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There is something particularly disconcerting about chopping up pig hearts, with their familiar lobes and valves, and then frying them up, filling my mostly vegetarian kitchen with gusts of gamy, porky steam.

But I do it because, as a friend and fellow dog owner once said, "I like to watch."

Not the cooking, but the eating of it. Like me, she feeds her dog meals prepared at home. And, like me, she enjoys seeing her dog eat. (I actually sit on the floor sometimes for a better view.) I know I'm at some extreme end of the spectrum here, but the desire for owners to see their pets eat well is not as rare as you might think. And for many owners these days, this means making the food themselves.

Christine Ford, a Toronto dog walker, began home cooking for her Westie puppy Joey six years ago, mostly for health reasons. "He had all this brown, runny stuff from his eyes ... [and] digestive issues," she says. "... He was a puppy, he should have been healthy."

When a co-worker mentioned to Ms. Ford that she cooked for her own dog, "a light went off." Now she buys organic meats and vegetables for Joey and her other dog, Millie. "We chop up the veggies and then throw the meat in and then water and start the slow cooker."

Her puppy got better and is now a healthy dog. As a bonus, Ms. Ford's pets were unscathed during last year's tainted-food scandal. In March, 2007, a number of pet-food companies recalled products in Canada and the United States following reports of animal deaths. Melamine-tainted food was blamed for about 4,000 deaths of cats and dogs in the United States. As many as 40,000 pets reportedly became ill.

While pet-supply stores immediately saw a rise in sales of all-natural brands, some owners opted out of feeding their pets processed food altogether.

Liza Cowell runs The Skye's The Limit in Burlington, Ont. She sells Canine Life muffin mix, which requires the addition of meat, but is essentially for home-cooked meals. "When that food recall hit ... we doubled our business," she says.

Many veterinarians are accepting these alternative diets. Scott Bainbridge of Toronto recommends home cooking for some clients to address certain medical conditions.

As for processed food, "I'm not big on the preservatives, and I don't like the fact that there's no moisture in dry food," Dr. Bainbridge says, mentioning that cats are particularly at risk of bladder problems. But, he cautions, "if you are going to do it, let your vet know."

The move toward homemade meals was already under way long before the tainted-food scandal broke, though.

In fact, for most of our shared history with hounds, they have eaten from our tables (or our garbage). In the book The Lost History of the Canine Race, Mary Elizabeth Thurston shows how attitudes about dog food have matched our attitudes about human food step for step.

Regal dogs ate rich, liver-clogging foods; Prince Albert's poor greyhound Eos was fed a diet of foie gras and unsalted butter. Peasant dogs ate the family castoffs: potatoes, cabbage and the occasional knuckle.

Industrialization led to a dedicated pet-food industry; the first mass-produced dog biscuit is said to have been introduced in 1860. What followed was the rise of the era of processed food, climaxing some time in the past century with wild health claims: Never mind that dogs in the wild thrived on half-rotten carcasses - even veterinarians were saying that the only kind of food that could supply your dog (or cat) with all the necessary vitamins was brown gruel you tipped out of a can.

Now, a generation of label readers, skeptical about processed food, is buying local, buying organic, buying free-range ... and feeding it to their pets.

"People's awareness is the direct result of educating themselves on what's going into their own bodies," says Steven Mactavish, who runs one of the Ryan's Pet Foods in Burlington.

He feeds his own dog a raw-food diet, but says that when customers come into his store the best advice he can offer them is, "stop doing what you're told and start thinking for yourself."

Lisan Jutras is a writer and editor who lives in Toronto with two cats and a small, sensitive street dog.