Recipe Station

Website Spoon University took a good long look at how prisons feed their inmates, and what they found was shocking. In many cases it's not the prisons themselves, but the companies they hire to feed prisoners, in this case Aramark, one of the nation's best-known private outsourcing companies:

In 2009, Kentucky Northpoint prisoners started a riot over Aramark’s food in which several buildings burned irreparably. Still, just a few years later in 2013, Michigan signed a 3-year, $145 million contract with the same company to provide the same service, promising things have changed. They didn’t.

In the years following the signing, the American Civil Liberties Union found Aramark in violation of shorting inmates food, having unsanitary cooking and serving areas, and serving food contaminated by maggots and mice. Aramark “knowingly served rotten meat, ordered inmates to serve food pulled from the garbage, handed out food on which rats nibbled, and served moldy food,” according to this article found on the Michigan House of Representatives website.

Besides serving tainted food, Aramark employees were found smuggling drugs and other contraband inside, engaging in sexual acts, and even working as hired hit men, and that’s just in Michigan.

Aramark was fined a meager $86,000 (for making unauthorized meal substitutions and not preparing the correct number of meals), dust compared to their big $48.3 million/year payout. Aramark was never forced to pay this, but was later charged $200,000.

And if that's not bad enough, it's Aramark that runs the prison commissaries, meaning prisoners are essentially forced to pay the very company that's giving them substandard nutrition:

Yes, prisoners are forced to buy food (and other supplies) from the same company depriving them. The matter of the fact is prisoners are trying to buy toothpaste and toilet paper AND feed themselves on the salary of a prison job that only pays around $25 a month. Since money is prohibited and cigarettes were banned in penitentiaries, commissary goods have become currency in prison, mackerel and stamps being the most common form of moolah amongst those serving time.

“Cadillac,” a cup of coffee with a packet of hot chocolate added to it, sounds like a shabby way to make a mocha coffee, but it’s the norm here. Cheese sauce is pretty easy to make: mix boiling water with crumbled nacho cheese Doritos. These are just a few recipes in the Jail House Recipes Cookbook. You even start to miss chicken nuggets being on the inside, but prisoner’s make a “similar” version by wrapping ramen noodle mush around summer sausage and cooking the nuggets in the microwave until they’re brown.

A particularly disturbing aspect of prison food is how it's used to punish inmates:

Prison food is no joke, and with almost no regulation – inhumane. Nutraloaf, aka disciplinary loaf or “the loaf,” is given to inmates who act out or misbehave. Like in Orange is the New Black, inmates are given “the loaf” in the shu. Nutraloaf can be made multiple ways. According to NPR, Pennsylvania makes it with potatoes, cabbage, and margarine, but in some states, dinner from the day before is just thrown together and baked; it’s considered nutritionally complete since it includes the prison’s required number of calories.

Prisoners are usually fed nutraloaf days, sometimes weeks, at a time for every meal. Jeff Ruby, dining critic, described nutraloaf as tasting “neutral” and being a “thick, pulpy aftermath of something you dissected in biology class: so intrinsically disagreeable that [his] throat nearly closed up reflexively.” See for yourself just how gross “the loaf” is.

What Do You Think?

Well, we were definitely shocked when we read about what American prisons serve their inmates. Hopefully the situation will improve now that so many people are investigating it and calling for change!

Should Prisoners Eat Like This?

Article Source: Spoon University

Photo Source: Fox