Can anyone tell me where the phrase “eating one’s own dog food” has suddenly appeared from? Dave Winer, Jeremy Zawodny and even Adam Curry in his keynote speech at Gnomedex have all quipped it recently.
/me think it must be an American thing. This guy agrees with me.
Ben,
It’s a term that’s been around for quite a few years. An explanation can be found in the Jargon File:
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/dogfood.html
And also in WP:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogfood
The term is often used within microsoft for describing when a project uses internal beta software and platforms. All of the projects that I have worked on within Microsoft required the dogfooding of at least one beta product.