(Originally Posted on October 1, 2015)
With low cost being the main objective, there is an exceptional lack of variety in our diet. Have you ever wondered what the absolute cheapest food in America is? I bet I know. Not because I’m a food economics expert, but because I eat it every meal: it’s bread. Biscuits, pancakes, cornbread, noodles or outdated sliced bread purchased at a huge discount from local outlets. No meal in prison is served without bread, and with casseroles making up the majority of our menu, bread forms the largest part of our diet. Ever wonder what the second cheapest food is? It’s got to be beans, as they too, come on every tray with the exception of breakfast. Not to say that breakfast is any more diverse than the other meals. In fact, breakfast has the least variety of all as it’s pretty much always pancakes with an occasional egg and biscuit day to break the monotony. I haven’t eaten breakfast in years, and not just because I’m so sick of pancakes that I’ve taken an oath to never eat another (barring starvation). Breakfast is served at 2 a.m. every morning; how insane is that? Who wants to interrupt a perfectly good sleep cycle to go stand in a line of grumpy convicts, illuminated by horribly bright florescent lights, just to eat some nasty prison pancakes? Evidently, plenty do, but I choose to survive on two meals and a full night of sleep.
Beans and starch will invariably make up the biggest percentage of our diet and fresh fruits and vegetables are forbidden, but sometimes there are one of five canned vegetables to be had, which are cooked until they reach the consistency of baby food — be it corn, green beans, carrots, greens or mixed veggies. I don’t know how many nutrients are left in the vegetables after being boiled to death, but I force myself to swallow the stuff in case any vitamins survive. There haven’t been any outbreaks of scurvy, so we must be getting vitamins from somewhere… perhaps the “enriched” bleached flour?
In America, meat is usually considered to be the main course. This is true even for its disposable people in jail, yet the term “meat” shouldn’t be taken too literally. Though our meat is often served in microscopic bits hidden in casseroles, or tastes suspiciously like oatmeal, it’s the main course for lunch and dinner. Beef and pork make up the majority, but it’s not actual meat cuts. The beef for instance, is always ground and supplemented with other ingredients. When the meat arrives in the prison kitchen, it is cut with oatmeal, cornmeal, crackers and other fillers. They get creative with the menu calling the results things such as: Beef Cutlets, Salisbury Steak, Porcupine Balls, Pepper Steak and so on, but it’s all the same low-grade meat that meat packers call “lips and assholes”: the waste left over on the floor after the butchering is done. Our pork is much the same.
On rare occasions like today, with the exception of beef, we’ll receive an actual cut of unprocessed meat, a chicken thigh/leg (but never a breast or wing which is too valuable to feed to prisoners), and perhaps once a year we might see a pork chop. The irony of this is that our prisons are called farms because along with gazillions of chickens, we are forced to raise all sorts of livestock, especially pigs. (A discouraging side note: In this state, the summer temperatures are so extreme that inmates die every year from heat related illnesses. There are no cooling systems in our razor-wired brick ovens. Yet, the prison system spent extraordinary sums to build climate-controlled buildings for livestock. I sort of knew I had less value than a pig, but the state confirmed it with an exclamation point.) Despite all of the livestock we’re required to raise, we eat very little of it. The prison system sells the meat to commercial interests, which makes me wonder — not only are inmates fed quite economically but perhaps at a profit? It seems unlikely, and it’s impossible to research but it’s interesting.
I still haven’t figured out what happens to the crops we cultivate, particularly the produce. We receive almost no fresh fruit or vegetables in our diet; even the canned vegetables tend to have commercial labels. It’s a mystery. Except for cotton. You can drive by any number of our prisons and witness the same sight had you ridden by in a carriage 300 years ago: a wide expanse of cotton plants with a line of unpaid, mostly black men bent over picking cotton and guarded by a red-necked, cowboy-hatted, rifle-toting overseer riding a horse and shouting profanities at the slaves. A lot of people in the North cannot picture this, but here in the South, people don’t even bat an eye. The cotton is then processed into textile by another set of slaves, and then made into maternity uniforms for prisoners.
Of the foods I miss the most, produce would top the list — especially fresh fruit. Not just the lovely taste, but the fact that you’re eating something natural and wholesome. A connection to the earth. A healthy, delicious, untainted form of nutrition. Oh how I yearn for glorious fruit, and I mentally kick myself in the face for every time I ever selected junk food over fruit when I had the privilege to choose my diet. It’s a cliche, I know: you don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone. Perhaps proverbial regret is prison’s most palpable punishment.
End part 2
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