Feeding & Nutrition

I meant to bake a potato. That is the whole story, really. The oven was on for something else, I had a sweet potato left from the veg box, and I chucked it in because waste bothers me more than it should. Forty minutes later I split it open, steam came up, and Buster appeared from the other end of the house like I had whistled.

He does not appear for a normal potato. He does not appear for most things. But the orange one, the one that smelled like sugar without the sugar, that one brought him at a run. I let him have a forkful, plain, no butter, no salt, just the flesh. He took it, looked at me, and sat down, which in his language means more, and also means I am not leaving this spot until something happens.

I looked it up before I gave him more, because orange foods have a history in this house. Sweet potato is fine. Better than fine, the vet said when I mentioned it at the next visit, good fibre, easy on older guts, just keep the skin off if he is a gobbler and never, ever the leaves or vines, which are the toxic bit. I had not known that. I grow nothing, so the risk was zero, but I filed it away anyway, the way you file away the small facts that might one day matter.

The first time I tried to bake two at once I forgot and left them too long, and one split and blackened at the ends, and Buster still wanted it, burned bits and all, which told me the appeal was not the perfection, it was the smell, the warm orange smell that fills a kitchen and says something good is happening here. He is a dog of smells before he is a dog of sense, and the sweet potato wins on smell every time.

Now it is a Sunday thing. One sweet potato, baked, mashed into his bowl with his usual food, and the begging stops being about the fridge and becomes about the orange. He sits by the oven. He has learned the smell of the thing he likes more than kibble, which is a small humiliation for a dog who spent years acting like kibble was the only food on earth and the only thing worth guarding.

The change I noticed was his coat, actually. Not dramatically, not like a miracle in a advert, but the dullness at the tail went soft and shiny over a month, and the vet noticed before I did, which is the only time she has ever noticed something before me. I credit the potato. I also credit the fish oil I finally remembered to use. We will never know which one won, and the dog does not care which one won, he just knows dinner got better.

He is older now, my terrier, and I feed him like someone I want to keep around. The sweet potato is cheap. It is honest. It does not come with a label promising a longer life, it just is what it is, a root that tastes like dessert and happens to be good for him. I bake two now, one for me, one for the dog, and we eat on the floor by the oven because the chairs are too far from where the warm smell is, and the warm smell is the point of the whole exercise.

The neighbours think it is odd, the man and the dog eating orange food on the kitchen tiles. The neighbours think a lot of things about me and the dog, most of them true. But Buster is fourteen in dog years of a certain kind, his back legs tell the story when it rains, and the small comforts are the only comforts left that reliably work, so the tiles it is, and the orange root, and the quiet ten minutes that taste like we both did something right.

If you have an old dog who has gone a bit beige, try a plain baked sweet potato folded through dinner once or twice a week. Not every day, not instead of his food, just as the thing that makes him come to the bowl happy instead of suspicious. Buster would not care that it is healthy. He cares that it is orange and warm and mine. The rest is my problem, not his, and the bowl proves it every Sunday.

The oven light is on as I write this, and Buster is already by the door, because he has learned the timer as well as the smell, and a dog who times your cooking is a dog who has truly moved in. The sweet potato was supposed to be his treat. It became the thing that taught him the kitchen is his, and the kitchen was always his, he just forgot.

My neighbour asked what I was doing on the floor with an orange root and a dog, and when I explained she tried it with her old lab who had the same beige look about him. A week later she rang to say the lab's coat had picked up and the dog now waited by her oven too, which is the nicest kind of proof, the kind that arrives from someone else's kitchen and not my own hopeful opinion. Buster does not know he started a trend on the street. He just knows the oven means the orange thing, and the orange thing means he wins.