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Meals

Interview with Stan, Rich and Claudia

JM: How many meals did you get per day?
Stan: 3
Rich: Each inmate receives exactly three separate meals (in the form of trays) per day.
Claudia: you get 3 meals per day. Unless you were pregnant which i was you could get an extra tray with breakfast and dinner and then at night when the nurse came around with medication they would give you a small snack bag with your prenatal viatmins again only if your pregnant otherwise you only get the normal 3 meals perday. in the special pregnancy snack bag there was normally a peanut butter and jelly sandwich a piece of fruit and a milk box.

JM: How would you rate the food? Please give details of why.
Stan: Not good but not as bad as people think, what do you expext, you are in jail!
Rich: The food is usually absolutely horrible, even by what a layperson might imagine prison or jail food to be like. It is rarely cooked to proper temperature, and relies heavily upon pork and turkey products with filler (mystery meats), white bread, and canned sides of vegetables or cheaply prepaid JELLO or puddings. The drinks provided are a 0% fruit juice based 'fruit drink cocktail' called 'Cool Shots'; sometimes these are served well past their date of expiration. For breakfast, if cold cereal is being served, you might receive a 2% milk. The trays, even special dietary trays for those with medical issues or diabetes or heart issues, are absolutely loaded with low-quality refined carbohydrates. Sometimes the trays are sloppily put together by the food kitchen 'trustees', with things like cracked hardboiled eggs (or hardboiled eggs with signs of entry from someone's fingertip!), bread slices soggy and doused in the part of the tray that contains canned syrup/fruit juice-covered fruit, occur, and sometimes the meat is almost refrigerator cold. It is better not to think about it, for sake of not starving yourself. Some inmates eat almost exclusively the items available for purchase from the commissary sheet. For the most part, the jail-provided meals range from very poor to awful, but perhaps with time and because you may have few or no other options you can learn to 'desensitize' yourself to just how bad they really are.
Claudia: Ugh on a scale of 1-10 i'd give the food maybe a 4. actually thought they recently switched to a new food provider and i have to admit the new food is actually much better then the old food. but all in all the food is pretty nasty its all starch and carbs so that you get full while your eating but about an hour after your finished because of all the starch and carbs your body burns it all off so fast even though your totaly lazy your body still burns it up so quick that your starving again in an hour. You loiterally wake up every night in the middle of the night with the most intense hunger pains and end up staying awake until breakfast because you cant sleep with the pains in your stomach.

JM: Did you have any favorite/least favorite meals?
Stan: Everything was okay;however, ther was a slaw made out of red cabbage I could not eat.
Rich: Lunches or dinners with chicken patties, breakfasts with cold cereal are the better things offered on the trays. The worst are the 'cat food' like tuna, or mystery meat casseroles, or the slimy hamburger meat that smells like a wet dog.
Claudia: Umm my favorite meal was breakfast because it was normaly corn flakes a piece of some kind of coffee cake such as chocolate chip coffee cake, also came with scrambled eggs made from powdered egg mix. and of course the gave you a boxed milk that was normaly warm yuck

JM: Were there any other snacks offered outside of meals? What was commissary like and how expensive was it?
Stan: Yes, if you are fortunate enough to have someone deposit money into your personal account.
Rich: There are no snacks offered outside of meals, except for perhaps some food or kitchen 'trustees'. The chaplaincy on a major holiday will sometimes gift the entire jail inmate population a bag containing candies and baked goods usually found only on the commissary list Commissary is decent, but most of what is offered is approximately 3 or more times what you would pay for an equivalent item out on the street, so they are definitely making a tidy profit from running the commissary. Most of the food items are 'junk food', what you might find in a gas station, or the check-out lane of a small convenience store. You can receive up to $80 in purchases from commissary per week.
Claudia: no snacks unless your pregnant or diabetic. and the commissary had a great selection surprisingly. i loved the different food on there and you could make anything you wanted instead of eating the yucky trays which is what i did Id order a million ramen noodels and tons of other items to make differnt kinds of meals. most of the commissary was a little over priced but not bad enough that i wouldnt buy it.

Read about inmate access to medication in the Macomb County Jail