Food Friday: Evanger's Hunk of Beef

Evanger's Hunk of Beef is a canned dog food supplement, but not a complete and balanced diet. The name delivers, this contains chunks of cooked beef and nothing else. It has the dubious honor of being the most disgusting thing I have scooped out of a can for my dogs to date. I expect that someday I will work up the courage to buy them some canned green tripe, and this record will be smashed. Until then, we have the Hunk of Beef.

This is a grain-free food with an ingredient list that consists of a single item: beef. It is cooked in its own juices and looks significantly less appetizing in person than the picture on the can.

It's worth repeating that this is not a complete and balanced dog diet. It's a food supplement, meant to be added to Evanger's vegetarian canned food to make a complete diet, or added to a complete and balanced kibble. Since it doesn't have anything in it but cooked beef, it lacks calcium, fiber, and other important nutrients.

I've mentioned the somewhat colorful history of the Evanger's company before. They've had some silent recalls where product was pulled from store shelves without any information passed to consumers. There have been some recalls, but at least Evanger's owns their own packing facility.

This particular product is proudly proclaimed to be "hand packed". The website goes into further detail, declaring that the meat was placed into the can by hand. I'm not entirely certain how I feel about the value our culture places on things done "by hand". There are lots of things that are honestly better when done by hand, but these things tend to be artistic in nature. "Hand painted" and "hand carved" mean a lot when I'm buying pottery or furniture. Other things seem to be pointlessly advertised as "by hand". Obviously an ice cream shop will be serving "hand scooped" ice cream, and restaurants will have "hand poured" wine, there's not really any other sensible way to do it. I can't remember I saw an ice cream scooping machine, or a wine pouring machine.

When it comes to "hand packed" dog food, I'm sort of on the fence. It's nice to know that a real live person personally stuffed this can full of beef while presumably watching to make sure nothing weird got in there. On the other hand, automated processes can be less prone to error. I haven't decided whether I prefer my dog food to be more like art, or more like driverless cars.

Given the company's range of issues, I'm not planning to feed my dogs Evanger's Hunk of Beef on a regular basis. This is more of an occasional stinky treat.

What's the grossest thing you've ever scooped out of a can for your dogs?