Marina Rabin unveils the brutal reality of prison food in the UK, and explores the work being done by Food Behind Bars to improve the situation.

“For lunch here at Bullingdon, I recently received a spoon of beans and some lettuce. Another day, a frozen white bread baguette with two thin cheese slices, no butter,” reads a letter in the February 2024 edition of Inside Time, the newspaper for prisoners in the UK. Written by Ben Phillips, who resides in His Majesty’s Prison Bullingdon, he concludes his letter: “If I had children and I fed them like this, they would be put into care.”

Ben Phillips’ experience of barely edible food is not unique to HMP Bullingdon. It is a crisis of the prison system as a whole. And it’s been acknowledged that this has been the state of affairs since at least 2016, when an HM Inspectorate report into food in prisons concluded that “too often the quantity and quality of the food provided is insufficient, and the conditions in which it is served and eaten undermine respect for prisoners’ dignity”. Violence and self-harm rates within prisons are also at an all-time high, while studies have shown an unequivocal link between good food and its positive impact on mental health.

“People come to us and say: ‘The food just makes me feel shit. It just gives me no energy and makes me feel depressed’” 

Lucy Vincent

Catering managers have to produce prison meals under rigid constraints, with inflation making an already untenable job harder. The daily allocation increased last year to £2.70 per prisoner – which they need to stretch to three meals per day. There are also limitations on where ingredients are sourced from. Food supplier Bidfood holds a monopoly over all 141 prisons in the UK, supplying food which is specifically sourced for prisons to be served en masse and isn’t available to those on the ‘outside’. 

Prison meals are the final frontier of institutional food to be tackled in the UK, without a Jamie Oliver-style advocate overhauling the food served to those in the hands of the institution.

That was until Lucy Vincent came across the topic. In 2016, Vincent was 24 and working as an increasingly “disillusioned” fashion journalist when she saw the HM Inspectorate report, sparking what would become an almost decade-long dedication to the issue. “Immediately, I was hooked,” she says. 

Unable to leave it to rest, in the same year, Vincent launched Food Behind Bars, a campaign to improve the quality of food within prisons. In 2020, the organisation became a registered charity. Today, it works alongside catering managers to improve menus and runs specialised food programmes in several prisons across the UK. At HMP Wealstun, Food Behind Bars started an in-house bakery, Rise & Prove, teaching inmates the fundamentals of bread-making. In HMP Sutton Park, the organisation operates a butchery out of the prison where women are trained in butchery skills and nose-to-tail carving. Food Behind Bars also runs a series of cooking competitions, whose former judges have included Michelin star chefs and Masterchef winners. 

While some smaller, lower-security prisons have communal dining, in the majority of prisons – 80 to 90 per cent, Vincent estimates – prisoners will eat in isolation due to staff shortages or security concerns. They eat in the same cramped cells with minimal sunlight, where they spend 23 hours of the day, eating in space shared with cellmates and next to a toilet. 

Food will arrive at their door, which they haven’t cooked, and they don’t know the contents of. And much of the time, it will be a cold, soggy, wilted, undistinguishable mass. 

On the other side of the door, it’s a convoluted process. From the time food is made, it takes about an hour to finally make it to its recipients. Meals are loaded onto a hot trolley, wheeled through multiple wings via a labyrinth of locked doors and delays – nothing can move quickly through a prison. “I sometimes see a plate of food come out of the oven and think, ‘that looks pretty good,’” says Vincent. “But by the time I see it down on the wing, it’s barely recognisable.”

This has its obvious physiological impacts, compounded with the final plate being consistently colourless and carbohydrate-dense. “We get people coming to us saying: ‘I’ve lost loads of weight’, or ‘I put on loads of weight’, or ‘I’ve developed this health condition because of my diet over the last couple of years,’” Vincent recounts. But it has immediate mental implications, too. “For the most part, people come to us and say: ‘The food just makes me feel shit. It just gives me no energy and makes me feel depressed.’” 

And when meals are the only thing to look forward to, punctuating the monotony of the day, a lifeless, nutrient-devoid dish arriving at their cell is crushing. “People get angry when they go to collect a meal and it’s not what was listed down, or it’s cold, or a small portion, or there’s no vegetables,” says Vincent. “It has huge ripple effects. Not just on how they feel, but how they act.” 

The upset from being served subpar food has, in the past, led to turmoil within prisons. In 2015, one prisoner at HMP Northumberland staged a protest on a high railing for several hours after being served another cold meal. Inadequate food hits a deep nerve – indicative of the emotional weight food holds. Food is used to self-medicate: Vincent tells of prisoners in high-security men’s prisons turning to comfort eating, buying endless chocolate and more sweets than ever before.

Vincent also noticed a gendered difference in approaches to self-nurture through food, observing that, generally, men will use prison as an opportunity to embrace fitness and clean living, using food for fuel and prioritising protein. 

“I think for women, their relationship with food is a lot more complex,” muses Vincent. Women’s prisons are also usually smaller, so a larger proportion of them will have self-catering facilities. This enables women to assume a structure of matriarchal roles within the prison kitchen, as Vincent has witnessed and allows them to use food as a medium to nurture both themselves and others.

Women in prison also are in significantly worse states of mental health than men, with self-harm rates in women’s prisons eleven times higher than their male counterparts. Vincent explains that for a lot of women she meets in prison, their self-esteem is already at “rock bottom”. “So what they don’t need is an unhealthy diet that’s making them put on weight, that’s making their skin look horrible, that’s making them feel sluggish,” she says. “They already feel sh** enough about themselves.” 

What Vincent has found, instead, is that the most effective rehabilitation happens when food resonates with people’s “pre-prison” identity. One programme Food Behind Bars runs, ‘Food From My Culture’, is designed to acknowledge the disproportionate makeup of prisons of minority ethnic groups. In its bland, beige, barely-defrosted iterations, prison food frequently presents a vacuum of food culture – indicative, in Vincent’s view, of the lack of a historic cultural reverence towards food and its psychological benefits embedded in British culture. 

As a result, prisoners often don’t identify with the food being served to them, miles from the comparatively technicolour palettes they grew up with. In the ‘Food From My Culture’ programme, participants are asked to come with a recipe that resonates with them, usually a family recipe. After cooking the meal, they will eat communally: a rare occasion where prisoners will not only eat together, but with staff, too. 

“We get comments from prisoners saying that was the best part of their day, or that was the first time they’ve done that in however many years being in prison,” Vincent reflects. “It’s just giving people that opportunity which we take for granted.”

It’s moments like these which lead Vincent to conclude, despite this unexpected career pivot: “I’m doing exactly the thing that I was meant to do.”