February 8–15, 2001

naked city

Canine Cuisine

A new Queen Village deli serves up food for the four-legged among us.

by Meredith Broussard

Puppy love: David Casper and Julie Baker behind the deli counter with their dogs Gish and Sophie. photo: Lexie Giarraputo

Although husband and wife team Julie Baker and David Casper are vegetarians, the first item on the menu at their new Queen Village deli is chicken.

Raw chicken.

Other tantalizing dishes include offal, a blend of organ meats, as well as uncooked four-grain flax cereal topped with pulverized vegetables.

It may not sound like your ideal takeout dinner, but there is someone special who’d be thrilled to see one of these concoctions on his dinner plate: your dog.

Casper and Baker are the proprietors of the new Organic Doggie Deli, a natural food center for canines. Located on Fourth Street just below Bainbridge, the Organic Doggie Deli offers nutritional supplements, fresh raw meat or vegetable entrees and natural treats for your favorite four-legged friend.

"We’re trying to offer people an alternative to dried dog food," explains Baker, perched behind a deli case filled with heaping plates of organic chow. "We’re hoping to educate people about the health benefits of raw feeding."

Raw feeding is a health food regimen for pooches that eschews kibble, canned food, grain-based diets and all cooked food.

Levittown residents Casper and Baker have fed their two dogs this way for three years, and they have found that feeding their dogs uncooked organic dog food makes them healthier and happier.

Baker waxes eloquent about the positive effects of raw dog food, explaining that a raw diet is no more expensive than kibble, gives dogs more energy and functions as effective preventative medicine. Obviously, this is a woman who loves her pets. Both Gish, a terrier mix, and Sophie, an Afghan mix, were rescued as strays in Northern Liberties before the couple moved to New York several years ago. Baker has also rescued several other dogs that were eventually placed with family members. Naturally, these dogs now eat organic raw food diets too.

After becoming frustrated with pursuing classical guitar careers in Manhattan, Baker and Casper returned home to Levittown last year to develop their doggie takeout dream. "We were doing this for our dogs anyway," explains Baker. And so the two decided to offer homemade chow for other dogs.

The market is certainly ripe for pet products: According to a 1999 survey conducted by the American Veterinary Medical Association, the American Animal Hospital Association and the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges, 58 percent of American households own pets, and pet owners are generally willing to pay up to $92 a month to keep their pets healthy. The survey also concluded that the economics of the pet retail world are simple: The more an owner cares about a pet, the more he is likely to spend on pet care, products and feeding.

For Baker and Casper, however, the Doggie Deli seems more a labor of love than a business venture. They are earnest about their desire to educate as well as feed the masses, providing journals and nutritional information to interested customers. Even the store itself is pooch-proof and earth-friendly: walls are covered in special non-toxic paint, and the clear plastic take-out containers are made of the maximum amount of recycled materials.

So what are a couple of thirtysomething vegetarians doing spending their days behind a raw meat case?

"You can choose what you eat. Your dog can’t," offers Baker. Though they choose not to eat meat, the couple feels it is biologically appropriate for dogs to do so. They do, however, prefer the call of the wild to be answered by humanely treated, free-ranging, organically fed animals.

Casper and Baker aren’t alone in their thinking. The organic raw food dog diet is gaining popularity worldwide.

"As far as I can tell, it’s becoming a huge movement toward natural nutrition," says Tunia Hyland, a Bryn Mawr resident who has been feeding her two Scottish Terriers a raw foods diet for five years. "The philosophy behind feeding raw food is based on the model of the wolf. Dogs, genetically, have the same DNA as wolves. Basically, going on that, we should all be feeding our dogs what wolves eat."

Admittedly, it’s hard to imagine a pack of Scottish Terriers hunting down and killing another animal in the woods. But, if left to their own devices, even toy poodles would probably hunt and eat a fuzzy bunny if they were hungry enough.

The acronym for the raw diet is BARF, which stands for Bones And Raw Food, or Biologically Appropriate Raw Foods. The raw foods diet originated with Dr. Ian Billinghurst, an Australian vet. Billinghurst’s book Give Your Dog A Bone is widely regarded as the Koran of the natural dog-feeding movement. Billinghurst felt that Australian dogs were getting sicker in the 1980s. He linked the illnesses to Western dog kibble, which was introduced to Australia around the same time, and developed the raw food diet in order to combat the effects of it.

Like Weight Watchers, vegans, Atkins dieters, or macrobiotic vegetarians, raw feeders are quick to evangelize the life-changing effects of this diet, often telling the story of a personal triumph over toxic kibble and cooked food.

"Feeding a raw diet is the only way I will feed my dogs," enthuses Haddonfield native Susan Cosby, a dog trainer. "My male German Shepherd had terrible ear and skin problems. We tried everything under the sun from homeopathic to allopathic treatments. Only by switching to a grain-free raw diet did I see a major improvement." Cosby makes sure to discuss nutrition with all of her clients, and has recently begun making home deliveries of a BARF food line called Aunt Jeni’s Home Made 4 Life.

The end result of BARFing is an unexpected, practical bonus for dog owners.

"The poop is smaller, and less offensive," Baker offers. "There’s less of it."

Though usually an indelicate social topic, canine digestion is discussed enthusiastically among most dog owners — especially raw feeders. Hyland notes that her lawn benefits from BARF too. "When my mother was alive she had a yellow Lab," Hyland remembers. "All over her yard were round brown patches. We thought this was a normal thing for her dog, that whenever she tinkled on the ground, the grass died. That does not happen in my backyard. I think it’s because the food [the dogs] eat is so balanced."

Sounds like reason enough for any pooper-scooper, er, dog owner to head straight to the Organic Doggie Deli.

Organic Doggie Deli , 716 S. Fourth St, 215-592-1969.