Do Prisoners Eat Better than School Children?

UPDATE 12/02/10: The House voted in favor of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, ushering in school lunch reform. The move came after more than 15,000 Change.org members signed a petition supporting the Child Nutrition Act and more than 1,000 members urged Congress to reform school lunch without cutting future funds to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps.  While the bill still includes SNAP cuts, President Obama and Congressional leaders have promised to fix these reductions. Read the full story here.

It's probably no secret that school lunch tastes pretty gross. Feeding kids a hot dog, bag of pretzels, sugary fruit cup, and chocolate milk isn't exactly the most nutritious meal, either. But despite cafeterias' dubious dishes, there's one place I expected to offer even worse fare — jail. The nation's youth must get better meals than grown-up, hardened criminals serving time in the slammer...right?

Well, according to a story in the Herald-Citizen, when it comes to meal selection, jail might actually be the preferable choice.

Reporter Tracey Hackett covered the meals served in Tennessee's Putnam County Justice Center. According to Hackett, the detention center's kitchen gets about $548 a day to provide prisoners with meals, which roughly works out to about $1.83 per meal. Each inmate gets two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. A typical breakfast consists of a six-ounce container of gravy, a 2.5-ounce biscuit, scrambled eggs, a hash brown patty, pineapple slices, an eight-ounce glass of milk, and some jelly. "Dinner typically consists of a sandwich or casserole, two-to-three servings of vegetables such as mashed potatoes, whole kernel corn and green beans, cornbread, sweet tea, and a serving of fruit or a dessert such as a cookie or piece of cake," Hackett reports.

Not exactly the most appetizing of meal-time selections, for sure, but they seem to at least provide a somewhat-balanced diet. When you take a look at the school lunches kids receive in America's cafeterias, jail food looks like a meal at a five-star restaurant.

Mrs. Q, author of the "Fed Up With Lunch" blog, ate the lunch served in her school's cafeteria every day, photographed it, and blogged about it. The selections are enough to nauseate even the most adventurous of eaters. All meals start out frozen and come packaged in cardboard and plastic. The dishes themselves are, well, not-so-palatable. Processed chicken nuggets with diced carrots, frozen pear puree, chocolate milk, and a stale muffin made up one lunch. Penne with suspiciously brown meat sauce, green beans, a breadstick, chocolate milk, and a blue raspberry icee made up another. The meals change every day, but it's just more of the same.

Like jails, school cafeterias work on a limited budget. But while the Putnam County jail creates its meals with $1.83, schools receive $2.68 for each meal (though there is currently legislation before Congress that would up those funds a bit). I find it hard to believe that a prison could find a way to feed its inmates dairy and five servings of fruits and veggies a day, and the best school cafeterias can do is dish out processed chicken patties and rubbery hot dogs.

I'm not saying that prison food couldn't use an upgrade either — it certainly could, starting with providing prisoners with three meals a day instead of just two. But the fact that the nation's criminals eat better than America's school kids — and on a tighter budget, to boot — is just plain pathetic.

By investing in better school lunches, we're investing in America's kids. Sign our petition asking for immediate reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act.

Photo credit: WellspringCS via Flickr