More U.S. dog owners are cooking for their pets, pushed by distrust of industrial pet food, influencer recipes and a very human urge to make a sick or picky animal eat something that looks like dinner. The trend is real enough to show up in American Veterinary Medical Association survey data: across more than a decade, the share of owners preparing food for dogs rose by an estimated 3 to 8 percent.
The market is big enough to make every niche look less niche. The American Pet Products Association says more than 87 million dogs are kept as pets in the United States. Around them sits a swelling wellness economy that now includes red-light therapy and experimental longevity pills, with food still the daily battleground.
Cooking for dogs also has a longer pedigree than the average Instagram reel admits. M.F.K. Fisher reviewed pet cookbooks in The New Yorker in 1966. Jeffrey Steingarten later wrote in Vogue about making a Daniel Boulud soup meant for both dogs and their owners. French writer Frédérick E. Grasser-Hermé published Mon chien fait recettes in 2001, Judith Jones released Love Me, Feed Me in 2014, Martha Stewart has written about feeding her dogs farm-raised ingredients, and influencer Nara Smith has posted meals for a rescue dog.
The recall that changed the feed bowl
Jonathan Stockman, a board-certified veterinary nutritionist and assistant professor at the UC Davis Weill School of Veterinary Medicine, traces much of the modern interest in home-prepared dog food to the 2007 melamine crisis. Menu Foods, which made about 1,300 recipes for private-label pet food contracts, used wheat gluten contaminated with melamine, a plastic-related compound. Dogs and cats died, and the incident triggered what Stockman described as the largest pet food recall in history.
Marion Nestle, professor emerita at New York University and author of Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, has written that the episode exposed weak points in a consolidated pet food system. Nestle said recalls still happen, although none since Menu Foods have matched that disaster in animal impact. She attributed many later failures to missed safety steps or poor adherence to protocols, adding that dry pet food can support pathogens such as Salmonella if companies do not maintain serious food-safety practices.
That history helped create space for companies such as The Farmer’s Dog, which began selling vacuum-sealed meals in the mid-2010s. The company describes its food as made from “human-grade” ingredients, typically meat, vegetables and sometimes grains. That phrase sounds reassuring. It is also marketing, and it does not settle whether the diet is better for a given animal.
Veterinary advice is less glamorous than the videos
Stockman said home-cooked or homemade-style diets are not proven superior to commercial kibble or canned food for most dogs. He said many owners suspect processed pet food contains toxins or harmful ingredients, but evidence does not support that broad claim. For most dogs, he said, conventional dry or canned food is acceptable.
There are cases where a home-prepared diet may make sense, according to Stockman: dogs that are unusually picky, dogs that do not eat enough, or dogs with medical reasons to need a different nutritional plan. He recommended Balance.it as a tool for calculating ingredient ratios. That is the boring part influencer videos tend to skip: calcium, phosphorus, protein, fat, calories and micronutrients still have to add up.
Joelle Jay and R.A. Young, who post as TheCedLife and published The Dog’s Table in 2025, told Wired that their elaborate dog-meal content is designed to attract attention, while their everyday recipes are built for batch cooking. Young said they reviewed decades of nutrition literature after gaining an audience because they did not want to hurt their dogs or encourage others to do so.
The evidence base remains mixed and specific. A 2024 study in Veterinary Science reported better outcomes for dogs with dermatological or gastrointestinal problems on homemade diets. A 2025 Metabolites study found benefits for metabolism and other markers from fresh, human-grade food, though that study was funded by The Farmer’s Dog.
Nestle said owners who cook for pets often apply the same food values they use for themselves, rejecting canned and extruded products as overly industrialized. That explains the emotional force behind the trend. It does not turn a freezer full of chicken, vegetables and sardines into a universal prescription.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
