Prison Food

I heard a man once say his old lady’s cookin’ sucked so bad the flies pitched in and bought them a screen door.  This makes me think about the food they expect us to eat around here.

You know that toast and jelly, cereal and milk, and salt and pepper go together.  A steak and potato, a soup and salad, garlic and butter….I’ve been hearing these dishes go together all my life.  But prison?  Not so much. 

I’m not real sure who made up these menus but they fit together like water on your cereal.  Who thought of giving full-grown men two pieces of bologna and no bread?   Just roll up the meat and eat it.  Sometimes I wonder if this is some twisted joke!

Here you can see one slice of bread on the tray.  Today the bread is no longer added.

One of our dinner trays is referred to as “tacos” on the DOC menu.   Instead of taco shells, they give you two pieces of bread.  Taco Bell?  I say Taco Hell!  Can you imagine the mess?  Two pieces of bread….

Where I come from we call that “shit on a shingle.”  They took the “taco” off the tray.  They only thing Mexican about the meal is the Chihuahua dog they got the meat from.  Tacos my ass!

Whoever department of corrections has doing their meal plans is smoking crack.  They serve us the same patty and it changes names each time.  Some soybean-cardboard patty is southern fried on Monday.  The patty is a “zesty” patty on Wednesday and somehow turns into a Salisbury steak on Friday.  This is a bigger lie than most men saying their Salisbury steak is ten inches!  It is false advertisement folks.  Plain and simple.

I told my lady the other day I’ll eat anything….well…within reason.  You either eat their food or go hungry…especially when you’re in confinement.  When I first came to prison you got a carton of milk with breakfast.  That was your dairy serving.  You also got a fruit; either an orange or a banana.  The food director decided to do away with both dairy and fresh fruit.  They found it’s too hard to stretch an orange.  When you step on it, there’s a big mess.  Same with the bananas.  They found it’s easier to water down and stretch a fruit juice.  Now we get our fruit serving in a cup that’s been cut down so bad by water there is no nutritional value left.  This is worse than telling someone O’Doul’s will get them drunk.  It’s all a lie. 

How’s that song go...women lie, men lie?  That’s right…and so does the food director.  It’s a shame.  Back here we love to hear there’s an “inspection” coming up.  That’s the only time of year the food trays have proper serving sizes on them and the juice actually tastes like juice. 

Really, I’m not bitching.  It is what it is.  But it’s all false advertisement.  Even the flies won’t eat this shit.  They don’t need a screen door to keep them away.  Prison food make 7-11 chilidogs look like a gourmet meal.  Yep, even that 4-day old weenie that someone forgot about.   That one that’s been turning on that rack and has shrunk into a piece of beef jerky.  Put some chili and cheese on that shit and grab a Coke Icee.  That’s five star dining!