{"id":182284,"date":"2025-08-28T11:24:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T11:24:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/182284\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T11:24:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T11:24:11","slug":"book-review-eating-behind-bars-food-for-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/182284\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: “Eating Behind Bars” – Food For Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bill Littlefield<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cEating Behind Bars\u201d is a necessary if incomplete cry for justice. It earns its place among the growing number of books exposing this country\u2019s shameful treatment of incarcerated men and women.<\/p>\n

Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison<\/a> by Leslie Soble with Alex Busansky and Aishatu R. Yusuf. Impact Justice\/The New Press, 209 pages, paperback.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cPrisons serve mostly ultra-processed carb-heavy meals high in salt and sugar, with few or no fresh fruits and vegetables and a scarcity of quality protein.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

Feeding a lot of people is easier if you provide packaged, \u201cultra-processed\u201d meals which can be stored for a long time and that require minimal skill for their preparation.<\/p>\n

Wardens, governors, and other prison and jail administrators like \u201ccheap.\u201d Sometimes that\u2019s because they have limited budgets. Sometimes it\u2019s because what they don\u2019t spend on food they can pocket. This goes double for private prisons.<\/p>\n

Few outside the prisons and jails object to the low quality of the food in the institutions. Many people outside of these institutions don\u2019t see why those inside should eat well. They\u2019re incarcerated, after all. What do they expect? Surf and turf? (The carceral system encourages society\u2019s demonization of people in prisons and jails, a mindset that creates a problem extending well beyond what sustenance is provided there.)<\/p>\n

Incarcerated men and women hoping to augment their meager fare must deal with several challenges. Strict rules in some states prevent relatives from bringing in food for incarcerated folks. Food \u2014 mostly snacks \u2014 offered at the canteens in the prisons is far more expensive than it would cost in convenience stores. Some institutions even prohibit the sharing of food inside or outside the mess halls.<\/p>\n

Eating Behind Bars catalogues these circumstances. The authors also cite programs that have successfully addressed them: organizations such as Chefs in Prisons, which not only demonstrate inexpensive and effective ways to provide healthy food, but also train incarcerated men and women in the field of food preparation so they might be able to find employment upon release. The authors also argue that several states, most notably Maine and California, have made some progress in developing nutritious and appealing meals for incarcerated people.<\/p>\n

The arguments in favor of this encouraging move toward caring for prisoners\u2019 well-being are numerous and compelling. Supplying food that people can actually eat means less waste. Providing food that enables incarcerated people to remain healthy \u2014 rather than developing diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, or other diet-related conditions \u2014 means the men and women leaving prison aren\u2019t sick when they leave prison or don\u2019t end up dependent on state-provided health care. Programs that teach incarcerated folks how to grow and harvest healthy food for their own consumption teach useful skills that can lead to future careers. The latter merit is not to be confused with the practice in some states of using incarcerated people to harvest crops that are sold for consumption by others, a practice that is sometimes indistinguishable from sharecropping or slavery.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Prison meals often lack fresh fruit and vegetables. Photo: X<\/p>\n

The bad news in Eating Behind Bars is that, in many states, incarcerated men and women are being served \u201cfood\u201d that is tasteless, often spoiled, sometimes contaminated with animal matter, and unpalatable in myriad other ways.<\/p>\n

The good news is that, thanks to organizations like Impact Justice<\/a> and more-or-less enlightened officials in a few states, these inhumane and costly conditions are being addressed, at least on a limited basis. Justice and compassion demand more. Justice and mercy demand more and, of course, a book limited to concerns about what incarcerated men and women are given to eat doesn\u2019t address other practices that make incarceration so destructive. Still, in other contexts, formerly incarcerated men have written eloquently about how depressing and degrading it is to be served inedible meals or given so little food that they are left constantly hungry. Some have accepted hunger as a challenge, something to endure and overcome. Others have resorted to methods of securing food that people unfamiliar with the realities of incarceration in this country will find hard to believe. For example, \u201cfishing,\u201d in which someone with access to snack food from the prison canteen wraps it in waterproof paper and sends it to the recipient through the same plumbing system that carries waste from the facility.<\/p>\n

Eating Behind Bars is a necessary if incomplete cry for justice. It earns its place among the growing number of books exposing this country\u2019s shameful treatment of incarcerated men and women.<\/p>\n

Bill Littlefield<\/strong> volunteers with the Emerson Prison Initiative. His most recent book is Who Taught That Mouse To Write? (Writing Mouse Press)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Bill Littlefield \u201cEating Behind Bars\u201d is a necessary if incomplete cry for justice. It earns its place…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":182285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-182284","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115106144366895233","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}