Feeding & Nutrition

I bought a bag of mung beans for a curry and forgot about it, and three months later found it at the back of the cupboard, dry and innocent, and on a whim tipped a handful into a jam jar with a square of muslin over the top, the way you do with mustard cress when you're seven and the teacher tells you to.

By day three there were white tails curling out of every bean, and the jar lived on the windowsill above the radiator, and the cat, who normally ignores the kitchen entirely, developed a fascination with the sprouts that bordered on obsession, which was new, because she'd previously shown interest in exactly two things, her food and my chair.

She'd sit on the sill and bat the glass, gently, as if checking they were still moving. Cats are odd about growing things. Grass, catnip, now this. Something about the life in them, I think, the way they lean toward the light and twitch in a draught, a small drama played out at her eye level.

I rinsed them twice a day, as the method demands, and watched them fatten into proper sprouts, and one evening I tipped a few, well rinsed and room temperature, onto her plate with her usual food, half expecting her to turn up her nose the way she does at anything that wasn't in a packet with a picture on it.

She ate them first. Every time. The green tail, the crunch, the novelty of a food that moved an hour before she met it. I started giving a small pinch each morning, never much, just enough that the jar lasted and she had something to look forward to that wasn't a pouch and didn't arrive with a sharp click from the cupboard.

Are they good for her. Mung sprouts are mostly water and fibre, a little protein, gentle on a gut that's used to processed food, and a nice bit of variety in a diet that rarely sees anything green unless it's a blade of grass she's quietly sicking up later. I checked with the vet, who said fine, clean, plain, small amounts, and warned me about the one real risk, which is bacteria if the jar isn't rinsed and drained properly.

So I was strict about it. Rinse, drain, no standing water, eat the same day, and if a batch looked cloudy it went straight in the compost. A cat's a small animal with a small margin for error, and a windowsill science project is only as safe as the person tending it, which in our house is me, unaided, prone to forgetting the watering can exists.

The dog wanted no part of it. He sniffed a sprout, decided it wasn't a sausage, and left it, which is his entire philosophy of food, and which I've come to respect. The beans were never his, they were the cat's strange little hobby, and she guarded the sill with the seriousness of a gardener defending a prize marrow from a rival allotment.

There's a quiet pleasure in growing a cat's food on your own windowsill. It costs pennies, it takes thirty seconds a day, and it turns feeding from a scoop into a small act of attention. She gets something alive, I get the mild pride of a person who kept a jar of beans from going foul, and the sill, once bare, now has a purpose that doesn't involve a mug left to go cold.

Some mornings the sprouts are ready and some they're not, and she's learned the rhythm of it, appearing when the jar comes down, vanishing when it goes back up. A cat on a schedule she invented herself. I can't say it changed her life, but she's there, every morning, willing to find out, and the jam jar, rescued from the recycling, has become the most reliable thing in her day.

There's a thrift to it I didn't expect to enjoy. A bag of dried beans costs less than a single pouch and lasts a month of tiny pinchings, and the cat, who'd turned up her nose at dearer things, took to the sprouts like they were the only honest food in the house. I've started a second jar now, a rotation, so there's always one in the wobble stage and one ready to eat, and the sill, once bare, has become a small green ledger of her moods.

She's fourteen now, the cat, and set in her ways, and I'd assumed her diet was fixed for good, but the sprouts proved her wrong, that an old animal will still lean toward something new if you offer it gently and cleanly, and I'm glad I bothered to rinse that jar one more time instead of tossing the beans for being forgotten.