Worst Thing You Ever Ate?
Atom Debris
> In article <3be5c30d....@news.eastlink.ca>,
> DarlaVl...@hotmail.com (Darla Vladschyk) wrote:
>
> > Also, I have seen some stomach-turning things on Iron Chef lately.
> > Would YOU eat fish stomachs in your soup? I thought not.
>
> Well, I've eaten cow tripe, which was OK, I guess, but not great.
I've eaten prison food.
Imagine a hybrid between hospital food and airline food, but with
everything that isn't starchy and horribly overcooked extracted. Now
imagine it cold.
Some people say grace over their food; when I was in prison I got
into the habit of eating and then loudly paraphrasing Sir Henry
Rawlinson: "That was inedible garbage, and there wasn't enough of it!"
Prison policy is to underfeed you, and this is exacerbated by the
fact that prisoners cook the food, which gives them the opportunity to
steal a great deal of it. By the time it gets to the table, the
portions are less than satisfying. This motivates the prisoner to
either conserve energy (which reduces the number of fights and
therefore the amount of paperwork that the guards have to do) or buy
food from the prison store... where a single packet of Top Ramen costs
$1.10, last time I looked. The prison store does not carry any food
that is more than marginally nutritious, although there are some
fairly tasty items available. In the old days, better food was
available, but this led to prisoners being paroled with giant muscles,
and nobody liked the idea of that, so the food was downgraded and the
gym equipment was removed. In the place where I did my time, you
weren't even allowed to do pushups.
In the L.A. County Jail system, if you make paperwork for the
jailers by starting a fight or something, they put you in a special
solitary confinement cell known as "the hole". All your possessions
are taken from you, including your clothing. LACJ food is slightly
worse than prison food, but in the hole it gets really awful...
instead of a thrice-daily plastic tray half-full of various kinds of
nasty, cold, starchy gloop, you get a daily "jute ball" to eat (at
least, that's how it was in the '80s). Jute balls are made by taking
the three meals that everybody else gets to eat, tossing them into a
grinder and grinding everything up together, and then baking the
result.
When I was in LACJ in the '80s, I had the best job in jail: I worked
as a clerk for the civilian employee who ran the jail kitchen. His
name was Pasquale F. Buzzelli, and he was 5x5x5 -- five feet tall,
five feet wide, walking five miles per hour. He loved to eat gourmet
food, but hated to eat alone, so he'd tell one of the civilian
employee chefs to cook up something exotic, and then we'd sit down and
eat together. Back in those days, LACJ prisoners carried their money
around with them (these days you just have money on your account, and
the store deducts it), which gave me many opportunities to rake in the
cash by selling good food and coffee to other prisoners. It was also
my duty to prepare lunches for prisoners in protective custody who
were going to court... that way, if the guy got poisoned or ate broken
glass or something, they'd know who to prosecute. I made lunch for
Raymond Buckey (of McMartin Preschool fame) and Richard Ramirez (who
raped, sodomized, and murdered my crippled octogenarian English
teacher, Mrs. Bell) every time they went to court.
The worst thing I ever *drank* was a beverage known as Pruno, which
is made by fermenting any fruit you can get your hands on (usually
stewed prunes, hence the name) in a big plastic garbage bag. Just
keeping it hidden long enough to ferment is a big achievement, but
actually getting the stuff down your throat is so difficult that it's
practically a rite of passage. One word: bleah.
The second worst beverage I ever drank was shoestring coffee, named
for the method of preparation: take one empty foil tobacco pouch, fill
it with coffee (stolen from the kitchen or bought from a trustee) and
water, attach your shoelaces to a couple of holes punched in the top
of the pouch, and dangle it over a burning toroid of jailhouse blanket
next to the vent in your cell until it boils... mmm mmm good, if you
like burnt, metallic-tasting tobacco-flavored coffee with the grounds
still in it.
What I liked best about prison: there were signs stenciled on
practically every wall that read "WARNING: NO WARNING SHOTS!"
-M. Otis Beard
Otto Bahn
> What I liked best about prison: there were signs stenciled on
> practically every wall that read "WARNING: NO WARNING SHOTS!"
You are Upton Sinclair and I claim nothing.
--oTTo--