Prompted by this post on how well household pets fare under capitalism – and how poorly they’d far under socialism – Tim B. sent to me the following e-mail, shared here with his kind permission:
I lived in Italy in the late 1980s and had an expatriate American friend who was married to a German who worked for the WHO nutrition programs. The first time they visited the U.S. together (his first time ever), she lost him in a supermarket. When she finally found him he was in the pet food section reading the labels on the pet food. He apparently commented that pets in the U.S. eat more nutritious food than was natively available to most of the populations he worked with.
