The Embodiment of Contempt: Ontario Provincial Prison Food
| Author | Kelly Struthers Montford |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221104253 |
| Published date | 01 April 2023 |
| Date | 01 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Embodiment of
Contempt: Ontario
Provincial Prison Food
Kelly Struthers Montford
Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson
University), Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Prison food is central to the prison experience and is a physically invasive manifestation
of carceral power. This article draws on 61 interviews with individuals with lived experi-
ence of provincial prisons in Ontario, Canada. Participants reported that the food was
unhealthy, small-portioned, bland, and steamed to the point that they could not discern
what they were eating. Others reported living in fear of the food, whether because it
was molding, spoiled, or had been tampered with. For many participa nts, their experi-
ence of incarceration was that of hunger and unwanted bodily changes. Poor quality
prison food bolstered an underground food economy in which trading, gambling, or
intimidation were used by prisoners to access more and/or better foods. Overall, prison
food was a means through which social, political, and institutional contempt for prison-
ers was communicated to and embodied by prisoners.
Keywords
Prison food, prison diets, provincial prisons, Canada, Ontario, food as punishment,
embodiment, cook-chill, hunger
Introduction
Food is political and inherently intimate; physically ingested, transformed by and trans-
formative to our bodies, with our available food options shaped by geopolitical, environ-
mental, geographical, cultural, and institutional forces. The power of food and the
Corresponding author:
Kelly Struthers Montford, Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University), Toronto, Canada.
Email: ksm@ryerson.ca
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2023, Vol. 32(2) 237–256
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639221104253
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constraints upon it are heightened in the prison setting. On the one hand, the need to con-
tinuously feed large numbers represents a significant operational issue for prison admin-
istrations, one that is remedied by assigning prisoners to the labor of food preparation and
serving (Godderis, 2006a). On the other hand, incarcerated individuals routinely report
constant hunger and malnourishment despite standards laid out by the United Nations
in its Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners requiring that meals of wholesome
quality and adequate nutritional value for health and strength be provided (OCI, 2019;
UN General Assembly, 2015).
Food is central to the prison experience (Godderis, 2006a). Some have argued that
“prison food assumes enormous importance, symbolically representing, in many respects,
the prison experience”(Smith, 2002: 197). Pratt (2002) has suggested that the symbolic
function of the prison diet is to encourage uniformity and to reify the overwhelming
power of the prison (and hence the state). It is also meant to provide prisoners with
just enough nutrients to maintain biological life. Poor quality food is often the catalyst
for various exercises of resistance, misconducts, and prisoner organizing such that cafe-
terias have not been included in the blueprints for some new institutions, as administra-
tions seek to curtail the potential for resistance and violence that often occurs in these
locations (Earle and Phillips, 2012). With this shift, prisoners often eat in the common
area of their pods or in their cells, resulting in increased restrictions on movement and
socializing, as well as more time-in-cell. The outcome, as Pratt argues, is much like
the taste of the food itself: a bland, boring, and mundane institutionalized life.
Despite its centrality to prison conditions and experience, prison food has received
relatively little academic attention. Existing scholarship has investigated important rela-
tionships between food, health, and identity; ways in which poor-quality food causes feel-
ings of unworthiness and neglect; food as pleasure, punishment, and resistance; the role
of food in articulations of masculinity and ethnicity; as well as the role of food in prisoner
organizing (de Graaf and Kilty, 2016; Einat and Davidian, 2019; Godderis, 2006a,
2006b; Sexton, 2015; Smith, 2002; Smoyer, 2016; Ugelvik, 2011). As well, we have
seen how non-white prisoners in Norway are normalized through national diets, and
how the British government’s self-proclaimed cultural sensitivity is undermined in
Immigration Removal Centers by its serving of a ‘British’diet (DeAngelis, 2020;
Ugelvik, 2011). These examples come from the UK, USA, Norway and Israel and
turning to the Canadian context the research is more scant still, though with notable
exceptions in the federal context (see for example, Godderis, 2006b, 2006a).
A focus on the federal context is common in Canadian prison studies, yet because
Canada’s prison system is bifurcated, with provinces administering sentences of two
years less a day and remanding accused persons, provincial prisons warrant sustained
attention. Based on admissions figures, the province of Ontario is Canada’s largest
jailer. In the 2018/2019 fiscal year, there were 14,548 admissions to federal penitentiaries,
and 64,818 admissions to Ontario provincial custody. Of the admissions to Ontario pro-
vincial custody, 41,131 individuals were remanded prior to trial, making them legally
innocent (Statistics Canada, 2020). De Graaf and Kilty (2016) have examined how
women who have served both provincial and federal time in Canada use cooking and
the sharing of food to take care of themselves and others, thereby subverting the desub-
jectifying and alienating nature of prison power. Yet, there has not been a thorough
238 Social & Legal Studies 32(2)
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