Feeding & Nutrition

It started as laziness. I had boiled pasta, tipped the starchy water into a jug to cool instead of down the sink, and taken it out to the geese because the alternative was walking back to the house with a full jug and the dinner getting cold. The geese, Geraldine and her two duller companions, came at a run. Not a waddle. A run. They had never moved that fast for the feed sack, and I noted the speed with the suspicion of a man who has just discovered a preference he did not know he was catering to.

What they wanted was the starch. Pasta water, cooled, unsalted, is basically a weak broth of carbohydrates, and geese are built to seek exactly that kind of easy energy, the sort their wild ancestors found in flooded grain fields and remembered in the genes. They drank it, dabbled in it, and looked up wanting more with an intensity that surprised me. I had been throwing away a treat they would have crossed the field for, and they knew it before I did, which is the usual order of things with animals.

I am careful to say unsalted. The salted water from a proper pasta pot would be a different story, and a bad one. Geese, like all poultry, handle salt poorly, and what is a pleasant seasoning for us is a slow poison for them, stressing kidneys that were never meant for the shaker. So the rule became strict in our house. Only the plain water, only after it had cooled to lukewarm, only in a clean shallow dish they could not tip and drown in, because a goose that falls face first into a bucket is a headline nobody wants.

It became a small ritual. A few times a week, the jug went out instead of down the drain, and the geese learned the sound of the back door at pasta time. Geraldine, who guards everything, started guarding the jug, which was funny until she tried to guard it from me and I had to explain, without words, that the jug was already on her side. I put it down and stepped back. She did not need to win that one to feel she had.

The nutrition side is modest and I do not oversell it. Pasta water is not feed. It is a supplement, a treat, a bit of easy energy on a cold day when the grass is thin and the birds need the lift. The real diet stayed the corn, the pellets, the good pasture when it came. The water was the something extra, the way a square of chocolate is for a person, not the meal and never the foundation, just the thing that makes the meal feel like a treat.

There is a wider waste lesson I did not expect. We throw away so much in a kitchen that an animal would value. The cooled veg water, the rinsed rice starch, the odds of a peel. None of it replaces proper feed, and some of it is flat dangerous, but the pasta water opened my eye to the fact that a flock will tell you what they like if you bother to offer it once instead of sending it down the plughole without a thought.

I drew a line, because you have to with animals and the bin. No salt, no oil, no meat water, nothing from a pan that had been near onion, which is toxic to geese and most birds and will drop them before you understand why. Just the plain starch water from a plain boil, cooled and offered in moderation. Anything else stayed down the sink where it belonged, and the geese, frankly, did not need to know what they were missing.

The geese still cross the field for it. Geraldine still arrives first, because Geraldine arrives first at everything including the rain. And I still laugh a little that the laziest thing I did all week turned into the treat they rated above the sack. Feed animals well, waste less, and occasionally the two goals line up on a Tuesday night with a jug in your hand and a goose at your feet demanding the rest.

Geraldine, for her part, never connected the jug to the kitchen, which is the only reason the system lasted past the first week. She thought the starch water was a gift from the yard, delivered by me but originating in the grass, the way all good things did in her goose theology. I let her keep that belief. A goose with a theory about where treats come from is a goose who waits by the door instead of raiding the bin, and the bin raid was the one behavior I had no interest in training into her. The pasta water stayed a small mystery, the geese stayed happy, and the sink stayed, for once, empty of something useful. I started saving the cooled veg water too, same rules, same shallow dish, and the flock learned to expect the evening jug the way the dog learned the lead, which is to say without being taught and without ever forgetting.