A few people have asked me what the food is like in a Scottish prison. It can be summarised in a single word: sufficient.

I’m sure you can imagine that many prisoners complain about the food on offer but I do not share my fellow convicted and unconvicted people’s view. There is “enough” vaguely edible stodge to keep us alive and one advantage of keeping us in almost a total lack of physical activity is that we don’t burn that much energy during the day.

It is also true that the average prisoner is hardly a frequenter of Michelin star restaurants. After speaking to many other inmates about what they eat on the outside, it’s actually pretty similar to what we have in here – high fat, salt and sugar foods with a focus on convenience and cheapness. Lots of pies, chips, noodles and other ultra processed foods and that is what we have in here.

So on an average day, breakfast is a bread roll with “margarine” and rice krispies or corn flakes (we get given half a ping of milk in the morning if they have enough to go around). Lunch is a pastry thing, either a pie or a bridic or maybe a roll with processed “meat”. There is always soup, too which is actually probably the most nutritious thing we get and, of course, empty carbs in the form of bread. For dinner there’s something like a thin piece of manufactured “meat” or a fish creation with piles and piles of white rice or possibly some samosas containing a mystery filling with a pile of cold, floppy chips. There is a pudding too, maybe a rice pudding or a baked sponge creation with a yellow, sweet sauce amusingly referred to as “custard”. You can probably imagine that it is sufficient to keep us alive (especially considering the aforementioned point about lack of exercise).

However, the food provided to us could not be described as wholesome or nutritious, nor is it adequate for health and nutrition. Nor is it well prepare or well presented and, unfortunately for the prison authorities, the law requires it to be all of those things as outlined in rule 35.

As I hope I am making clear in this blog, this is all my opinion and to be fair, I haven’t carried out a formal nutritional analysis of the menu. The problem is, though, neither has the Scottish Prison Service. They do not know the nutritional details of the food they are serving. They also seem unwilling or unable to engage in meaningful dialog in this area.

There have been healthier items in the past, we used to get a small carton of fruit juice once a week, but this quietly dropped off the menu. There was once a smoked mackerel salad on the menu but it never arrived, it was always substituted for “tuna” slop salad. It’s also true to say that sometimes a bag of sweaty apples or old pears is lying around the pantry.

Once again, it all boils down to what we want to achieve for our prison service. Do we want to redirect convicted prisoners away from their criminal past and the causes of their criminality or do we want to perpetuate the instability and embedded opinions so that they are more likely to re-offend?

NaN.