizzling up steaks for him, either. He’s a large, active dog, at 70 pounds; I worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with properly cooking for him. So I gave him commercial dog food that was recommended by his veterinarian, dressed it up with farm-fresh eggs, steamed vegetables, and sardines. We went on with our lives.Then, in early 2026, Benny was diagnosed with lymphoma. I started to question myself all over again with the same line of thinking as all those gourmands who’d come before: If food were 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 healthfully?I immediately began to research how to cook nutritionally sound dog food at home that would enable him to retain weight, strength, and vitality during his six-month chemotherapy treatment. But when I did, I felt like I’d fallen into a rabbit hole and couldn’t discern the MAHA from the science.There were websites that looked like they hadn’t been updated since the ’90s, Facebook and Reddit threads in which people argued over whether or not to peel sweet potatoes, and concerns about carbohydrates that I hadn’t thought about since Atkins went out of style. Hadn’t dogs, the first domesticated animal species, at some point in pretty recent history just eaten whatever the humans around them were eating? And yet, it seemed like if I didn’t have access to pounds of organ meat or keep dried oyster powder in my larder, I shouldn’t even try.To understand why this dog food world seemed so complex, I talked to Jonathan Stockman, a board-certified veterinary nutritionist and assistant professor at the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine. He has noticed that home-cooked food for dogs has been a growing trend for at least 15 years, and he suggests the “melamine crisis” as the origin point.That crisis occurred in 2007, when a company named Menu Foods that was responsible for making 1,300 recipes for various private-label contracts included wheat gluten that had been poisoned by the inclusion of melamine, a type of plastic. Dogs and cats both began mysteriously dying, and it was traced back to this ingredient found in their meals, initiating a massive wave of recalls—the biggest in pet food history.Marion Nestle, a prolific author on public health and professor emerita at