shoestring gringa

Most everybody we know belongs to one or the other of these consumer emporia, not because their prices are so great, but because they carry certain items that just can’t be found elsewhere.  The items on our usual list are few but critical:  Kitty litter, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, cod liver oil caps, paper towels.  Sometimes we’ll splurge on giant jars of marinated artichoke hearts, jamon serrano (similar to prosciutto), or the occasional find in the liquor department.

We’ve been bouncing back and forth between the two, being too cheap to join both at $40 a year (that was a year ago, who knows what it might be by now with inflation raging).

We started out at Sam’s, because when we first moved we had a card from the states that worked in Mexico too.  Then last year we were lured to Costco by their fabulous, irresistible deal on jamon serrano.  Sam’s was selling single packets for about ~$12 US, and we discovered Costco had boxes of 10 packets for less than ~$25!  So, no contest, we migrated to Costco.  They also have both 5-liter jugs of regular olive oil, and 2-liter jugs of extra-virgin, whereas Sam’s had only 3-liter jugs of extra-virgin, which I would (extravagantly) use for frying and everything.

However, we’re thinking of migrating back when our card expires, because of the kitty litter problem.  The Costco product is perfumed to the point of inducing nausea, and we’re about ready to renounce our jamon serrano habit to see the last of it.   Another thing I won’t miss is Costco’s wasteful, annoying, mile-long paper towels.

But we will miss the artichoke hearts.  And the 5-liter olive oil.  Maybe we should live dangerously for once and just cough up for membership in both.  The way things are going in the global economy, who knows if they’ll even be around this time next year?

Feeding the little buggers south of the border has proven to be quite a hassle, which is presently in abeyance only due to our proximity to el otro lado. It’s not that you can’t get cat food here, it’s that you can’t get DECENT cat food. Well, here’s the story.

We have three cats, two about age 6 and one who’s over 10. So, they were already old – and set in their little ways – when we moved to Mexico. I had started buying so-called premium brands of cat food some years ago after reading scary things about the cheaper stuff, and during the last years of the late, great, much-mourned Lolita, who had a delicate digestion. So these current cats had long been dining off one of those pricey brands from Petco, something with “nature” in the name if I remember (and YES!! One of the very brands that poisoned all those cats about a year ago, thank GOD we moved when we did), along with a brand of dry food called Azmira which I got at the Holistic Animal place in Tucson. They all seemed to do fine on this.

Fast forward to Yucatan. We’d brought a couple months’ supply (one of the more brilliant ideas I ever had) because even in my boundless ignorance at the time, I had a wee suspicion that I wouldn’t want to be hunting for CAT FOOD in a strange land while rehabilitating a house and trying to figure out how to feed us.

The cans ran out first, and that was simple, we just went back to Friskies. You can get it in Walmart and its clones, and large supermarkets like Soriana and Comercial Mexicana. Whiskas is equally available, but our cats won’t eat a lot of their flavors, so I gave up on that. So, we had Friskies. It’s about 60 cents US a can as of this writing.

Then we ran out of the dry food, and that turned into a BEEG problem. We got some Whiskas dry (known as croquetas in Spanish), which is available everywhere I’ve been in Mexico. You can get it in bags or boxes in grocery stores, and many little tienditas have a giant bag on hand and will sell you the stuff by weight.

Well, the cats liked that fine too, but I noticed that after about three weeks they were getting really jumpy, and their coats turned dull, and I could see that this just wasn’t going to work. Cheap-food carbo OD. So the search was on for some better quality dry cat food. Which we finally located, after numerous trials and tribulations which I haven’t the strength to relate here, in a – get this – pet store in the Gran Plaza shopping mall in Mérida. Eukanuba. At 400 pesos or $40 US smackers for a teensy 8-pound bag. Yep. We love our kitties, yes we do!!

The good news is that it worked, their shiny coats returned and their nervousness abated. The only real downside was that sinking feeling I got every time I had to shell out 40 bucks for another bag.

Eukanuba also makes dog food, by the way.

Then we moved to central Mexico, taking a couple of bags of Eukanuba along, of course. By the time those ran out, we managed to locate a source, not exactly local, in a veterinary clinic about 30 minutes away. Crisis averted once again.

