For years, our vets have been telling us to put Ganni the Big Fat Cat on a diet. The diet usually came with a prescription of ‘diet food’ and doomsday warnings of diabetes, heart problems and arthritis. He’s already cross-eyed, so having additional ailments would make him the most unfortunate cat alive. Now Ganni really is big. Truth be told, he’s a bit enormous. Of course, since I live with him, and he’s been a boċċu since he was born, his size was not news to me. I was as surprised to hear this diet advice as if somebody had said “Wow you have shoes.”
So I bought the advice and invested in some diet food, both at considerable expense. The cat was put on a diet of low-fat dry and dark brown diamonds and stars. Immediately, he rebelled. A portion from his early days suddenly stopped being enough. He wanted more and more. The food was not filling.
Moreover, the low-fat tag struck me as odd. In the wild, cats eat fat and protein, preferably from a fresh kill. Yet this domesticated one was expected to switch to what effectively would be the veggie version: I checked the convoluted small print and there was so little animal protein in there and so much vegetable matter and soya. The surprise, of course, was the four percent ash. A week later, Ganni was still miaowing like crazy, complaining constantly about his portions and the flavour of his food.
Three months of emotional pain and expensive low-fat food later and Ganni was still as fat as ever, if not fatter, as well as unhappy. I gave up and switched him back to his normal food.
Then we met Zoran, a homeopath vet who advised us to put our pets (we run a zoo at home) on natural foods. I asked what everybody else asks, which is “How can our pets live on that if all vets are always telling us to give them packaged food?” Zoran, being a vet himself, albeit of a different disposition, asked us to bear with him and we did.
Instead of believing all we had been told unquestioningly, I applied all I have learnt about human diets to our pets. If natural food is good for our bodies, then if I wanted Ganni to lose weight, I had to send him back to the wild.
I started feeding him mackerel. Remember the small red tins which we all used to give our cats when pet food was not even available? Every morning, Ganni eats half a can. In the evening, he eats the other half. He adores it and it fills him up. Of course, I’m not happy with the fact that the manufacturers add unnecessary sugar to the ‘tomato’ sauce the fish comes in, or that there is no nutritional information about the contents (which is probably not even legal) but that was, in comparison to everything else, a small price to pay.
Within a month, Ganni had lost three kilos. That’s 20 percent of his body weight. He now has a flabby hanging belly, like the post-op stomach-stapling patients on Travel & Living’s Family Fat Surgeons, but at least he’s lighter and his ten-year old heart gets to work a lot less trying to pump blood through his once-bloated body.
I wonder how many vets have the guts to admit to their clients the reasons why they prescribe diet food (or any other kind of packaged food). In the meantime we have a generation of pet owners who are scared to feed their animals the real thing. Some vets have even convinced us that dogs scratch because we feed them ‘human food’. Packaged food seems to be a solution for everything.
Take the animal situation and compare it to the human one: we are raising a generation of human beings who grow up on pre-packaged food. And when they get fat and sick because of that, what do we do? We prescribe them low-fat everything, which, vegetables aside, all comes from a manufacturing environment.
The Writer and I went to Sandro Bianchi’s Fiorino D’Oro. I make the distinction because the restaurant changed owners quite a few months ago. To the readers of this newspaper, the name may ring a bell because Sandro is one of the writers for Gourmet Today magazine. I happen to be a bit thick, and my diet may be lacking in fish oils, but I had absolutely no idea who this guy was. All I could figure out was that probably I knew him as one of my fake ‘Facebook friends’.
“That face is familiar,” I told TW when we sat down in the quiet restaurant. TW remembered Sandro’s face (though not his name) from years ago when he had a summer job in some outlet (TW, not Sandro).
Thing is, reviews come with deadlines, and by the time it finally clicked who Sandro was or wasn’t, we had already been, eaten, paid, and the outline of this article was already written. Thank goodness he’s not Nigella Lawson or something. Poor Sandro: it doesn’t always help to be in the media.
What’s more, the food, in its majority, was really pleasant. So was the experience.
The menu is very Italian, which is a good thing. Sandro should up his descriptions and bring them to life. He needs to put a menu outside to attract punters in. I would have loved to know where the meat was sourced from, for example, but there was nothing to indicate this.
We kicked off with some fiocchi ripieni: parcels of fresh pasta filled with gorgonzola and pear. They came in a pale, creamy sauce which would have benefitted from a sprinkling of chopped parsley, if anything, for colour. The pears needed to be cooked slightly and peeled before being put in the mix because they felt grainy on the tongue. Yet the overall feel was of a lovely dish with very thin fresh pasta and an unctuous sauce.
My pepata of mussels was wonderfully cooked, the rawness of the molluscs just taken away with a judicious amount of heat. I would have preferred more pepper and the dish overall lacked seasoning, but the mussels were absolutely faultless in texture.
In Malta I have never seen tagliata di manzo done as they do it here. It was almost a thick carpaccio, cut and fanned, with lashings of olive oil. I asked for it rare, and it came cooked to a medium-rare, but the meat was very well sourced so that was almost forgiveable. The Writer’s lombatina of veal was perfectly cooked, pinker than my beef, and well rested. The roast potatoes were absolutely adorable, sliced and seared with some vengeance until the edges turned black. The side roast vegetables were almost raw.
Since Sandro took over from the previous owners, he doesn’t seem to have done much to Fiorino, and the place is dying for a make-over. Please go visit and give him loads of nice dosh so that he can afford to do it up. If there are more people around, then he may also increase the dessert selection. The day we were there, a Thursday, there was sadly just a manufactured lemon-cheesecake, which tasted horrifically of bubble gum, and a banoffee with no toffee and hardly any bananas, although it did have an inch and a half of artificial cream. We did not eat more than a taster and Sandro kindly did not charge us for them.
I’ll be back. The desserts may have come from a factory, but everything else seems to be made with love and care. Considering that love and care are what are needed for much everything in this life, including taking care of our animals, then I’m sure Sandro is half way there.
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Now Ganni really is big. Truth be told, he’s a bit enormous. Of course, since I live with him, and he’s been a boċċu since he was born, his size was not news to me. I was as surprised to hear this diet advice as if somebody had said “Wow you have shoes.”
