It would be cruel and unusual punishment to force someone to eat what I ate. At least, that is the argument before the Supreme Court, and the one I decided to put to the test. Death Kava, meet Nutraloaf.

What is Nutraloaf?

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......Imagine, for a moment, you have been convicted of a significant crime and sentenced to prison. As a prisoner, you have a 45 to 64 percent chance of showing signs of a serious mental illness. There is also a good chance that this is not your first time behind bars. Your cell may even feel like home to you.

......You may have difficulty behaving and obeying the prison’s rules. You would not be the only one. If you act out once, you might lose your recreational privileges. Act out again and your keepers may put you in solitary confinement. A prison may have quite a long list of little luxuries it can take away from you. But what can a prison do when it has taken away everything that can be taken away from you, save for the necessities, and you still misbehave? If you are unlucky enough to be confined in certain jurisdictions, you just might have a date with the dreaded loaf.

......Nutraloaf, also known variously as “confinement loaf,” “meal loaf,” “prison loaf,” “special management meal,” “Nutri-loaf”, or simply “the loaf,” is a food served in some prisons. According to some critics it is literally a recipe for punishment. Prisoners have compared it to dog food and have claimed it to be inedible. It has been the subject of lawsuits in Illinois, Maryland, Nebraska, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Washington, West Virginia, and Vermont. It has also been served in California, Florida, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, and Texas.

......Around the country, Nutraloaf is the subject of prisoners’ lawsuits with “some regularity.” The arguments usually focus on the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, or the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ due-process implication that the employment of Nutraloaf should be accompanied by some sort of hearings.

......Nutraloaf has been called an effective tool for behavior management, and it has been called the twenty-first century version of bread and water. A human can survive with it – but can the Constitution?

Why I Did It

......There really aren't any foods that scare me and still qualify as food. I have an irrational fear of spiders, for instance, but only ones that are alive, and I don't recommend eating those. I am happy to try anything once, even the much dreaded casu marzu would be a must-have if I found myself in Sardinia. I love food, I eat with abandon and delight every day. I worked out that I was a supertaster as an undergraduate, and have voluntarily taken up the mantle of trying new and exciting foods whenever possible. As it happens I've got a lifelong quest to eat as many different animals as I can, with moral reservations only for the endangered. If I got the chance to eat whale, dolphin, or even chimpanzee I'm not sure I would turn it down on moral grounds, although I could hardly encourage the hunt. So where would I ever find a food that scared me?

......Just when I thought I would never find a food I simply would not eat, a phrase caught my ear. I overheard that there was a food being challenged in the Supreme Court of the United States as "cruel and unusual punishment." On that basis alone I knew I had to test my palate against a food condemned (perhaps) by the Constitution itself!


How I Did It


......It just so happens that I know someone writing an article discussing the oft-challenged constitutionality of this foodstuff known as Nutraloaf. That quote you just read was from their latest draft. I got in touch with them and decided that for the sake of scholarship and science he would prepare as many official state penitentiary recipes as were available for this meal, and I would eat them.

......Moreover, while he was only trying them to comment on their flavor, I was willing to take on the real challenge -- eating ONLY nutraloaf.


A Prisoner's Dilemma: To Eat or Not to Eat

The basic legal challenge against this food is that prisoners on a Nutraloaf diet are fed the exact same meal, at room temperature, to be eaten with their bare hands, three meals a day, every day. Many prisoners will simply start skipping meals because they can't bear the monotony. It is no individual square of the loaf that is cruel, it is the loaf to the exclusion of all else. This, I found, is what scares me.

I looked at my life, and I realized that good food is about the only luxury I enjoy. While working on The Taking Tree, where all of LA0 was called upon to put what they treasured into trees, I realized I don't have any possessions I treasure anymore. I own clothes, books, a mattress, and food. But oh, what food I enjoy. So leading up to the nutraloaf diet, I documented my meals to show you just how luxuriously I eat on my student meal plan, and more importantly how accustomed to variety I have become.


