Severe Fish

When planning a menu of prison meals, it’s parts and labor. The parts are the ingredients; they have to be beyond cheap, available in great quantity, and built for simplicity. Which leads to the labor. A cheerless lot, the fewest number of steps to produce the highest yield is the design for inmate meals. With wages starting at twenty-cents an hour, there is a drought of motivation. So the guiding, unspoken mantra is “lazy is as lazy doesn’t.” Often, these are the guys who come running when they hear there is nothing to do or nobody to help. Accordingly, trays of frozen fish fillets, pre-breaded, and sized for convenience are the standard in order to save time and energy.

In leading this kitchen crew of 63 guys, the obstacles are many, the successes few. The equipment is handicapped, often reeling from years of abuse, neglected maintenance, and daily battering. The ingredients are trash and, in some cases, almost literally. Most of the workers are unwilling participants and, just like the “management,” are a comic book collection of missing pages, pointless plot, and sophomoric dialog. This particular kitchen is structured, rugged, loud, and mostly clean. There are more characters in this kitchen than other spots I have helmed, but then I have never been the head cook in a prison.

My shift is 2,600 meals for lunch and dinner. The food is strung together with busted recipes. The ingredients with which we work are haunting, which is probably fitting since the cooks are jacked-up miscreants. I’m damaged too. I do not expect scholars and saints. This is a bottomless place for dire circumstances and dire people. This food is disturbing. It doesn’t help that the meals leave me—maybe everybody—homesick. Don’t we associate happiness with good food and better times? This is not that.

On any given Friday, we dispense a humiliating combination of dysfunction and 172 other ingredients, otherwise known as “Oven-Ready Breaded Haddock.” It bathes the kitchen in a fishy miasma and even more discontent. We work at an unsavory level in here. The food is made of poorly framed sarcasm, laziness, and gray mushiness. How do 172 ingredients become Friday’s fish fillet dinner?

The days of bread and water for prison fare are long gone. But “Oven-Ready Breaded Haddock” is insipid. It is jarring and immoral. For the sake of my crew of fearful cooks and crooks, the convenience of frozen fish is a necessity. Just who decides that minced green onion powder belongs on the ingredient list? Is the powder minced? Wouldn’t minced powder be an oxymoron? And if the onions are minced, is it necessary to mince onions that are going to become powder anyhow? In a 4-ounce fish portion, how is it that 172 ingredients coexist and, at the same time, maintain their individual identities? Who decides that, “Hey! You know what this ‘oven-ready breaded haddock’ needs? Gum Acacia! Yeah, that will make this terrific.”

I am no expert-taster, but I can’t make out Parmesan cheese, the sweet potato, the 4 iterations of garlic or the variations of yeast contained therein. Dried garlic, granulated garlic, garlic powder, granulated roasted garlic? Nope, no hint of any of them. And those are the flavors with which I am familiar, and I am not sure how Torula yeast is different from yeast extract or, you know, yeast.

Not all of the “Oven-Ready Breaded Haddock” news is evil. There are nods to trends on this compendium of ingredients. Turmeric is on trend. Lime never loses its panache. Grits are the hipster darling. Sadly, though, none of these flavors hint, smack, kiss, linger or otherwise contribute to the dish.

Neither are there any notes of corn meal or tortilla, corn flakes or chipotle, hops or cheddar cheese.

So, every Friday, we do what we do every other day. We (well, maybe not all of us) hoist our dignity and feed the residents of this fine Crossbar Inn. On Friday, it is “Oven-Ready Breaded Haddock” fit for sinners, prepared by sinners, and served in the spirit of sinning against the 8 or so haddocks that sacrificed their swimming lives to become 1,440 filets. Today, it’s stewed tomatoes from a can to complement the “fish.” Chopped greens, seasoned with lukewarm water, also go along for the ride.

It’s not bread and water, for sure. But after all, bread doesn’t have Blue #1 and sodium tripolyphosphate.

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As recently as three years ago, James Berman was a mostly successful chef at what some would consider the top of his game. A 30-year cooking career led to moderate renown in the field. Today, after fallout from destructive choices, Jim is in prison. Instead of well-stocked kitchens in remarkable places, Jim now prepares meals for fellow incarcerees, writing with wry humor about the care and feeding of those behind bars.