How It All Started — A Chef’s Perspective on Simpler Nutrition
How It All Started — A Chef’s Perspective on Simpler Nutrition
This didn’t start because something was wrong. Loki was healthy. He had no allergies, no sensitivities, no obvious issues that needed fixing. What bothered me wasn’t his health — it was the food itself. I’ve always cared deeply about what I eat. Where it comes from. How it’s prepared. What it does for the body over time. Yet when it came to feeding my dog, I was expected to accept something heavily processed, shelf‑stable, and disconnected from what I understood as real food.
That disconnect didn’t sit right with me.
My Background Shaped the Question
Before The Wolfery existed, my life revolved around two disciplines: food and the human body. I trained in professional kitchens, including Michelin‑starred environments, where food isn’t treated casually. Ingredients matter. Technique matters. Process matters. You learn quickly that food is not just fuel — it’s information the body responds to. Alongside that, I studied sports medicine and human performance. That education reinforced something chefs already intuitively understand: nutrition works best when it’s simple, consistent, and biologically appropriate. The body doesn’t need constant novelty or engineered complexity. It needs quality inputs, prepared well.
Those two worlds — culinary craft and physiological understanding — shaped how I see nutrition.
Why Dog Food Felt Backwards
When I looked at most dog food through that lens, it felt overengineered. We’ve taken something inherently simple — feeding a living being — and turned it into a maze of processing, additives, claims, and numbers. Nutrition became abstract. Meals became formulas. Dogs became endpoints for compliance rather than beings with digestive systems that evolved to recognize food. Ironically, this mirrors what we’ve done to human nutrition.
We overcomplicated it.
Calories replaced food. Macros replaced meals. Optimization replaced intuition. And somewhere along the way, we lost sight of the basics. Dogs are now caught in that same system.
Cooking Wasn’t a Trend — It Was a Reset
I started cooking for Loki not because I was trying to improve him, but because I wanted his food to make sense. Whole proteins. Real vegetables. Gentle cooking. Nothing unnecessary. Once I stripped things back, something became clear: simplicity wasn’t a compromise — it was an upgrade. That’s a principle chefs understand well. The best dishes are rarely the most complicated. They’re the most intentional. Every ingredient earns its place. Every process serves a purpose.
The same applies to nutrition.
What Culinary Training Adds to Nutrition
A culinary background changes how you approach food — for humans or dogs. You understand ingredients, not just nutrients. Proteins behave differently depending on how they’re cooked. Vegetables release nutrients differently when handled gently versus aggressively. Fats matter — not just in quantity, but in quality and context.
You respect process.
Temperature, moisture, and time directly affect nutrient integrity and digestibility. Gentle cooking isn’t a marketing term; it’s basic food science applied correctly.
You design meals, not formulas.
Bodies don’t eat isolated nutrients — they eat meals. Meals work as systems, and balance comes from how ingredients work together, not how many boxes are checked.
Going Back to Basics
The more I cooked for Loki, the more I realized this philosophy extended far beyond one dog.We don’t need more complexity. We need better fundamentals.
Good sourcing. Thoughtful preparation. Consistency. Restraint.
This doesn’t reject science — it respects it. The most enduring nutritional principles haven’t changed much over time. What’s changed is how far we’ve drifted from them.The Wolfery was built as a return to those basics. Not as a reactionary brand. Not as a trend. But as a disciplined approach to feeding dogs the way we know how to feed bodies well.
Why This Matters
Dogs rely entirely on us for their nutrition. Every meal we serve shapes their energy, digestion, and long‑term health. They don’t need novelty. They don’t need overprocessing. They need food their bodies recognize. The Wolfery exists because food should be honest, intentional, and biologically sensible. Because simplicity, when done correctly, is powerful. This is where it started — with one dog, one question, and a refusal to accept that processed food was the best we could do.
