Eating Alone in Prison Is Miserable

Prison grub tends to be a bit of a mystery to those on the outside. The days of lining for a sloppy ladleful of gruel are mostly over, but if porridge is no longer staple scran for inmates, what do they eat? A friend of mine, "Josho," is an ex-prisoner who has had various runs with custodial cuisine in the UK. According to him, processed meat and instant noodles are the new gruel, and the daily menus available to inmates are both unimaginative and monotonous. Not only that, but the wait between mealtimes can be as excruciating as the meal itself.

While a new prisoner cannot expect to be met with creative, bountiful menus as the doors lock behind them, regardless of where your views on the prison system lie, there is surely argument for every human being having the option to eat at least vaguely well. Despite their misdemeanors.

Josho explained that communal dining areas are fast becoming a memory in UK prisons, with many prisoners having to eat, sleep and shit in the same place—their cell. In turn, mealtimes no longer provide an opportunity to socialize. Despite this, prisoners remain resourceful as ever, trading pillaged food from the kitchen and using kettles as cooking devices.

MUNCHIES: Hi Josho. What would you eat for breakfast on an average day when you were inside? Do you get porridge? The only porridge you get now is dried oats and milk powder that comes in your breakfast pack. Every evening at dinnertime, we were given a breakfast pack for the next day. It would include cereal or porridge, a tiny carton of long-life milk, jam, tea bags, sugar, and a few grams of milk powder. Every pack would be different because prisoners in other jails pack them—sometimes you'd get two teabags to last you a day, other days you'd get five.

How does HMP-branded cereal compare to, say, Cheerios? Well, it comes in a little crisp packet container and tastes like cardboard. God knows where it's made. Probably somewhere even cheaper than China.

So no fry-ups? Every Sunday we'd get a "fry-up" of sorts. But you can't really use the word "fry" because it's all cooked in the oven—they can't fry the eggs, sausages, or bacon because of health and safety. Basically, they don't trust prisoners with hot oil, so everything has to be cooked in the oven.

What time were mealtimes? Lunch and dinner are the only hot meals of the day, and lunch is always around midday. Dinner was at 5:30 PM. There's no set time for breakfast—you can choose when to give into hunger and eat your cereal pack. Not that it will fill you up.

In your experience, what does the average prison menu look like? Every day you get given a paper dinner sheet that you have to fill out and give to the screws. There are always five options—halal, vegan, kosher, vegetarian, and meat—and each of the options are different. One day the choice might be between lasagna, curry, bolognese, and shepherd's pie. If you ever forgot to fill in the dinner sheet, your food requirements were ignored and you'd get lumped with whatever was left.

Do you think prisons in the UK use their food budget wisely? Put it this way, the food is nothing to write home about. Nearly all the ingredients were frozen or tinned and any spicing was pretty bland and boring. I guess its hard to make the food tasty when you're cooking for up to 5000 people, though. I remember seeing all the food poured into big pots that looked like witches caldrons. It tasted like school dinners at a shit school. The meals got repetitive quickly—what they'd serve on a Monday one week might be what they'd serve on a Wednesday next week. Although we did get fish and chips every Friday.

Well that's something. What were the waiting times and portions like? Well, the food had to be on time because otherwise there's no structure to the day. My portions were always alright; I don't know about other people. You're meant to get two scoops of whatever you've requested, which is supposed to be enough to feed you, but if they want to mug you off they'll only give you one scoop. If you're vulnerable, you're not going to say anything, either. It was all fine, apart from the long waits between mealtimes and the fights that broke out in the dinner lines.

Where would you eat your meals? I would eat in my cell. At mealtimes, the officers would let each landing out one by one, and you'd line up to get your food in the servery. After that you'd be taken back up to your cell where you'd have half an hour to eat. You basically eat, sleep, and shit in one place.

Surely mealtimes provide key socialising opportunities? Yeah, but I guess fights can break out anywhere, whether its at church, in the gym, or in free association. It's just one less place for trouble to start.

What kind of things could you buy at the tuck shop? They had most things you'd get in an off licence apart from the booze—chocolate bars, sweets, crisps, instant noodles, long-life milk, juice, tins of tuna, tobacco, Rizlas, etc.

Browsing the shop must be one of the highlights of your day. There was no browsing. If we'd all been allowed in the canteen together it would have been madness. Everyone would have gotten robbed. Instead, you were given a bit of paper to tick off what you wanted and then they'd deliver it to your cell. Of course, the amount you could spend depended on what status you were on. If you were on basic you could spend £2.50 a week, on standard £15.50 a week, and enhanced £25.50 a week.

Did you ever go inside the kitchens? Prisoners aren't allowed in the kitchens unless they work there, but I worked as a runner so I'd go into the kitchen to collect the meals everyday. I would count the portions out and put them on the trolley to take into the serving area, where the food was laid out and served by the servers.

Is working in the kitchen the most popular job in prison? Yeah. You've got to remember that prisoners do pretty much everything in jail apart from locking peoples doors. Apart from a couple of main chefs who were in charge, prisoners cooked all the food. People who liked food would try and get a job in the kitchen, in the same way that older people wanted jobs in the garden and younger people wanted jobs in the gym. It was a popular job because you got an oven-cooked "fry-up" every morning and you could eat while you cooked. But, most of all, you could steal all sorts of food from the kitchen to take back to the wing.

What would you do with the stolen food? Sometimes you'd trade it, but you'd be more likely to cook it yourself in your kettle. We'd use the kettles in our cells to cook up food.

How? You empty the water and use the metal bit at the bottom of the kettle as a frying pan. You'd use some oil from a tin of tuna to fry up onions and whatever other food you could your hands on. We used stolen food from the kitchens, food from mealtimes, and bought food from the canteen.

Resourceful. What kind of things would you cook and what would happen if you got caught? The screws know people cook in their rooms. If you got found out you'd get a warning, but it's generally pretty safe. I only ate prison food for the first six months or so that I was in there, and after that would always eat re-cooked things. A group of five of us would put all of our food from the servery together and one person would go into the cell and cook it all in their kettle.

Was it tasty? Yeah, pretty tasty. We'd get hold of paprika, jerk, and all-purpose seasoning from the kitchen. Jerk stews were normally the easiest thing to make, but sometimes we'd get lucky if someone had stolen raw meat from the kitchen. After the half an hour to eat was up, they'd open our doors for free association and we'd all eat together.