Cooking in Prison
by Allegra Baggio Corradi
In a prison context, institutional policies minimise opportunities for the articulation of self. Cooking allows inmates to thwart an uninterrupted trajectory of subjection. By relying on processes of participation and strategies of repurposing, inmates cook up decision-making moments that affirm their agency as individuals, breaking a cycle of scarcity, paucity, monotony and listlessness. A form of collective disobedience and personal pride, a victory over deprivation, a rebuttal to under-achievement: cooking inside a cell is a celebration of choice and creativity.
Providing food to prison populations is a challenge constrained by tight budgets, complex logistics, as well as cultural and health-related needs. In many countries, prison food is insufficient in quantity and poor in quality. Malnutrition in prison settings is often a cause of obesity. In addition to poor diet, unhealthy weights among incarcerated populations are related to limited access to physical activity and the use of psychotropic medications. According to Penal Reform International, in the US less than 0.5 USD per prisoner is spent every day on food. Recently, the World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe has published a report that addresses the critical role of food in the physical and mental health of incarcerated people, and how nutrition affects relationships and the construction of identity.
Indeed, food is a largely top-down expression of power through which a hidden punishment is inflicted on prisoners to perpetuate patterns of poverty and oppression. Against the backdrop of a punishment-driven welfare providing animal grade nourishment to communities who already experience inequalities and deprivation, cooking in prison kneads together politics and poetics in an act of defiance. Gaining access to limited resources, building supportive relationships in a hostile environment and demonstrating knowledge in a context inciting idleness leads to a redefinition of sociability. “Boats”, i.e., groups of prisoners, keep afloat through balancing acts of labour, skill and resourcefulness, making waves in a sea of solitude and sorrow through the imaginative acts of cooking sausages on heaters and building ovens from bedside tables. By turning a whole into something more than the parts alone imply, prisoners turn cooking into a metaphorical act of liberation and sharing; which is also why they often look for an audience with whom to share their guileful craft, moving from a top-down to a bottom-up view of dignity and purpose.
During Covid, 31-year-old Jeron Combs from California shared videos of his daily meals in prison via TikTok. He garnered millions of views and 300k followers over a few months. In the US, phones are considered contraband. His aim was to show that prisoners have agency and can make creative decisions inside a prison cell. Like him, French inmate Fleury Mérogis made a name for himself on Twitter by sharing photos and videos of his culinary creations throughout the pandemic. In 2013, Michelin-starred French chef Michel Portos spent a week in the prison of Baumettes in Marseille. There, he learned recipes and became familiar with the ingenious solutions that prisoners invented to build utensils and retrieve food. A two-season series called « Prison Breakfast » was aired on French TV, which showed video recipes from the prison of Marseille. In the women’s prison of Cartagena in Colombia, a foundation working to improve living conditions in prison, opened an inmate-led fine dining experience to jumpstart reintegration. The restaurant now serves fifty and a set meal costs the equivalent of 26 Euros, including an appetiser, a main, a dessert and a non-alcoholic drink. Prison restaurants also exist in Milan, Volterra, Concord, Auburn, San Quentin, Montagny, and many other cities internationally. Former inmate Daniel Genis wrote a feature on prison cuisine, highlighting key cooking tricks to survive in a slammer, from making « crackhead soup » (instant ramen) to boiling-in-the-bag with a stinger (a stove). In the UK, social enterprise Liberty Kitchen trains prisoners in high-quality food preparation and employs ex-prisoners to sell food at street markets to reduce recidivism. In 2009, Italian catering manager Alberto Crisci identified the need for prisoners to obtain formal training and qualifications to find a job after release. He founded « The Clink », a rehabilitation project providing guidance in food preparation, food service and cleaning, and horticulture to prisoners in Cardiff, Brixton, Styal and Manchester. Over the past ten years in the US, several attempts were made to improve self-sufficiency in food production within prisons. As prisons farms did not have enough funds to buy and feed animals, a solution was found in rearing small animals directly. Rabbits, for instance, have risen to popularity in Malawi because they are rich in protein and can live on maize husks and vegetable leaves alone. A manual on the subject was recently published by the Malawi Department of Justice itself. In 2012, Andrei Barabanov was sentenced to four years in a Russian prison after being arrested at an anti-Putin rally. After his release, Barabanov opened an Instagram page where he shared recipes that he and his fellow inmates concocted by using the few supplies they could access. His best-known recipe was homemade Nutella, made from ground digestive biscuits and cocoa powder.
Food culture in prison varies greatly between countries and continents. A naïve Google search with the input « Which country has the best prison food » reveals that Norway has a reputation for the homeliest meals like fish balls, prawns and salmon. But type « Which country jail has the best food ? » and the answer is « The prison of Hokkaido in Japan, where grilled saury fish, barley rice and miso soup are served. » If one wonders « What do they eat in Italian prisons ? » the first answer showing is « The menus typically include freshly harvested fruits such as cherries and figs and vegetables such as aubergines and tomatoes. It is also believed that the adult prisoner would receive a bottle of around 250ml of wine. »
Against all stereotypes and uninformed hearsays, reality is not so rosy. Picaresque rather than picturesque, the act of cooking in prison, oscillates between varying degrees of iterative indigence and rare attempts to humanise an otherwise stable state of stupor, depending on the geography. In the preventive jail of Mexico City, prisoners are allowed to receive and consume food coming from outside only on Saturdays, Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. On other weekdays they are only served onion soup. On the other side of the spectrum, the prison of Bastøy in Norway attempts to rehabilitate prisoners rather than punishing them. To this end, a mini village was set up where prisoners wear plainclothes and shop at local grocery stores on an $85 weekly allowance. More moderately, prisoners in South Korea are often served Kongbap — a bland instant dish consisting of rice and beans. At breakfast, they are given bread with tomato sauce and cheese, soup, salad, and soy milk. Similarly, in the prison of Roumieh, one of the largest prisons in the Middle East, prisoners typically share plates of hummus and rounds of bread naans.
