Sometimes dog food smells … not awful. Maybe because dog-food producers strive to make dog-food look/smell like something we human shoppers almost could eat. Which makes sense, since Fido doesn’t carry cash.

Serena Williams may have been turning that over in her head after a salmon-and-rice dish intended for her little dog, Chip, arrived at her hotel room in Italy.

“Don’t judge me,” the world’s top-ranked tennis player wrote on social media. “I tried a bite.”

She was asked about her taste test after winning a match in the Italian Open. Reporters had seen the photo she posted, which can be seen here.

“I thought ‘what the heck, I’m gonna try a piece, it looks good’,” she said after defeating fellow American Christina McHale.

“Fast forward two hours, I just ran to the toilet like I thought I was going to pass out.”

Apparently, she had stomach issues.

Her issues were perhaps not about dog food, per se — though we would recommend that elite athletes not imbibe.

Let’s hear more from Serena:

“I force-swallowed it, she said of the sample. “I don’t know what they put in these dog foods, but Chip liked it.

“I don’t think it’s consumable for humans. They should have wrote that! So now I feel really sick. It was just a spoonful, but I don’t feel so good.”

She added: “It did taste weird. It tasted kind of like house cleaner.”

Ah, that is interesting.

In theory, we should be able to eat most dog (or cat) food, and stories of poor people eating their pets’ food have been around for years.

In this case, her report that Chip’s meal “tasted kind of like house cleaner” makes us think that perhaps the salmon had “turned”.

Bad fish often has a sort of ammonia smell, and house cleansers often contain ammonia.

Perhaps the tougher tummy of a dog, even a cute little one, was able to handle a batch of less-than-fresh salmon.

Serena’s was not.

Anyway, we trust Serena will, in the future, not sample something from the dog’s dish. She should order something from the people menu, instead.