Everyday, there are oodles of cats in the Texas joint running every game they know to get hospitalized so they can go to the prison infirmary, just to get a decent meal. Sometimes, I guess, drastic needs call for drastic measures. Over the years, I’ve seen prisons attempt to pass off some pretty nasty shit as food fit for human consumption. Hell, I’ve eaten piles of that nasty shit and asked for seconds.
In prison, eating any meal can be likened to stalking a wild and fairly dangerous animal to its lair. In other words, it’s always best, before just mowing it down, to walk slowly. Take your time and observe, closely, your surroundings rather than just go crashing hell bent through the briars and the brambles. You know, just to make sure that you don’t step into any dead bodies down in the willies.
Thanksgiving of ’93 I was working in the kitchens at Coffield, about a hundred and twenty miles west of Dallas, feeding breakfast to all the schlumps back in the lockup. I love coleslaw but was nonplussed to see that the cat who had been assigned to making it was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, his arms buried to the pits, tossing the slaw. I promise, it was almost enough to turn a man on coleslaw and make him start eating cranberry sauce and black olives.
There are always traps to be on the lookout for. I have come across everything from rocks to screws to dirt clods to live bees while walking the chow time tightrope. The joint has more wildlife than the zoo: ants, roaches, crickets, grasshoppers, spiders, wasps, stinkbugs, mice, and snakes. I’ve even run across a scorpion or two. Then there are the critters that are simply unidentifiable. It, therefore, shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that they would find their way into the food. I have, and still do, know cats who will not eat unless the food comes directly from their own lockers.
Some guys have grown paranoid that they are being poisoned or that their food is being sabotaged (paranoia doesn’t mean it isn’t true). Others want the rest of us to think they are John Gotti or somebody that they got the scratch to big dick it in style and others just can’t do cold and lumpy. Whatever their reasons, this can get expensive fast, even for guys with long money. Most of us that have been locked up for awhile, however, no longer even taste the food. It’s just gas for the tank just keeping the machine running. It’s all crap anyway. If, and when, we do find something in our food, either we just flick it to the side or close our eyes and go ahead and eat the little bugger. I mean, a few ants never killed anybody. On the other hand, it’s never a good idea to ask too many question about the food especially in regard to the way it was prepared. There are some things a person would just rather not know. Trust me on this. I mean, everybody has to eat, right?
Back around 1990 I was working in the cannery at the old Ramsey III Unit (now renamed Terrell). It wasn’t a bad job as prison jobs go: Texas summers are a bitch, especially anywhere near Houston. We were out of the direct heat and sun. The cops didn’t ride our jocks too hard and it was fairly laid back. Vegetables came to us straight out of the fields where they were to be washed, cleaned, cut, canned, shucked, and soundly fucked before being shipped out around the system.
I worked in the green bean depot. Once the squads schlepped their catch in from the fields, they would dump their sacks into a big canvas buggy out back of the loading docks. The green beans would usually spend the night there collecting various field mice, garter snakes, bugs and other critters. Sometimes we’d get a lucky surprise and find a big chicken snake. When we would come to work in the morning, the machine was cranked up and the buggy was dumped onto a conveyor belt that immediately ran it all under a spray of freezing water, sending whatever wildlife that had been camping out to scurrying. They were, however, moving along a conveyor belt and couldn’t figure out how to get off (kind of the prison system itself). This belt ran along horizontally for perhaps fifty feet or so. Guys lined both sides of it whose job it was to pick out any rocks, sticks, or other flotsam. The problem, however, is that this particular job would bore the tits off a boar hog. So there was never a shortage of smart asses that would find a nice-sized, sturdy stick to poke at the mice and snakes, keeping them moving along on the belt. At the end of this belt, the contents would be dumped onto another one that carried things vertically to a second tier. There, everything would be sprayed with scalding water, killing whatever was alive. It was all then dumped into a big, water-filled, canoe shaped tub where I would be with another guy. We both had what resembled boat paddles with these we would keep everything moving along smoothly, where it would be dropped through a shoot which would cut up the green beans (as well as any other critters) and put into cans. The cans were then sewn up, labels were slapped on, and the whole works were then fired off around Texas.
Don’t get me wrong. I still eat green beans. I’m probably a little more discriminating here than with other foods but that’s no reason to stop eating them. I mean, there are probably worse things in the food than chopped up snakes and … stuff. My personal philosophy is that if I’m unaware of what is in the food, then it must not be in there, right? This is the best philosophy regarding prison dining. Trust me on this. I was down here during the VitaPro years and remember them well. This was somewhere back in the mid-’90s: ’95, ’96, ’97, thereabouts. VitaPro was intended to be a meat supplement to be used similarly to the way rice or oatmeal is used to bread beef, making a little go a long way. TDC, however, being what it is, instead fed prisoners straight VitaPro, sans meat. This made for a thin gruel, resembling a watery stew. It was readily recognizable by its overbearing chemical smell. To my nose, it resembled the smell of a squashed stinkbug times ten. Over twenty-five years later I can still smell it even though TDC swears they no longer feed it. And that’s a good thing. People eating Vidapro® began getting sick. Some were breaking out with lesions there were stomach problems, the drizzling shits, and just a general feeling of bad. At the least, it gave those who ate it terrible gas, making their farts smell as if they’d been eating dead bodies. Scads of people began rejecting their trays, eating only from their lockers that is, they did if they wanted to stay well. Eventually this shit was recalled, TDC quit feeding it, and the Executive Director, Wayne Scott, was given a prison sentence of ten years. It was a suspended sentence. Horses, of courses?
Then again, there are always cats who would have you believe otherwise. In fact, if you believe the tears of a clown I’ll refer to as IJK, you’d think he was at the Four Season Unit instead of Beto I. In a June 2015 letter to the editor of The Echo, the pro-cop propaganda rag that we call a prison newspaper, he gushes: “I am a stark realist. In prison, the bad times seem to outweigh the good times. But why are we always commenting on the negative but hardly saying anything about the positive? For example, today at lunch, everything just went right: the main course was wonderful, the veggies were properly cooked and there were ample amounts of ice in the pitchers, each filled with perfectly flavored juice. It wasn’t even a holiday.”
Really. If it wasn’t a holiday then it must’ve been a dream, because I’ve been to the Beto I Unit. Let me tell you, and you can trust me when I say this, it has never been known for its five-star cuisine. As a matter of fact, during my time there, the main course regularly tasted like ass—–and not the good kind. The “veggies” looked as if they’d been left in somebody’s shoe all night and the only ice I saw there was on the scrim floating in my toilet on cold winter mornings.
IJK is a perfect example of what we call “being rescued.” You can never trust a man like that. In the joint, the best meals are baloney sandwiches or Tony the Tigers. I mean, short of the bread being moldy or having sea monkeys growing on your baloney, it’s hard, even for the most dedicated asshole, to fuck up a baloney sandwich. And unless the milk is spoiled, your Tonies will always be right on time. But the day that you actually start believing the swill served up in here is tasty, or that anything is “perfectly flavored,” is the day that you’ll know that you’ve been locked up too long, that you’ve already begun to highside it, and that it’s time to begin working your jelly, shooting for that hospital chain. Happy eating, pardner.
J.S. Slaymaker
