Long ago, we consumers learned to differentiate between advertisements and reality.
The gargantuan, set-dressed Big Mac in an ad is not the same as the downsized, barely-dressed Big Mac we actually receive from the McDonald’s drive-thru.
The number of plump raisins cascading down in glorious slow motion in any Raisin Bran TV ad is not the same as what we’ve poured into our cereal bowls at the breakfast table.
The satellite dish-like spread of a bloomin’ onion in an Outback Steakhouse commercial is certainly nothing close to what I’ve ever received in the restaurant.
What we are told is not what we are sold.
Each year, the Florida Department of Corrections releases a new menu for its facilities via its food service provider Aramark. The menu does not contain pictures, descriptions or advertisements. Aramark posts the new menu in the dining hall and lets us use our imaginations. Each time, we play along.
I am often among the realists who proclaim the meal won’t be nearly as good or as bad as I dream.
Take, for example, one of the latest menu additions: a scrambled egg and potato casserole, served for dinner. That dish may evoke images of skin-on red potatoes cut into eighths, drizzled in olive oil, seasoned lightly with garlic, salt and pepper, then roasted until golden, crackly brown.
If I were making this meal back home, I’d crack a dozen eggs and whisk them together with a pint of heavy cream, shave in a few shallots, grate a little nutmeg, pour the mixture over the potatoes, then return it to the oven.
I’d melt generous handfuls of grated Gruyère and fontina cheese on top. And just before scooping out a serving from the casserole dish, I would dust the meal with diced chives or sliced scallions.
My history of eating Aramark food led me to believe that this was not how they were going to serve scrambled egg and potato casserole.
Aramark cooks for more than 1,800 residents at my prison, Everglades Correctional Institution. We haven’t seen a real potato at this prison since baked potatoes were removed from our incentivized menu in 2022. Today, we only have freeze-dried scalloped potatoes and freeze-dried hash browns. Meanwhile, raw whole eggs are unheard of in this prison. Eggs come in two varieties here: hard-boiled and shelled in a 5-gallon bucket or, as resident and former cook Allen Holladay said, “frozen in a case of six 1-gallon plastic bags.”
“You’d throw the bags whole to a kettle of boiling water” to cook them, Holladay said.
So that’s why it was easy to imagine that the most likely serving of scrambled egg and potato casserole would be this: a scoop of dry, improperly cooked scalloped potatoes mixed with a smaller scoop of soaking-wet scrambled eggs.
On the day we were served the dish, trepidation filled my heart as I entered the dining hall.
As a guard scanned my ID, I craned my neck, attempting to peek at the food trays. I wanted a first look at the meal, which we were told also came with biscuits, sausage patties and grits. I saw fluffy biscuits atop many trays. But I was too far away to see the finer details of the casserole.
Finally, the line trudged forward, and I received my meal: two fist-sized biscuits, two still-steaming sausage patties, cheesy grits and, in the large slot, a generous serving of casserole.
Indeed, scalloped potatoes and scrambled eggs from a bag comprised most of the casserole in about a 5:2 ratio. No grated cheese, chives or scallions, but diced green peppers played hide and seek under a few potatoes.
Dressed with my own drizzles of ketchup and mayonnaise, the food was flavorful and plentiful — two words I was convinced Aramark deleted from its training handbook. The food was simple, but it was cooked properly and with a little more seasoning than our root cellar expectations had anticipated.
I asked the men at my four-top steel table what they thought.
“The best breakfast I’ve had since I’ve been here,” resident Heathcliff Peters said.
Another nodded while chewing and mumbled, “It’s good.” He even traded his biscuits for more casserole, the most enthusiastic endorsement possible.
A few days after the meal, I followed up with Holladay, the former cook, for his perspective. He had low expectations before the meal — that it would be mostly flavorless potatoes. Aramark never issued any mouthwatering advertisements about the casserole, but Holladay, myself and others still concocted an unappetizing mental image.
That’s probably why Holladay’s face brightened when I asked how he felt about the dish.
“I was surprised,” he said. “There were eggs along with the potatoes. It actually had some flavor, and it had some green peppers. … It was well above the low expectations I set for it.”
