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Prison food is about more than ramen - in fact, it s much worse, a new Oakland report shows
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A hole in the door shows how Corrections Officers at San Quentin keep watch over inmates in the cafeteria during breakfast.Carlos Avila Gonzalez / SFC 2002
We don’t talk about prison food much in the media. What food stories we tend to find are lighthearted fare about rehabilitative culinary programs or the ingenious, ad hoc recipes that incarcerated people figured out while serving time. Prison recipes have generated several cookbooks. Those stories of resilience are fascinating from a human perspective, but they often fail to mention what eating is actually like for the more than 1.3 million people incarcerated in state prisons nationwide. So when Oakland nonprofit Impact Justice sent me their report on the prison food experience, I was eager to read it.