Best Food Writing 2014 (55 page)

“That's when I knew it was going to happen,” Tyler says. He reels off a list of parties Rob themed around such fanciful ideas—the Outhouse Open House, with its hinged toilet seat invitation, or the “hoedown,” when they mailed out unshucked ears of corn with invitations tucked carefully inside the husks. Once Rob threw a birthday party for one of the town's oldest citizens, seemingly for the excuse of sculpting the man's likeness from a giant hunk of Velveeta cheese.

The first Cut the Cheese Club meeting took place in Tyler and Rob's modest, one-story house. “Half an hour before the party was supposed to begin, Rob all of a sudden looks at that carpet and grabs a little corner and pulls it up. He says, ‘There's a beautiful wood floor under here.' And next thing I know, he's pulling up the carpet.” Tyler sighs dramatically. “People are coming over for a party in twenty minutes, and Rob is literally pulling up the carpet.”

“The floors were beautiful!” Rob protests. “Aside from some foam and some carpet tacks.”

The Cut the Cheese Club became a huge success. Rob and Tyler would order the pricey cheeses, portion them, and label them. Members were supposed to keep the tags for the cheese they had eaten and pay at the door on the way out to offset the cost. The club grew and grew, quickly becoming the most popular party in town. It outgrew residences, and Rob and Tyler started renting venues. People passing through town would somehow hear about the cheese club parties and gate-crash. Soon enough, Consuelo interrupts indignantly, people weren't even paying—they would just float in, hoover up some cheese, and take off. Moreover, they were drinking the expensive bottles of wine that Rob and Tyler ordered and leaving bottles of cheap wine in their place, a blatant abuse of the BYOB rule. “We would end the night with a dozen bottles of ‘two-buck Chuck,'” Tyler complains, miming pouring a bottle down the sink.

Eventually, there were hundreds of people showing up at each party. Rob began ominously invoking the “final clause” in his emails to the membership. (“Rob had actually written up bylaws for the Cut the Cheese Club,” Tyler explains. “And the final clause stipulated
that when it stopped being fun, the club would immediately be put to death.”)

But the last straw was the infamous furniture store party. The club had outgrown the largest venues in town, and the furniture retailer was a venue of last resort. Perhaps putting 250 people and several gallons of red wine in a closed furniture store for an evening was not the best idea. Stained upholstery was just the beginning.

“We had ordered this particular wine to go with one of the cheeses,” Tyler relates. “Rob was really excited about it. It was more than usually challenging.”

“And
expensive
,” Rob adds.

People who dropped in for the party went, as usual, for the free booze, ignoring the pairings and gobbling cheese at will. However, the wine proved too challenging for casual gate-crashers (and, it is just possible, for some of the regulars as well). Raucous, intoxicated guests began tipping their glasses of wine into the potted plants. In the morning, every plant in the store was dead, the furniture store owners enraged.

Nobody else in town wanted to host the cheese club after that. The final clause was invoked, and the Cut the Cheese Club was no more. It would seem that Rob had reached the limits of the town's patience for highbrow food culture—the haute ceiling, as it were.

Tyler puts it in a more positive light. “The cheese club showed us that there really was a core group in town who would turn out for this kind of thing,” he said. Without the Cut the Cheese Club, Tyler explains, the Curious Kumquat would not exist.

He mused for a moment. “The thing is, Rob doesn't even really care about cheese, do you, Rob?”

Rob smiles. “Not really,” he says.

I
type this sentence twenty minutes after eating leftover spaghetti and clams for breakfast, a Hungry Man-sized portion at nine a.m. It is an exertion of my free will to do so. It is within my civil right as a dedicated grocery shopper and keeper of leftovers, imprinted in the Charter of Man, that I am free to eat however much I want, of what I want, when I want.

In prison, that right is stripped away. Craving pizza on a Saturday night? Feel like washing it down with cold beer? It's not happening. Your right is reduced to eating portion-fixed food dictated by a warden on a set schedule. If you're hungry after dinner, you'll go to bed hungry.

The thought of losing this control sends me into a panic attack.

The town of Westville sits beneath the southern curve of Lake Michigan, an hour's drive from Chicago, past the belching steel plants of Northwest Indiana. It is every small American town that ever existed, a patchwork of green and brown rectangles on Google Map's satellite view. On the two January days I visited Westville Correctional Facility, the winter's second polar vortex was bearing down
on Middle America, plunging daytime wind chills to –25 degrees Fahrenheit. Westville's position south of Lake Michigan also makes the area prone to biblical lake-effect snowstorms. And so, against the howling white-out squall, the eighty-five-acre prison—occupying about one-eighth of Westville—appeared utterly
gulag
-ish.

The first thing you notice when walking into Westville, however, is that the staff is unflinchingly Midwestern. Their jocular disposition—beginning with your pat-down officer at the security checkpoint—is unnervingly pleasant. I remember a coroner I met years ago who had the most inappropriately morbid sense of humor—he mimed the suicide victim on the gurney blowing his brains out, complete with exploding hand gestures from his temple. It was, I realized, a coping mechanism to deal with the darkness he sees daily, one that might explain why the prison staff (at least in the presence of a reporter) seemed so sunny.

