The Prison Cookbook
Page 18
Anyone satisfying the governor that they were vegetarian could have meat dishes replaced by items such as rice pudding (1½oz rice, 1oz milk and ½oz sugar per 6oz of pudding), flour pudding (2oz vegetable fat and 8oz flour per 1lb pudding) and vegetable soup (2oz fresh vegetables, 2oz pearl barley, beans, or peas, ½oz onions and 1/6oz flour per 1 pint soup).
Other special provisions, such as the hospital diet for sick inmates and the punishment diet for prisoners being disciplined for breaking prison rules, were largely unaltered.
One ‘diet’ that was never spelled out in dietary scales was the ‘hearty breakfast’, traditionally eaten by those about to face execution. However, by the 1930s, it had become formalised in section 196 of the ‘Prison Rules and Orders’:
Prisoners under sentence of death will be placed generally on an ordinary hospital diet with any addition (e.g. an egg or bacon for breakfast, or an egg or cheese for supper, and a pudding for dinner) which the Medical Officer considers advisable. Half a pint of beer may be allowed a condemned prisoner at dinner, and again at supper. Ten cigarettes or ½oz of pipe tobacco per diem will be allowed … the prisoner should be allowed to smoke in his cell as well as at exercise.
WORLD WAR II AND BEYOND
Improvements in the quantity and variety of prison food were halted by the Second World War. Following the introduction of rationing in 1940, a personal ration scale was drawn up for each prisoner. Set meals were abolished and it was left to the cook to serve the rations in the most suitable manner he could devise. The use of curry powder, herbs and dried fruit (or fresh fruit if in season) was suggested as a means of adding interest and variation to the food. 225
In 1942, Dr Magnus Pyke investigated the nutritional value of the diets at a range of prisons. Although broadly satisfactory, some deficiencies were discovered, most notably in the amounts of fat and vitamin A. As a result, inmates were provided with extra rations of sausage meat and carrots. Vitamin C was also often lacking – often resulting from cooked food being kept too long in hot cabinets. Pyke recommended changes in the cooking procedures and an increased issue of green vegetables from Christmas to the spring to compensate for the declining vitamin C content of stored potatoes.226
The post-war years saw gradual improvements both in the food and in the way it was cooked and served. By 1949, ‘supper’ had become ‘tea’, with the evening cocoa served as a separate ‘supper’ at around 8 p.m. In the same year, the cylindrical tins long-used for serving prisoners dining in association began to be replaced by an issue of two dinner plates, a side plate for bread and a drinking mug. Old wooden dining tables and forms were replaced by tables with inlaid linoleum tops and wooden chairs. For those dining in their cells, a ‘cafeteria compartment tray’ made from a cream-coloured plastic was developed. Three years later, the cafeteria system with melamine trays came into general use. At one prison, 1,000 men could now be served in less than twenty minutes. 227 New kitchen equipment installed at various prisons included fish fryers, dough-mixing machines, meat slicers and stainless steel margarine stamps to replace the long-used wooden ones.228
In 1956, breakfast was supplemented by an additional dish, initially with sausage meat, cheese, bacon or syrup replacing part of the bread or oatmeal ration. A few years later, chips had begun to make an appearance on prisoners’ plates. A typical week’s menu from Durham prison in 1963 illustrates these changes: 229
Breakfast
Dinner
Tea
Supper
Bread, margarine, tea, porridge, ham.
Soup, bread roll.
Lancashire hot pot, peas. Fruit pudding and custard.
Bread, margarine, tea, sugar, fried fish.
Cocoa,
cheese
biscuits.
Bread, margarine, tea, porridge, bacon and potato savoury.
Soup, bread roll.
Meat pie, peas, potatoes. Semolina pudding.
Bread, margarine, tea, preserved pork, figs and custard.
Cocoa,
ham
sandwich.
Bread, margarine, tea, porridge, sausage meat savoury.
Soup, bread roll.
Stew and dumplings, peas, potatoes.
Fruit pudding, custard. ½ pt. tea.
Bread, margarine, tea, cheese savoury, tomato, preserved beef.
Cocoa,
soup.
Bread, margarine, tea, porridge, fried bacon, fried bread.
Soup, bread roll.
Roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, peas, gravy. Rice pudding. ½ pt. tea.
Bread, margarine, tea, sugar, cream bun, jam, fresh fruit.
Cocoa, preserved beef spread.
Bread, margarine, tea, porridge, sausage, fried bread.
Soup, bread roll.
Liver, onions, peas, potatoes. Date pudding and sauce.
Bread, margarine, tea, sugar,
ham and chips.
Cocoa, rock cake.
Bread, margarine, tea,
porridge,
bacon and potato
savoury.
Soup, bread roll.
Mince and batter pie, roast potatoes, gravy.
Sago pudding.
Bread, margarine, tea,
sugar,
kippers.
Cocoa, Fruit scone.
Bread, margarine, tea, porridge,
sausage, fried bread.
Soup, bread roll.
Roast beef, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, peas, gravy. Bread and butter pudding, custard.
