Mystery meat and maggot-infested produce: the disturbing reality of US prison food

[erronis]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/31/eating-behind-bars-book-prison-food

In Eating Behind Bars, author Leslie Soble details how food is used to further punish incarcerated people in the US

At best you get “mystery meat”. Or “sour-smelling heaps” of macaroni. In the worst cases, it’s undercooked chicken, spoiled milk and maggot-infested produce.

In prisons and jails across the US, people are routinely fed unhealthy, tasteless or inedible meals. Many are left hungry and malnourished, with devastating long-term health consequences. The hidden crisis affecting millions of incarcerated people is the subject of Eating Behind Bars, a new book offering a disturbing account of how correctional institutions punish their residents through the food they provide and withhold.

The book by Leslie Soble, a Washington DC-based ethnographer and folklorist, describes roaches and rats in prison kitchens, rotten meat and guard dogs who are fed better meals than incarcerated people. It is a compelling, and at times nauseating, indictment of the criminal justice system. Soble manages the Food in Prison Project at Impact Justice, a national non-profit that advocates for reforms and supports incarcerated people; she co-wrote Eating Behind Bars with Impact Justice colleagues, Alex Busansky and Aishatu R Yusuf.

The book lays out the “gastronomic cruelty” and “culinary malpractice” inside prisons, where residents “subsist – barely – on carb-heavy, ultraprocessed foods”. Portions are “just enough to keep you alive”. The book is based on surveys of hundreds of formerly incarcerated people and their families, in-depth interviews, in-prison focus groups and testimony from officials and activists.

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I'll bet Ghislaine Maxwell gets as many hambudgers as she wants. As long as she stays quiet.

[canetoad]

1. Incredibly cruel

And against every human rights principle. At least you don't torture folk....... oh wait.....