“Is it love or is it Fancy Feast?” I’ll choose option three: it’s fucking stupid.

If there was ever a moment when perhaps American consumerism had gone too far, overstepped its bounds, or become downright daft, then it came with Fancy Feast’s new line of gourmet cat foods. Fear not! No longer will affluent cat owners be forced to feed their servile animals substandard protein and carbohydrates. The days of lower mammalian fine dining have arrived. Truly America has seen no better time than one in which you can treat your beloved pet to “artfully prepared Tastes of Tuscany.” That tagline is not an exaggeration. Check the website.

A cat is a cat. It’s not a food connoisseur, it’s a long-stunted feral feline that gets hair on everything and ignores its owners. The cat won’t love you any more if you serve it marinated satay chicken out of a can instead of the usual five-for-a-dollar bull scrotums in gravy you find at Food Lion. Regardless of its owner’s level of nutritional pampering, an indoor cat runs a scant chance of outliving genetic predisposition to a death at approximately 10-15 years of age. And regardless of how delightful the cat food looks when served on a white Ikea plate, rest assured that it’s going to end up as a sand-encrusted spear of dung in a litter igloo just the same as the cheap food.

From the moment I saw a Fancy Feast commercial when I was a wee lad, I instantly developed a revulsion for everything I perceived to be its underpinnings, ie. opulence and excess. For years I have seen a reincarnation of that plutocratic white cat hasten to the sound of fork tines on glass, which I blame for helping to perpetuate the frivolous myth of modern times that pets are somehow small humans privy to the same rights and comforts. This is a particularly repugnant trend since a sad homeless puppy on TV looks a hell of a lot cuter than a rib-baring African child in the throes of malaria. I suppose that’s why they’ve come to deserve an “exquisite feast” while the latter will be lucky to get a handful of dirty rice off the back of a UN relief truck.

Since the Fancy Feast brand and pitch has persisted this long, I have to wonder at the sheer number and flaccid humanity of people actually buying into this. Also, I have a nagging premonition in my brain that as a society, we may actually reach the point of denying food for people on the logic that it would be depriving our pets of an “American way of life.”

In such a sad state of capitalism, I console myself with the possibility of a marketing backfire. Perhaps those falling on hard times in our current economic thrall will opt to round out their diet with gourmet cat food if it’s the cheaper option. Hell, it looks healthier than Lean Cuisine.