Bread, margarine, tea, fried bacon, fried beans.
Cocoa, meat spread.
Food produced by prisons themselves increasingly formed a significant source of supply for prison kitchens. By the 1970s, agricultural activities were managed by what had become the Prison Service’s Farms and Gardens Group, which controlled some 12,500 acres of land of which 11,000 were devoted to commercial farming and horticultural enterprises. As well as supplying milk, vegetables, fruit, pork and bacon for prison consumption, in 1971 it provided work and training for more than 1,800 prisoners.230
PRISON DISTURBANCES
Despite the gradual improvements in its variety and quality, food was still often prominent among prisoners’ complaints. Occasionally, these and other grievances resulted in violent disturbances by the inmates. One of the earliest mutinies took place at Dartmoor on the morning of Sunday 24 January 1932, when around forty convicts ran amok in the exercise yards. Within a few minutes, around 150 men were beyond the control of the prison officers. The mutineers managed to take control of the prison for more than an hour and set fire to parts of the building. Order was only restored with the help of local police. During the subsequent inquiry, a number of factors appeared to have contributed to the disturbance, amongst them being the porridge and potatoes, both of which had suffered problems in the days leading up to the mutiny. In one instance, the porridge was ‘like water with grains floating in it’. 231 At a trial of the ring-leaders, one prisoner described the food at Dartmoor as food ‘unfit for human consumption’. 232
A series of serious disturbances took place in the 1970s and 1980s – one at Hull in August 1976 resulted in £750,000 of damage, while another in April 1986 spread to forty-six prisons, with damage amounting to £5.5 million and over 800 places being lost. In between these major episodes, there was often a simmering discontent, with prison canteens often being the focus of trouble. One former prisoner recalls that during the late 1980s ‘prison confrontations at food serveries [were] a normal part of the daily routine in all closed jails. Spontaneous food strikes and sit downs happened often, pitched fights where trays of food, tables and serving instruments were sent flying were rarer.’233 In April 1990, another rash of major disturbances took place at a number of prisons including Strangeways and Dartmoor. In the subsequent inquiry, food emerged as one of the main topics of complaint, often being described as inedible and monotonous, with too many variations on stew.234 The often slow transport
of meals in heated trolleys from kitchen to cell was noted as being a problem, as were the outdated facilities and poor hygiene in many prison kitchens, some of which were required to produce up to 1,700 meals three times a day. The report recommended that the Prison Service review its practice in a number of areas, including prison dietary scales, catering officers’ budgets and the provision of communal dining facilities. It was also suggested that officers’ attendance hours, which largely determined prisoners’ mealtimes, be examined with a view to serving meals at more sensible hours.235
THE PRESSURE FOR CHANGE
In the past thirty years, the operation of the prison service, including matters such as catering, has come under close scrutiny from a number of sources. In 1981, the new Chief Inspector of Prisons (CIP) began to issue annual reports on the work of the prison service. A few years later, the independent National Audit Office (NAO) began to scrutinise the effectiveness and ‘value for money’ of various aspects of prison operation, with the NAO’s reports being reviewed by parliament’s Public Accounts Committee. Much of what the CIP and NAO had to say was often far from favourable, but their reports also gave valuable insights into the increasing problems faced by a service struggling to adapt to the changing expectations and demands placed upon it.
The CIP report for 1989 had a catalogue of criticisms regarding prison catering arrangements. That many inmates were required to eat their meals from plastic plates in overcrowded cells beside a lavatory that could not be flushed was considered a ‘degrading and unacceptable practice’. 236 Typical meal times (breakfast at 7.30, dinner at 11.15 and tea as early as 3 p.m., when the supper bun or cake was also served) created gaps between meals that were too short during the day and too long – up to seventeen hours – at night. The range and quality of the food, and also its preparation, left much to be desired. At Durham, a glut of cabbages had led to their frequent appearance on the menu, while at Holloway the inspector was shown an unwashed lettuce and a vegetarian pancake that was not cooked properly.
One source of increasing strain on prison kitchens was the rise in the number of special diets for which they were required to cater. This included not only the various religious diets, such as the standard provision of Halal meat,237 but also the increasing number of health-related ones, such as egg-free, fish-free, cheese-free, spice-free and pulse-free diets.238 This issue was particularly common amongst female prisoners – in 1996, Holloway women’s prison was providing around fifty special diets covering 40 per cent of the inmates. Even where special dietary provisions were made, the prisoners were not guaranteed to stick with them. At Strangeways, with 300 vegetarians amongst its 1,700 inmates, it was found that for the most popular meals, such as chicken or whole gammon steak, many of the vegetarians suddenly became meat-eaters, throwing the budgetary allocations into disarray. When the kitchens tried to offer a choice, the prisoners expected 1,700 of each dish to be available rather than 850 of each. 239
Many of the issues to do with choice, diets and wastage were addressed by the introduction of a menu pre-select system, where inmates fill in a form to choose the meal preferences in advance, typically with at least three choices per meal of which one was vegetarian or vegan. The system, first used at Full Sutton prison, proved popular both with prisoners and caterers and was taken up nationally in 1995; about two years later around half of the country’s prisons had adopted it. 240
In 1996, a ‘cash-catering’ scheme was implemented where a fixed amount of money was allocated for each prisoner’s daily food. Prison caterers were given more discretion in sourcing the food they needed, but were still required to place 26 per cent of their expenditure with the Prison Farms and Gardens Group. The scheme aimed to help control food costs and allow better comparisons between different prisons. However, in 1997 the NAO was still reporting considerable variations between prisons in such items as the portion sizes of meat being served. At Downview, prisoners were receiving 6-ounce gammon steaks, while at Cardiff the corned beef hash contained less than 3oz of meat per portion. One meal at Woodhill prison provided a meat content of only 1½oz per prisoner.241 A simple-minded cash-catering approach could also contribute to such problems – the Halal and Kosher meat required by Muslim and Jewish prisoners was generally more expensive, resulting in them receiving smaller portions than those eating the standard meat issue.