Rosemary potato wedges, beef stroganoff, basmati rice, walnut and cherry salad with red wine vinaigrette. Oh, and a white-sauce fried fillet of catfish in the back there.


A grilled cheese sandwich. There is a story about this sandwich, go through the proof files to see it.


A carrot cake with walnuts and raspberry sauce.



A fresh fruit salad of pineapple, honeydew melon, grapes, watermelon, and canteloupe, in strawberry yogurt, topped with granola.


Chicken Penne Marinara with cilantro and Gorgonzola, accompanied by "Dynamite" pizza, featuring an unusually peppered garlic-tomato topping.


All of that is a single dinner for me, typically. There is some repetition in that I will always have chicken or beef, some fish, some pizza and pasta, some salad, and some pie or cake. But it is different every night, and there are a dozen chefs at work making the components of a single meal. No one cooks for themselves like this.

So now to the problem. I believed I was dependent on this variety.

But was I so dependent I would come to fear this in its place?

What I Did

With five recipes in hand, representative of those used in twelve states, we got to work. Ryan diced, molded, and blended recipes defined by state statute. Impressively, California actually defines the exact cooking procedure for their recipe in the California Penal Code!


I prepared to consume these dishes with nothing but a paper towel, and my mitts. Most of the dishes were prepared in advance because they needed to be back down to room temperature before we could eat them as prisoners would.

So now for the eating. A full documentation of each recipe is in the photos section at the end of the praxis, where you can read my discussion of each meal. Mostly though, it went like this:

Illinois "Vegan Meal Loaf"

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At the end of the day, I went home with many duplicates of each of these four bricks'o'food:




And that is all I ate.
For days. No exceptions. I went out with a group of friends to see The Watchmen, and afterwards they stopped at an IHOP. I brought in my tray of goodies, passed them around, and was rather resoundly rejected. I can't blame them, who would eat that willingly?


How could I compete? IHOP serves you food that smiles.
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Mine doesn't smile.
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I sat at the next table, and quietly ate.



I stayed with The Walrus the next day. For breakfast: Nutraloaf.


For lunch: Nutraloaf


For dinner: Everyone had Ribs!

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I reached for a Nutraloaf.



Oh, and did I mention that during this whole ordeal I had tonsilitis? Yeah, that made it literally painful to swallow. I don't know how that fits into the broader scheme of the task, but it happened. Look, look at my tonsils (and also how disgusting this food was).




It got to the point where I was contemplating each bite with existential woes and nihilistic internal struggles.


I'm not kidding. There were times when all the pleasure and wonder of the world around me was forgotten. When I ate, there only was Nutraloaf in my future.
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The Walrus even lovingly crafted for me a desert that would fit into my diet; an eggless pear-bread of her own design. I would like to think it is because she could not bear to see me suffer so that she deigned to offer me what pleasure this cruel regimen demanded of me, but it may have been either because she found it funny to bring me food in loaf form or because this is all she had worked out how to bake. I would've killed for a chocolate chip cookie though.


Eventually though, it was over. Here is how I felt about that.



Finally, if you would like to read the article derived from this madness, I have appended a Word Document with the relevant names redacted to protect their identities. I also wanted to get into some of the theories of criminal justice, and whether prison meets them at all, but I decided it doesn't belong in this praxis about my experiment with the food. If you do want to read another article that articulates what my best informed opinion on the US prison system amounts to, drop me a line and I'll send you a copy. The tl;dr version is that prison only prevents some types of crime, but increases others, and we pay for the inconsistent mess?

Update: I was a runner up in the Los Angeles Bizarre Foods Invitational based on my Death Kava experience. It looks like Los Angeles has a fair few other masochistic foodies out there. No direct connection with Mr. Garnett's intended "consume your fears" interpretation of the task, although snakes are pretty troubling.