Along about that time, feeling royally sick and tired of the whole cat food business, I started researching on the net how I might feed them real food, so that I’d actually know what I was giving them. Well, THAT turned out to be quite a Pandora’s box, and with disappointing results to boot. I did learn a lot. Cats, it seems, are what they call “obligate carnivores” which means they need meat, pretty much exclusively. Unlike dogs, who can thrive on a more varied diet. It’s something to do with the length of their digestive tracts. Cats also need a substance called taurine, which is added to commercial cat foods. Not all meats contain taurine for some reason. Although liver supposedly has some, and heart has the most of all (yum, yum!). Maybe some of the taurine comes from crunching on little bones in the wild; according to one source you can roast egg shells and grind them up and put them in your homemade cat food to provide taurine.

Then, as if all this weren’t enough, there’s the hotly debated issue of cooked vs. raw meat. And what kinds of meat. And on, and on, and on.

I decided to experiment, and at least supplement their diet with some “real food.” Up to then it hadn’t occurred to me that the cats themselves might not be in favor of any more dietary changes. At least a variety of meats was available where we were living. We even had a friend who owned a butcher shop! I tried quite a few things. The two younger cats LOVED raw liver, couldn’t get enough of it, but every time we gave it to them one of them would barf it, in the middle of the night, all over our down comforter. Which we would then have to wash. Which was not good for it. All of them were lukewarm on ground beef, raw or cooked. The tabby adored raw chicken; and they all deigned to eat cooked chicken. The older cat would eat only cooked chicken, and would have nothing to do with any of the other stuff. They unanimously hated the heart, raw or cooked, taurine-packed though it supposedly was. I got stuck with a kilo of the stuff. WE certainly weren’t going to eat it.

As you can see, there’s no happy ending to this story. A few months after the Failed Real Food Experiments, we took a bunch of paintings up to Arizona, and bought a couple 25-lb bags of Azmira in Tucson. 25 pounds!!! For only 25 dollars!! We couldn’t believe how incredibly, miraculously cheap that seemed. And soon thereafter, we moved to Sonora, which is only a few hours away from Tucson. If we ever move back to central Mexico, I’m not sure what we’ll do. I guess if we could afford to do that, we’d also be able to afford Eukanuba. Or Azmira via FedEx.

Meanwhile, if we should foolishly acquire any new cats, we’d be well advised to raise them from the start on real food (with egg shells, I guess, or I think you can buy taurine supplements, which would certainly be cheaper to FedEx than 25-lb bags of Azmira).

Can you get kitty litter in Mexico? This is a question I worried about a lot before we moved here.

The good news is that kitty litter is fairly easily to find in Mexico, at least in towns of any decent size. The best place to get it is at Sams Club or Costco, where it comes in plastic bins of 15.9 kg (30-some pounds). Cost is ~$11. You can also get smaller quantities in some of the larger grocery stores, although not at such favorable prices, and it may not be the scoopable variety (rendered as agglutinante in Spanish).

Our litter box developed a leak after we got here, and that item was not so easy to find. However, as any plastic box will do, it was no real biggie. But if you hanker for one of those models with the rim on, or a little dome on top, you’ll probably just have to get over it, unless you can find a fancy pet store in a mall somewhere (The Gran Plaza in Merida, Yucatan had one).

Before I knew for sure that we could buy the stuff in Mexico, I did a bit of research on substitutes. My findings were not extensive, but I’ll share them for what it’s worth. All of these solutions, of course, would depend upon whether the cats in question are willing to use them.

• Shredded newspapers. This would be expensive in Mexico, with the daily paper selling at ~70 cents and Sunday editions ~$1.

• Beach sand. This was my choice back when we were moving to a beach town. The drawback being that beach sand is likely to contain sand fleas, which you wouldn’t want in the house or on the cats. Then I found some info on the internet from some folks who lived on a sailboat with their cat, who said that if you get WET sand and then dry it in the sun, it will be flea-free. They added that you could bake sand in the oven to kill the fleas, but that option seemed a little unappetizing to me. I’d want a special, dedicated oven just for the sand, which would be too expensive.

• In a pinch, I guess there’s plain old dirt, or non-beach sand, whatever’s available. It might not be the Ritz, but it’s better than having them use your shoes.

One house we rented had an interior patio which was wonderful because the cats could be outdoors and still protected at the same time. There was a large planter filled with dirt out there, where a previous occupant had been growing some green beans, and which one of our cats (the piggy one) appropriated as her own personal kitty box. So something like that might be another option.

That’s it! All the other suggestions I saw (cedar chips, etc.) would be WAY harder to find than kitty litter in Mexico. If you’re taking cats to Mexico, adult cats who are already set in their ways, it’s best not to get too far from civilization where supplies for them can be found.