What's on the tray in America's prisons with Daniel Rosen and Leslie Soble

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. often talks about reforming prison food in the same breath as school food, a genuinely unusual thing for a top health official to say. At the same time, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has quietly put out requests for information about outsourcing food service to the same private companies that serve colleges, elementary schools, and military bases. Are these two positions aligned? What would it take to actually improve food served in prisons? Why does it matter? We dive into all of it with two of the country’s top experts in prison food.Daniel Rosen co-founded the Carceral Nutrition Project after six years incarcerated in Virginia and Washington, D.C. Leslie Soble is a folklorist and ethnographer whose research became Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison, which just won a James Beard Award (Soble is also a founding board member of the Carceral Nutrition Project).Together, Rosen and Soble lay out what's actually on the tray, who's profiting from it, and why the whole "you did the crime, you do the time" doesn't actually make sense when you consider how to feed incarcerated people.Highlights:Prison and jail systems spend $1.50 to $2 a day feeding someone, a fraction of what the federal school lunch reimbursement coversThe wild imbalance between healthcare and food spending in correctional facilitiesHow privatization works (about a third of prison food service is outsourced)The science connecting better nutrition to lower violence in correctional facilitiesWhat the Trump administration is/isn’t doing to reform prison foodWhat national standards for prison food could actually look likeWhere to find Daniel Rosen and Leslie Soble:Carceral Nutrition ProjectEating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in PrisonAdditional Reading:"Private Food, Public Harm" — the CSPI/Carceral Nutrition Project report on privatized prison food serviceGesch et al. (2002) Gesch, C.B., Hammond, S.M., Hampson, S.E., Eves, A., & Crowder, M.J. "Influence of supplementary vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids on the antisocial behaviour of young adult prisoners." British Journal of Psychiatry, 181, 22–28. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.181.1.22Zaalberg et al. (2010) Zaalberg, A., Nijman, H., Bulten, E., Stroosma, L., & van der Staak, C. "Effects of nutritional supplements on aggression, rule-breaking, and psychopathology among young adult prisoners." Aggressive Behavior, 36(2), 117–126. https://doi.org/10.1002/ab.20335Schoenthaler & Bier (2000) Schoenthaler, S.J., & Bier, I.D. "The effect of vitamin-mineral supplementation on juvenile delinquency among American schoolchildren." Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 6(1), 7–17. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2000.6.7Schoenthaler sugar studies (1980s) Schoenthaler, S.J. (1983). "The Alabama Diet-Behavior Program." International Journal of Biosocial Research, 5(2), 79–87. (Pre-DOI era; search via Google Scholar)Systematic review: dietary/nutritional interventions on behaviour and mental health of prisoners (2024) — 933 studies screened, 11 included; found consistent ~30% reductions in violence across intervention types.Australian pilot RCT on dietary supplementation and aggression in adult male prisoners (2020) — feasibility study for a larger omega-3/multivitamin RCT; prisoners below the 6% omega-3 index threshold were 4.3× more likely to have elevated aggression scores.Omega-3 multi-centre RCT protocol (2021) — pre-registered protocol for a large-scale replication of the Gesch/Zaalberg findings.Gut microbiota and mental health in new inmates (2022, PubMed) — inmates showed higher anxiety/depression scores