Any cat owner is painfully familiar with the food testing stage, wherein you try to figure out what the fuzzy little jerk will actually eat, as opposed to just turning his nose up at it and whining at you. This is generally chalked up to cats being snobs. Which they are, but it turns out that the reason your cat is so picky is because the food you’re serving may quite literally taste like crap to him.
Researchers at AFB International, essentially a company that flavors your pet food, have been studying how cats react to different flavors. We’ve known for a while that kitty tastebuds are very different from human ones; for example, cats can’t taste sweetness in their foods. They can, however, taste ATP, which is why cats are so closely associated with milk; they love the protein, even if they can’t digest it. But it turns out, we have even less understanding of kitty tastebuds than we thought, because what’s bitter to us barely moves the needle with them.
For example, saccharine, with its bitter aftertaste, barely moved the kitty tastebuds, and aloin, a bittering agent used in beer, didn’t do much either. In fact, the only thing that got a strong reaction was denatonium, which is the bitterest compound known to man. Essentially, to get a reaction to tastes human beings can pick out with ease, the research team had to resort to the nuclear option of flavors.
This explains the picky eating; cat food is generally modeled on human food, and it’s fairly clear that cats just do not taste things the same way we do. AFB will continue the research, what with it being kinda the whole reason they’re a company, and soon we’ll know more about what cats want to eat… and hopefully put an end to picky eating.
(via Popular Science)