• Tested on Switch, Xbox and PC
• Works on food and lawn gnomes (and probably anything else)
• Can be done with cat or dog
• Does not require flight setup
• Can be used picking up items from a table, but it's much harder to execute, particularly on console

YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Great find! That's gonna be worth so much time :D

Ok yeah this is a spicy little glitch. Maybe you've already tested most/all of this, but I tried out a few more things with it to see what would happen (little of this is useful for speedruns, barring further developments, but worth documenting because it's funny if nothing else.

• The "storage" persists through reading a book with no adverse effects, though the food can get cold (useful specifically for the catnip food in the kidnap quest).
• If you hold jump through the pickup animation instead of transforming, you semi-softlock yourself into carrying the object while also perpetually looping naomi's awkward jump animation (as if holding jump normally). I couldn't find a way to break out of it (you can't interact with other objects or put down the food), including warping home. You could probably die to break it but I didn't feel like hunting down a badger to kill me.
• Cat waitress state does not persist through death and appears to have no adverse side effects once you res.
• It gets real funky if you go too far from the food while in cat waitress state. I suspect that once you get far enough away, it de-loads the food, and then when you turn back to human form, it knows you're supposed to be carrying something, but there's no longer anything to carry. I have 3 screenshots:
• 1: I walked as a cat from the restaurant to this shrine just north of naomi's house, and when I turned back naomi was translucent, carrying an invisible nothing, and I was only able to walk in one direction (inputting other directions, amusingly, could tilt naomi, but not actually move her). I also couldn't transform or anything. Also, it seemed that other actors (like a nearby fox) had their coordinates frozen - its animations played, but it didn't move.
• 2: If I went to map and tried to warp home, I got this amusing dialogue. (switching control schemes - controller to M/KB - caused the rest of the text to appear)
• 3: I traveled to that same shrine, but periodically stopping to drop and pick up the food so that it would stay in load range. I then warped to the hill shrine outside town and had all the same effects listed in 1, except naomi was now completely invisible.
• Worth noting that if you warp within load range, the game doesn't seem have a problem with it.

I don't think it's super likely to do anything but softlock, but I do wonder what would happen if you took cat waitress state into a story cutscene or something while outside load range. Like, this clearly breaks the game pretty hard and I can't help but think there's something that could be done with it but I'm probably just crazy.