To enter the prison compound proper, you step through a mechanized door into a holding cell, and wait as that door closes before a second door slowly grinds its metallic gears open. When that second door clangs shut with a sound just like in the movies, you enter a world of around 3,300 inmates, each serving an average of four years for offenses from burglary and drug possession to arson and worse.

Their favorite pastime seems to be staring at you. An Asian reporter and Hispanic photographer are curios when every day's the same day: wake up at five a.m., don your beige prison garb, work your twenty-cents-an-hour job, sit around in the dorms until lights out at eleven p.m. So the inmates are eager to talk, if just to break up the monotony. And when you mention you're here to write about food in prisons, it's like ramming a car into a fire hydrant and watching the water gush skyward.

“Why don't you grab one and eat with us, bro? And you tell us what you think,” says Shaun Kimbrough, who's wheelchair-bound and serving a five-year sentence for aggravated battery. “It's gonna hurt your stomach, but we're used to it.”

The Westville cafeteria, or “chow hall,” is where the state of Indiana spends $1.239 to feed each prisoner each meal, three times a day. They line up single file, shuffling forward until they reach a waist-height hole in the wall. Every five seconds, a hardened plastic tray of compartmentalized food slides into view and is quickly picked up.
The transaction between server and inmate is an anonymous relationship, a food glory hole.

Today is fish sandwich day at Westville, and conspiracy theories abound.

“They know y'all coming, that's why they served fish,” Kimbrough says. Apparently fish is one of the better-tasting offerings the prisoners see, in the way that canker sores are the best kind of ulcers. “That's a top-notch tray right there. But that fish patty, it ain't meat. It's just breading.”

The fish patty sits atop three slices of white bread—two to make a sandwich, and the extra slice presumably to meet the 2,500 to 2,800 daily calories as recommended by the American Correctional Association for adult males under fifty. There's also a corn muffin, steamed carrots and green beans, plus mac and cheese sloshing around in a puddle of bright orange water. Some trays hold elbow pasta, others have corkscrew. Beverage is a Styrofoam cup of powdered tropical punch.

The most coveted items on the tray are the salt and pepper packets. Every person I surveyed, without fail, used the word “bland” in describing chow hall food. Rather than prepare separate trays for inmates with high cholesterol or blood pressure, the kitchen serves low-sodium meals for the entire prison population. Even with the added salt, though, it tastes like a vague notion of lunch, with all the flavor and pleasure of food eaten one hour after dental surgery.

Says Thomas Powell, who's serving time for drug dealing: “You're salting something with no flavor to begin with. It's tasteless. It's horrible. It's repetitive day after day.” Powell brings packets of powdered ramen soup seasoning to sprinkle over his food. He is not alone in his desire for flavor—up and down the rows of steel tabletops, inmates pull out bottles of hot sauce they bring from the dorms, dousing their breaded fish and three slices of white bread.

The next most frequently utilized food descriptor is “mush.” Food texture is difficult to retain when most meals are prepared several days before service—cooked, then quickly refrigerated in an industry-standard practice called blast-chilling. Reheating it, workers in the production kitchen claim, turns everything into a one-note texture more suitable for nursing homes.

Two entrées exemplify mush: goulash and chop suey.

On days these dishes are served, many inmates will skip their meals altogether. Hearing them describe the dishes is like listening to grandpa recall war atrocities he witnessed: spoken with a heavy sigh, best left in the past.

On goulash: “Noodles in red sauce . . . his tray may have meat, mine may not . . . the noodles have been overcooked so much, it's compacted together so it's like mush. You try to pick up one noodle and eighteen go along for the ride.”

Two inmates have a conversation explaining chop suey:

“It's a bunch of cabbage and water.”

“That's it. It may have a few grains of rice.”

“ . . . And corn if you're lucky.”

“See, in mine, I don't remember corn.”

An inmate named James Rogers speaks more broadly about dining in incarceration: “I've been here for six years. It has never changed. You came here on a good day. If you came out when they served the other stuff, you'd be horrified. We have no choice but to eat it.”

I ask Warren Christian, in Westville the last five years for robbery, how long it took him to adjust to prison food.

“Years. It took years. Some people never get accustomed to it.”

What was the turning point?

“Finally accepting the situation you're in. That you're not going anywhere until they release you.”

Food is also served three times daily to the inmates at Westville Control Unit, its maximum-security ward, aka “supermax.” Two types of offenders get a ticket here: 1) Those whose behavior while incarcerated necessitates segregation from the general prison population, and 2) Shot-calling gang leaders and inmates who committed a heinous crime.

The prison isn't bragging when they call it supermax. To reach fresh air from lockup requires getting past nine gates of electrified or impenetrable steel doors. Regardless of the guards and a separation of bulletproof glass, supermax is a frightening place to be. The inmates know you're there. Suddenly everyone appears at their cell-door window, a dozen pairs of eyes laser-trained in your direction. They scream at you. Through the glass partitions, we hear muffled banshee wails demanding to know our business.

For the correctional officers who deal with these hardest of the already-hard, protocol is to err on the side of extreme caution. They're required to serve food in pairs while wearing body-armor vests. One officer's job is to lock and unlock the cuff door, the steel flap where food slides through, while the other delivers the tray through the slot. Even for murderers, food hygiene is imperative, so guards wear latex gloves and hairnets while serving.