THE PRISON SERVICE CATERING MANUAL
In 1999, in an effort to raise the standards and consistency of its catering provision, and to keep costs in check, the prison service issued its new catering ‘Bible’, The Prison Service Catering Manual, often referred to by its official publication code PSO 5000. Now revised several times, the manual includes major sections on food safety management, meal provision, healthy catering for a diverse prisoner population, and food and safety management for food at the point of service.
PSO 5000 is based on the requirement that ‘the food provided shall be wholesome, nutritious, well prepared and served, reasonably varied and sufficient in quantity’.242 The manual includes extensive information on hygiene and on the storage, handling and preparation of food, the training of staff and financial management.
As regards meal provision, the manual’s recommended starting point is a regular ‘market survey’ of prisoners to establish their tastes and preferences. Based on this information, a pre-select weekly menu is then devised from which prisoners record their choice by filling out paper slips. The menus should include a description of each dish, with each meal including options visually identified as vegetarian, Halal and ‘healthy eating’. Items containing genetically modified ingredients are also indicated.
Advice is provided on an extensive range of religious diets including those for Buddhists, Christians, Mormons, Ethiopian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Hindus, Jains, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and even Pagans (‘Many will require a vegetarian diet. Some may request a vegan diet’).
The manual also emphasises the importance of a healthy diet, with advice on how to make dishes more healthy, for example by reducing the fat, salt and sugar content, minimising the use of deep fat frying and substituting less healthy foods by healthier options, for example by using fruit to decorate desserts rather than piped cream.
On the long-standing issue of meal times, the manual specifies that there should be at least 4½ hours between the start of one meal and the next, with fourteen hours being the maximum that a prisoner should go without food. The recommended meal times are currently: breakfast 07.30–09.00, lunch 12.00–14.00, and evening meal 17.00–19.00.
PSO 5000 undoubtedly resulted in a significant improvement in prison catering standards, as acknowledged by the NAO’s subsequent review of the service published in 2006. The report recognised that the quality, range and choice of meals had improved over the previous seven years, and that complaints had fallen. However, many problems remained to be addressed. In some prisons, meal times were still being set to fit in with staff shift patterns, with meals being served earlier than the recommended times, and with some excessive overnight gaps between meals. 243 Lengthy delays also existed in the serving of food after its preparation – in more than a third of prisons visited, this was longer than the recommended maximum of forty-five minutes. At Altcourse prison, one prisoner claimed that dinners were cooked at 9 a.m. then left sitting in heated trolleys until being served up to four hours later.
THE END OF PORRIDGE
One historic change recorded in the 2006 NAO review, unpopular with many prisoners, was the demise of the traditional porridge breakfast – dropped at over half the prisons they visited, it was said, because cooked breakfasts were no longer part of contemporary eating habits.
In place of porridge and the cooked breakfast was the ‘breakfast pack’, containing items such as cereal, UHT milk, bread, butter, jam, a tea-bag, and sachets of whitener and sugar. The pack’s shortcomings were described with contempt by one inmate at Leeds prison, ‘you get the breakfast the night before which is a packet of cereal with one little cu
p … it’s about that big, it’s not big enough’. Not only was it a cold meal, but it was eaten by some prisoners the same evening, leaving a long wait until the next day’s lunch. The breakfast packs, which cost 27 pence, were also disliked by some catering staff because of their perceived frugal content and nutritional value.244 Like it or lump it, the twenty-first-century prison menu had arrived:
Sample pre-select menus for meals at Kingston Prison (Portsmouth), April 2005.245
Day
Breakfast
Lunch
Tea
Thu
Breakfast pack Milk
(semi-skim) Bread Roll
Bread and Soup
1Vegetarian Pasta Bake,
Boiled Potato, Mixed Vegetables
AVegetable Supreme,
Mashed Potato, Green Beans
2Chicken and Mushroom Pie, Boiled Potato, Mixed Vegetables
BChicken Supreme,
Mashed Potato, Green Beans
3Halal Jamaican Beef Patti, Boiled Potato, Mixed Vegetables
CHalal Chicken Curry, Boiled Rice, Green Beans