Other than being generally scarce in quantity and poor in quality, prison food is also bound to repetition. In the United States, where most prisoners are served meals that are prepared in a central kitchen, alternative cooking and food activities are largely prohibited but rather frequent. Inmates use hair dryers, hot water, pillowcases, and trash bags to prepare a wide array of dishes with food gathered from the cafeteria, purchased at the prison store, and smuggled out of the kitchen. Despite the ban of institutional policies on all group cooking activities, and the use of supplies for any other purpose than their original one being grounds for disciplinary action, correctional officers often turn a blind eye towards autonomous cooking projects. Indeed, the act of cooking together is closely tied to specific food selections made by the part of prisoners to reinforce cultural, ethnic, and/or religious identities. Male and female roles are also constructed through what one chooses to eat and the negotiations between prisoners about who cooks and cleans. Cooking is therefore also a way for prisoners to resist the tyranny of guards, claim their clan of belonging, and establish hierarchies therein.
Literature dealing with prison food culture has grown over the past fifteen years, as the attention of the institutions has turned to the improvement of health conditions more regularly, at least on paper. The behaviours and activities related to the acquisition, preparation, distribution, and consumption of food in prison is today commonly referred to as “prison foodways”. The growing genre includes institutional publications on nutrition in global contemporary correctional systems, online blogs (some of which are run by inmates), historical accounts of food culture in centuries past, prison farming and gardening manuals, and cookbooks. Among the recent prison cookbooks published internationally are: “The Convict Cookbook” (Walla Walla, US, 2004), “Jailhouse Cookbook: The Prisoner's Recipe Bible (New York, US, 2006), “From The Big House to Your House: Cooking in Prison” (Seattle, US, 2010), “Creative Snacks, Meals, Beverages and Desserts You Can Make Behind Bars: A cookbook for inmates (and others on a tight budget) looking to put the fun back into food” (Middletown, US, 2013), “Cooking in Maximum Security” (Viterbo, IT, 2013), “Stinging for Their Suppers: How Women in Prison Nourish Their Bodies and Souls” (Claremont, US, 2013), “Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories from Behind Bars (New York, US, 2015), “Everyday Cooking on the Inside: A Cookbook for Inmates in Danish Prisons” (Copenhagen, DK, 2015).
The re-edition of Matteo Guidi’s “Cooking in Maximum Security”, calls for renewed attention on the importance of cooking in the prison context. With an added letter from solitary confinement written by deceased inmate Mario Trudu, also the author of most illustrations, the book contains utilitarian recipes for survival in a maximum-security environment. Gathered over a period of four years through correspondence with inmates from seven Italian institutions, recipes reveal the prisoner’s cunning and constraints, and the subtle attempts from the part of institutions to exacerbate the inmates’ state of destitution, for instance, by way of a bland diet causing one’s perception of time passing to dull and eventually disappear.
“Cooking in Maximum Security” pays heed to the mutiny of an entire community of crooks-turned-cooks by recording their victory over valediction through humour and at times, scorn. Against a lack of salt in the slammer diet, comes the salt of a flavourous fight fought with broomsticks-turned-rolling pins, cupboard-turned-ovens, and TVs-turned-raising agents. Simple objects acquire new purpose by way of creative repurposing. As Mario states in his letter “if forced to survive in a cell, I would eat the wood of the stool, of the cupboards including the shelves, I would eat the sheets, blankets, all the clothes, everything within reach, toothpaste, shaving soap, the only thing I would avoid eating is the mattress, being made of foam rubber, I reckon I would suffocate, and I am not prone to suicide.” Cooking in maximum security is a political act of survival, a life-affirming roar.
“Cooking in Maximum Security” follows “Prison Photography” (2017), a visual reflection on photography as an exercise in escapism in prison and on photographic genres as a prison to photographic agency; and “Prison Museum” (2021), a visual essay on the alienating inversion between non-places of cultural production (museums) and hyper-places of natural selection (prisons). As such, the publication adds a new chapter to Rorhof’s prison literature, making available a slice of Italian culinary culture to an English-speaking readership for the first time.
Website Blurb
Cooking in Maximum Security is a prison recipe book. The methods and strategies put into place inside a cell to cook with the few resources available points to the importance of tools over ingredients. Simple objects acquire new purpose: a broomstick becomes a rolling pin, shoelaces tie up rolled bacon for seasoning, a cupboard or stool is transformed into an oven, a cathode ray tube TV facilitates the rising of bread or pizza dough in the very cold environment of a cell. The book celebrates the skill and ingenuity invested in improving the daunting experience of imprisonment, at least during mealtimes.
COOKING IN MAXIMUM SECURITY
Introduction by Matteo Guidi
Illustrations by Mario Trudu and MoCa Collective
Cover design by Walter Hutton (?)
Book design and layout by Nicolò Degiorgis
English translation by Allegra Baggio Corradi
Printed by ?
Year of Publication 2023
Edition 1000 copies
Format 16 x 24 cm, soft cover
Pages ?
ISBN ?
Bibliography
RORHOF