Look, we’ve all had our run ins with the kinks in the supply chain over the last 18 months. Maybe you couldn’t find the right kind of wipe for your delicate tuchus. Or you had to suck it up and use the store brand salad dressing instead of your favorite ranch.
Early on, there were actual yeast pirates online who were shaking down quarantine bakers for high-priced quick rise. And I probably could’ve paid my mortgage with a gallon of Purell last summer.
But we learned to deal with it. You can make pasta salad without rotini. You don’t actually need to choose your everyday ice cream from six different kinds of French vanilla.
But you are not a cat. You are definitely not a senior citizen tabby cat who is probably about 140 years old in human years. And you are probably not going to symbolically bury an unsatisfactory breakfast and quietly walk away, ready to starve yourself rather than eat some weird brand of chicken bits with gelatinous gravy.
For over six months now, it’s been a struggle to get the varieties of cat food that my old guy will tolerate. The photo up top is from a suburban Walmart on an average Sunday. I’ve got a collection of these damn photos.
There is no savory salmon most days, no minced trout, no beef feast or chicken’n tuna. I order online- they can’t fill the order. I’ve been waitlisted repeatedly for Friskies, for Fancy Feast, for Party Mix and indoor Chow. I jump on “in stock” notifications from Chewy like they were sending me the winning Powerball numbers- but it’s not working.
Media accounts about this issue, where they exist, refer to mysteries of steel cans or supply or capacity problems. Dudes! It’s cat food. It’s not the hottest holiday toy choice sitting on a container ship in the Pacific. It’s fish by-products and cow lips and god only knows what else. Is somebody else eating the cow lips now? Are they too expensive for cats now? Is there a cow lip challenge somewhere on Instagram I don’t know about? Are we feeding all the fish by-products to people instead of Soylent Green now??
We need cat food, dammit! I’m spending more time sourcing Friskies fishy flavors than the great lemon wipe hunt of 2020! Seriously now- what the hell is the issue? Is it no longer cost effective to use pull top cans? Are the Canadians bogarting all the salmon? Is there some way for me to blame Trump for this- did he piss off the New England fishermen so bad they gave up on fishing forevermore?
Help me figure this out so I can call my elected officials to fix it already! Why can we not haz salmon???