I was waiting for chow at my prison, choking. It wasn’t from food, or another inmate. It was anger lodged in my throat.
Thirty minutes later: still waiting. The line transformed into something more like an angry mob. Forty of us had gathered at the exit of our prison wing, fed up with waiting — fed up with not being fed.
The hallway boss, who mans the gate to our wing, wanted to let a guy in. We saw an opening in the gate, which was holding us back. Then, like accumulated pressure finding release, we barrelled through the gate. The hallway boss leaned into the door to stop us but was overwhelmed by our momentum.
It’s chow time at the Memorial Unit, a Texas state prison roughly 30 miles south of Houston.
Oh, the (kitchen) horrors
Chow hall at Memorial can surprise even those who have served in more notorious prisons.
Recently, I surveyed some people around me about what they thought of the chow hall.
“On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest potential of cleanliness, how clean do you think our chow hall is?” I asked.
“Would I bring my family to eat here? Not at all,” said one man. He gave it a 0.
Some corrections officers like to take advantage of the free food they’re offered in the chow hall. But others have higher standards.
“I bring my own food,” one told me, citing the general filth of the prison. “I won’t even eat in the [officer dining room],” he added.
I previously worked on the food service department cleaning crew. During my nine-month tenure, I was assigned deep-cleaning projects: scrubbing grease from industrial fans, cleaning spaces with mice and roach infestations, and polishing copper pipes. But daily maintenance tasks consumed most of my time.
Mopping was a Sisyphean task. Before I could finish cleaning, grease or green bean juice or applesauce would be spilled. The butchers would throw out the plastic wraps from their meat rolls, dripping blood on the floor. Sometimes, the kitchen maintenance crew would roll in, make a mess somewhere as a cover, then steal tubs of peanut butter and flats of eggs.
Sinks bore the residue of grimy spill pans. Hair and beard nets were worn only around audit time. Despite monthly exterminations, roaches and mice lived in the walls. Cooks sweated and sneezed into food, and sometimes served grub that had fallen on the floor.
What explained this dysfunction? Irresponsible coworkers. Lazy corrections officers sitting on their keys. Supervisors contradicting one another.
The food service major treated her department like a restaurant she might open in the free world. Her enthusiasm for baked experiments such as empanadas, cinnamon rolls and mini sweet potato pies took priority over policy. She took issue with the staff, saying that they didn’t respect her enough to do as she asked in her absence. In the end. The department failed the inspection.
It was a relief when I was reassigned to a different job.
The filthy blue trays
Of course, that didn’t solve the problems.
My outstanding grievance was the delays — lunch being served at 3:30 p.m., 11 hours after breakfast, for example, or the constant last-minute menu changes.
But the worst part of chow hall was, and remains, the blue plastic trays our food is served on.
The chow hall has two serving lines that meet at the front and center of the room, where drinks might or might not be, depending on the day. Down the hall’s center is a wide aisle that cuts through a sea of steel tables. There are about 100 people in the cafeteria at a time, rotating in batches. When we are finished eating, we walk through the center aisle to the exit. There are large open windows along the right wall, through which we occasionally catch whiffs of grass, trash, chicken and hogs.
By the chow hall exit, there is also a scullery, or dish room, with an industrial dishwasher. Food service typically assigns one worker to the dishwasher.
But in 2023, for about five months, the dishwasher was out of order. Because of that, food services assigned (and expected) one worker to wash all the trays by hand.
The person who washed dishes was provided pink hand soap and powder bleach. But often he was berated by corrections officers for his process and speed. Most guys who could bear the task for a time were unappreciated and ended up walking out on the job. Smokers would volunteer just so they could smoke in seclusion — even though they were often caught.
Eventually, the post was completely abandoned. Chow continued without a dishwasher. We were left with a pile of dirty blue trays on a crumby table outside the scullery.
At that point, the cleaning was up to the rest of us.
For men going to chow, the routine upon arrival was to find a “clean” stack of trays and rifle through them until we found one without food on it. Scrutinizing the damp sections of the tray, we might find peanut butter along the rim, or other kinds of food speckle. If there wasn’t a stack, we would leave the line — while others held our place — so we could wash enough trays in the abandoned scullery for ourselves and a few friends.
After some days of this, we learned to bring toilet paper so we could wipe clear any remaining water and grease. We chose to ignore what bacteria might still be lingering.
The truth is, you couldn’t bring enough toilet paper to wipe away your disgust.
Auditor visits didn’t change much
Auditors came by the prison on an almost quarterly basis to inspect cleanliness, chemicals and our equipment. According to people working in the scullery, auditors in summer 2023 examined the scullery, its broken dishwasher, circled the dirty tray mountain and noted a trash barrel overflowing with beans and cornbread. After that visit, the scullery was closed, its light turned out, its gate locked. Inmates at the prison speculated that the audit led to the closing, but we didn’t know for sure.
Blue trays were now washed by hand by an inmate. When I arrived after the rule changes, a serving line officer scanned my ID, set it on a tray, then handed it off to her workers. They filled each section of the tray with the menu items, then served me from under chicken wire.
In general, getting served would come with relief. The food may not have been warm, and it didn’t provide enough calories, but we dealt with it. After all, we walked across the prison and waited in a long line for our meals. Being served was the hoped-for highlight of our journey, even if the meal was just an imitation of a good one.
But my first feeling wasn’t relief. It was a physical sensation: my fingers encountering a dense concentration of grease on the bottom of my tray. Even after trays began to be washed in the pot room, they were often still dirty. The pot room was far enough away from the chow hall for someone to do a poor job and not be held accountable for it.
As I sat with my tray, I saw others reacting similarly. They found a table, dropped their trays, cleaned their greasy hands with toilet paper, sat and ate.
“If the last kitchen captain was here …” That was how many began their commentary on our chow hall’s decline. The last kitchen captain had had a reputation for good meals, a structured staff and clean trays.
I asked some people their thoughts: “On a scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the highest, how clean do you think our chow hall is?”
One guy gave it a 3 or 4. “They say we don’t see the dirtiest parts, though.”
“It’s been better here lately,” another replied. He gave it a 3.
Bad food, dark humor
Regardless chow continues on — three times a day, 21 times a week, 90 times a month, give or take. If one’s mental fortitude isn’t as consistent as the grease on the bottom of the tray, collapse will become a personal reality before it becomes an institutional one. No one wants that. So dark humor gets us through.
Bug in your food? “Oh, that’s just more protein, dawg.”
Greasy tray bottom? “Oh, that just makes it harder for the dope fiend tryna jack on chicken day to sell ya’ bird!” (They can’t grab the tray as easily when it’s slippery.)
During chow time on Memorial, there’s rocks in the beans, dirt in the greens, shells in my egg and blood in my chicken.
Yum!
We want to survive, so we laugh.