Let’s Talk About Prison Food
Yeah, I know, it’s not the most pleasant thing to jaw about, but just like your Aunt Thelma’s halitosis, it’s unavoidable if you visit. So hold your breath, nod in all the right places, and this’ll be over before you know it.
First off, we do NOT eat like royalty in here… usually. There are exceptions, of course, but they’re far from the norm. No, our typical fare is mass-produced, maladapted, third-grade cafeteria mediocrity cooked up, reheated, and over-warmed in an institutional kitchen built to handle a third of our population. There’s not a corner anywhere that ain’t been cut, and plenty of places that ain’t been cleaned.
Ever heard of campylobacter? We had an outbreak of it at Walla Walla once because no one had cleaned the kitchen roof in so long that the decades-thick slab of pigeon droppings up there seeped into the kitchen’s water supply. I got lucky, but others lost lengths of intestine, developed IBS, Crohn’s disease, or suffered any number of other permanent bits of damage.
Ever heard of a spaghetti bone? Me neither, until I found a chunk of what I can only describe as antler the size of my thumbnail in my pasta one night. Also, I’m positive copper box staples aren’t standard fare for ravioli filling, but what do I know? Oh, this: Me and Dwayne assembled an astounding collection of safety glass, rubber, and plastic from two meatloaf patties during one fine meal, and the turkey à la king used to be that stunt double slop you see in every movie. I think its name was like, Shane or something.
Keep in mind, this is but a small sampling of the culinary catastrophes I’ve encountered during my incarceration. I’m really trying to reach the positive experiences here, but they’re so hopelessly baked into the rest of the mess, it’s impossible to serve up without a bit of burnt crust.
Ok, some good stuff… um… Well… Aha! We used to acquire our food through a process referred to as Opportunity Purchasing. Back then, we had about a 50/50 shot of actually eating decent food at any given meal. Ok, breakfast has always been the most reliable, but that’s beside the point.
With Opportunity Purchasing, our food managers were allowed to shop around to find the best deals instead of being forced to buy from a Correctional outlet. That means if any of the major fast-food chains had overstock, discontinued, or damaged products, we’d end up with it on our trays at mainline.
So, all-you-can-eat McDonald’s hashbrowns in the morning? Sure, as long as you didn’t care how beat up they were. Wendy’s ice cream cake for dessert? Why not, just don’t complain that it’s thawed and refrozen to its wrapper. Stuffed mushrooms from Olive Garden with smiley-faced chicken nuggets from Schwan's? Why not. It was a weird meal, but it didn’t suck.
This form of supply made for some other weird stuff, too. One Thanksgiving, in addition to your standard stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and such, we each got a pterodactyl leg to go with it. I mean, it was PROBABLY turkey, it’s just I’ve never seen a turkey leg comparable to my own. Seriously, these things hung off each side of our trays and tasted like reconstituted fossil. Still…
This kind of randomness was the norm for quite some time and if you believe the old timers, it used to be even better back when each institution raised their own food. But all that changed with the introduction of Correctional Industries (CI) Food Factory.
The difference in quality and introduction of monotony was instant. We’ve always been on a four-week menu, but pre-Food Factory, the variables of any dish were common enough that it at least SEEMED like we weren’t trapped in a time loop. When the assembly lines came in, quality and variety suffered.
What’s a Food Factory? Glad you asked. First, let me educate you a bit about Correctional Industries. CI is the corporate branch of DOC, and as such, they have the mandate to lower operating costs while providing skills and employment to the incarcerated population. They espouse a real-world work environment while running what amounts to a sweatshop run by disposable cogs. If you work for CI, you are ASSIGNED and paid a GRATUITY. You are not an EMPLOYEE nor are you paid a WAGE. And although there are a handful of transferable skills to be gleaned, they’re incidental.
The Food Factory (there are actually two of them, one here and another at Coyote Ridge) is exactly what it sounds like—industrialized food manufacturing. They used to make TV-style meals for various schools and county jails, but when the pandemic hit, a lot of these agencies had to look elsewhere or shut down altogether since no one could work. What I find hilarious is that after the all-clear, 80% of the previous contracts were not renewed or continued. You could practically hear the poor customers sigh in relief. See, they’d been lured by an undercutting contract only to find you get what you pay for. The pandemic gave them an excuse to legally bow out.
Or what about the multimillion-dollar contract lost because one manager wanted to use a four-compartment tray over the customer’s CONTRACTED five-compartment tray? I could go on, but I said I wanted to get to the positives. So…
After CI hijacked control of our statewide menu, the quality of our meals fluctuated badly for several years, but eventually leveled out in the “Meh” zone. There are still some nightmares like their “Curry Stew” and “Chicken Alfredo,” but for the most part, it’s been tolerable. I suppose I should point out that just about everything CI makes is some sort of stew and comes in a bag. The aforementioned Alfredo is mostly broccoli stumps suspended in a gel-like medium we’ll assume contains some quantity of cheese and chicken. It’s hard to tell one milky strand of something from another, though, you know.
Ugh. Positives, Michael! Seriously, I’m trying.