Breakfast in the Feds is served from 6 AM to 7 AM and ranges from coffee cake to pancakes to bear claws to egg-and-cheese bagels to cinnamon rolls to waffles. The morning meals are pretty light, served continental-style with a piece of fruit, coffee, and milk. Nothing fancy or extravagant. The fruit is what they let hogs eat on the farm. Only the prepackaged waffles, cinnamon rolls, and bear claws are half decent.
Lunch is usually the best meal of the day, because that’s when all the administrative staff eat chowhall food. So of course the kitchen supervisors get their inmate workers to go the extra mile. The highlight of the week is fried chicken. Blacks make up over 50 percent of this prison’s population, and they “be trying to get that bird,” as they say. On chicken day inmates will be lined up out the doors, trying to go twice through the line and to smuggle that bird out of the chowhall for a late-night snack. Usually on chicken day the police presence is high, and the cops are searching everybody down and grabbing their nuts as they exit the chowhall.
Hamburgers and french fries are another highlight. It’s hard to fuck up some Micky D’s type food. Some other regulars on the prison chowhall menu are fried fish, BBQ beef sandwich, and Philly cheesesteak. There’s a hot-and-cold bar too, and it’s passable. It’s got lettuce, salad dressing, beans, rice, soup of the day, coleslaw, cheese sauce, and Jell-O (a prison cold-bar staple).
Dinners are the worst. They always try to experiment at night so you get shit like chicken-fried rice, baked tuna casserole, chicken parmesan, or stromboli. You see it on the menu and you’re like, “Sounds OK.” The reality is that what they make is some shit for real, so don’t let your mouth water. Most of the time this food is Desert Storm leftovers.
A lot of dudes come to prison and put on weight due to decreased activity and the fatty foods they serve. It’s not like the old days when convicts would starve because the food wasn’t edible. Now you have to watch your diet so you don’t get fat.
Guys who work in the kitchen have side hustles using their positions as cooks to make some pretty decent food to smuggle out of the chowhall and sell on the block. You can get decent sandwiches, pizza, and donuts at times. You would think that the inmate workers would use their skills for the benefit of the whole inmate population, but usually the kitchen supervisors stifle creativity and any ideas to make the food better. Anyway, prisoners that have some money will avoid the chowhall and eat the prepackaged and microwaveable commissary foods—or pay kitchen workers to smuggle them contraband items like green peppers or onions back to the block so they can prepare their own gourmet microwave prison meals. Anything beats the chowhall.
SETH FERRANTI
See more at gorillaconvict.com.
