Jail Food: More Than Just Chow
By Susan Orlins
No one was surprised when Winston Nguyen, a Jeopardy champion, treated friends to one seafood tower after another at a tony downtown Manhattan restaurant. It wasn’t the first time they had experienced his generosity. What was mysterious was the source of his wealth. After all, he was a student, and the only income they knew about was the money he brought home as an aide to an elderly couple.
Winston, whose father was Vietnamese, was 30. It was 2017. He needed only two more courses to earn his bachelor’s degree at Columbia University. That’s when a judge sentenced Winston to four months at Rikers Island, the notoriously vile New York City jail, for stealing more than $300,000 from the couple that employed him.
Once behind bars, he witnessed maltreatment by corrections authorities, which motivated him to find purpose and become a prison-reform advocate. “Many people don’t know that food can be used as punishment for inmates’ unruly or violent behavior. One example is nutraloaf,” says Winston. “Every prison that uses it has its own recipe, although California, New York, and several other states have banned it as inhumane.” (In the same vein, guards refer to meals as chow to make the act of eating sound degrading.)
According to Wikipedia, nutraloaf (also called disciplinary loaf) is nutritious and includes calorie-dense ingredients. However, prisons serve it as an added punishment. Even though this recipe might just sound like health food—whole wheat bread, non-dairy cheese, raw carrots, canned spinach, raisins, great northern beans, vegetable oil, tomato paste, milk powder, and dehydrated potato flakes—it is engineered to taste like misery.
No one was surprised when Winston Nguyen, a Jeopardy champion, treated friends to one seafood tower after another at a tony downtown Manhattan restaurant. It wasn’t the first time they had experienced his generosity. What was mysterious was the source of his wealth. After all, he was a student, and the only income they knew about was the money he brought home as an aide to an elderly couple.
Winston, whose father was Vietnamese, was 30. It was 2017. He needed only two more courses to earn his bachelor’s degree at Columbia University. That’s when a judge sentenced Winston to four months at Rikers Island, the notoriously vile New York City jail, for stealing more than $300,000 from the couple that employed him.
Once behind bars, he witnessed maltreatment by corrections authorities, which motivated him to find purpose and become a prison-reform advocate. “Many people don’t know that food can be used as punishment for inmates’ unruly or violent behavior. One example is nutraloaf,” says Winston. “Every prison that uses it has its own recipe, although California, New York, and several other states have banned it as inhumane.” (In the same vein, guards refer to meals as chow to make the act of eating sound degrading.)
According to Wikipedia, nutraloaf (also called disciplinary loaf) is nutritious and includes calorie-dense ingredients. However, prisons serve it as an added punishment. Even though this recipe might just sound like health food—whole wheat bread, non-dairy cheese, raw carrots, canned spinach, raisins, great northern beans, vegetable oil, tomato paste, milk powder, and dehydrated potato flakes—it is engineered to taste like misery.
Winston, who sees food as a gift to bestow on friends, was driven to action. As a prison-reform advocate, he sat on the inmate council at Rikers. He even used precious phone time along with his extensive knowledge of prison rules and policies to appeal to the mayor on talk radio.
At Rikers, Winston found himself assigned to a room of 60 men. He used his instincts to fit into the community that housed 3 rows of 20 beds each. Right away, Winston saw food as currency and a way to navigate his time behind bars. He also learned how inmates created an underground system to take control of making their own meals.
Men invited Winston to cook with them. “We would agree to eat, say, just a chicken breast at dinner and sneak out the little drum part of the wing,” says Winston. “And then we would blend it with other stuff we could sneak out.” One job was to shred the meat. One guy had a recipe for barbecue sauce, made with salsa, jelly, and sugar. The commissary sold dehydrated refried beans, which they added. Each person had his own part in preparing the recipe. They made nicer meals together than Rikers gave them in the mess hall.
There’s even a cookbook called Commissary Kitchen, written by a rapper nicknamed Prodigy. In one recipe, you smash Doritos into powder and add it along with hot water to noodles to make mac and cheese. Behind bars people found ways of creating food that resembled what you had on the outside.
You can use the things you have in jails. People in prison make wine that tastes like a mimosa. At breakfast, Winston would collect jelly in an old peanut butter jar and also sugar. Or, not wanting to waste money on snacks, Winston would wear loose clothing and collect uneaten apples near the end of meals, sometimes shoving nine of them up his sleeve.
You can mix jelly and dozens of sugar packets, add hot water and orange slices, and leave it all underneath a bunk. Turn every now and then—and, presto, wine. However, you couldn’t leave it too long. Guards came and raided the jail cells every two weeks. The men in Winston’s Rikers community would share a rich variety of recipes for what they called “prison hooch.”
Winston found food to be a way to help others in his situation. While behind bars, he met a guy who stole to get off the cold streets. “He had no money. Had no one,” says Winston, who would always buy him something from the commissary, like a jar of peanut butter. Winston could afford to do this because he had people supporting him from outside.
Winston acknowledges his experience was not typical, as he was there for only four months. He tried to eat everything. “I hear that during Bloomberg’s mayoral administration, people in prison sued because the food was unhealthy,” he says. He also says that commissaries have been replacing some sugary foods with healthier options.
And Winston learned that for things you couldn’t change, you had to find a way of accepting. His friends call it his toxic positivity. He said his biggest advantage was that he knew when he would be leaving.
Winston openly acknowledges the cruel crime he committed against the elderly couple, which was headlined in the New York Post and elsewhere. He will be paying back their estate over the next thirty years.
Today, Winston teaches a seminar he calls Crime and Punishment at an independent school in Brooklyn, where he recently devoted a day’s lesson to prison food.
Students learn about initiatives such as the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections’ Culinary Arts Training Program. It trains prisoners who qualify to provide post-prison opportunities and thus reduce recidivism.
“I did a lot of therapy, spiritual journeying,” says Winston. “I was never religious before, so I went to Episcopalian church services, seeking a community of support. A lot of what I try to see is how can I help others.”
Now, in rebuilding his future, Winston is reflective about moving on. “It’s a terrible thing I did that will live within me,” he explains.
His students know about his past. “I think because of this being so public, students know what I did and feel comfortable coming to me with their own poor choices.
“I keep thinking ‘what can I make of this for the greater good?’ Helping my students helps me.”
Winston continues to advocate for better nutrition in correctional facilities like Rikers, and he hopes his Crime and Punishment seminar leads his students to follow suit and advocate for humane treatment of incarcerated individuals.
Susan Orlans is a free-lance writer living in Washington, DC.