At the start of a February 2025 video interview with Stephen “Stevie” Wilson, a Black abolitionist writer incarcerated in Pennsylvania, I was informed the meeting was being recorded. I watched the red light blinking at me, making sure I knew the state was listening.

“Every day, people are hungry,” Wilson said. When I asked him what was on the menu for the day, he closed his eyes and thought back: “This morning, they gave us two boiled eggs and a little bit of cream of wheat.” For lunch: “It says, ‘meatloaf slice,’ potatoes, gravy, and I think peas or something, but it doesn’t look like a meatloaf slice at all.” Instead, he said, “it looks like something they balled up and threw on the tray,” and added that most people don’t eat it. Dinner was something called “meat wrap filling,” which is supposed to resemble a taco and also made with unidentified meat. “What we get here is the most low-grade food that could be sold for consumption by human beings,” he told me.

In prison, inmates have to pay for food items like ramen noodles, apples, and decent meat at a prison commissary. Prices are hugely inflated, marked up by as much as 600 percent. If their families can’t afford to send them money, they can use the little money they make from their own labor, which is paid 10 to 60 cents per hour — or sometimes nothing at all. In a 2020 Impact Justice survey of the formerly incarcerated, 93 percent of respondents reported being hungry between meals, and 94 percent said they weren’t able to eat enough to feel full. “If you don’t have your basic needs met, it’s hard to survive and fight any oppression or repression,” said Jalal Sabur, a farmer and co-founder of the Freedom Food Alliance, an abolitionist farming and food sovereignty initiative, who also started Sweet Freedom Farm in Germantown, N.Y.

The incarcerated writer Carla J. Simmons stated in a 2024 Truthout article that she knew of many cases where prison staffers forced inmates to participate in sexual activities in exchange for food. In our prison-monitored interview, Wilson spoke of the pressure inmates face in order to remain fed: “What happens when people are hungry on a block? … They may end up doing some things that create another problem, whether it’s stealing from somebody or getting involved in something, you know what I mean?”

“My first infraction in prison was for food,” recalled Michael Capers, director of advocacy and community engagement at Sweet Freedom Farm. Capers spent more than 12 years incarcerated at Upstate, Franklin, and Fishkill Correctional Facilities in New York. He was assigned to work in the mess hall, and took some produce back to his cell. “People who work in a mess hall,” Capers said, “sell stuff or give stuff to their friends. Stuff like lettuce, tomatoes, green peppers, and cucumbers.” When the guards found it, it was taken away and he was fined. He highlighted the similarities between chattel slavery and the prison industrial complex by pointing out that “food was the first pathway of restraining us from our land.” He said, “Our ancestors brought seeds over and braided them into their hair, trying to have this reminiscent feeling of home through their food. We were given the scraps and forced to make meals out of it.” Enslavers controlled what, where, and how much enslaved people could eat; prisons have caloric restrictions and a myriad of rules preventing access to food. Enslavers fed enslaved people scraps and rotten food; prison food often has maggots and mold and is tasteless, calorically dense but nutritionally starved, and made with canned and preserved foods that may be expired. Even when inmates were sent food, Capers remembered how the packages were kept from them for days; by the time they finally got the food, it was moldy and old. “But most times we ate it. There is no other option,” he said. He said that the similarity between slavery and prison “is real for me, understanding that I was forced to do something similar to what my ancestors did.”

Many unpaid prisoners are forced to grow and harvest food, sometimes even working on former slave plantation land. Over a six-year period from 2017 to 2023, forced prison labor generated at least $200 million in agriculture and livestock sales in the U.S. Such products end up on the shelves of large chains like Costco, Kroger, Target, Walmart, and Whole Foods. Even putting aside the food produced by prisons, there is, as Joshua Sbicca, director of the Prison Agriculture Lab, put it, “almost this ubiquitousness, culturally and socially, for people to have actually experienced or know someone who’s experienced prison food” because of the U.S.’s status as the planet’s top incarcerator.

We are all eating prison food, in one form or another. “The struggle for me,” Sbicca told me, “isn’t necessarily how do we achieve food sovereignty within the prison, but rather, how do we get rid of prisons so that we can have food sovereignty?”

At 21, I was incarcerated in a state mental hospital — which was situated right next to a jail — for attempting suicide. It was frightening and degrading, with threats of sexual assault and casual cruelty from guards and nurses. Mostly, what I remember is hunger. Maybe they gave me cheese on white bread. The sensation of pleading hunger while having no control over what or how much I ate stripped me of my dignity. After 24 hours, when my father, an ethnically ambiguous physician, picked me up, the nurse who released me apologized: “You don’t belong here.” But I was Black. According to the state, I did belong here.

Prison geographies, explained Rashad Shabazz, an associate professor of social transformation at Arizona State University, are part of the spatial reality of almost everyone in the U.S. but have a particularly heavy impact on poor, working-class Indigenous and Black people. He said that throughout the 20th century, “Black communities have been inundated by the mechanisms and the techniques and the tactics that make prison function.” Black people make up 37 percent of people in prison or jail and 48 percent of inmates serving life sentences. Indigenous people, less than 1 percent of the population, are incarcerated at double the national rate.

Community often erodes inside prisons in a way that makes organizing difficult, according to Wilson, even after people leave. Prisons prevent some inmates from participating in social and cultural activities around food, and disordered eating is common among the formerly incarcerated. Wilson said that inmates are frequently punished if they’re caught sharing food. “If you were sitting at a table and you were eating your tray,” he explained, and “there was something on there that you didn’t want, you weren’t allowed to give it to the guy next to you. They’d rather you throw the food away than give it to this hungry man.” Wilson mentioned reading studies that have shown formerly incarcerated people are less likely to participate in labor organizing. “They will go home and be averse to organizing with their co-workers for labor rights because they’re so used to being punished for working together with other people,” he said. When I asked a Black man named Bernard, who spent eight years incarcerated in Minnesota, how prison had affected him mentally, he said, “I know I’m kind of antisocial. I felt like I was a little more social before I did all my time. Now I’m more comfortable just shutting down in my little space.” Wilson told me, “It’s wild because you can’t survive like that in the world. So the very skills that you need to be able to go home and to be successful, you’re punished for those things in prison.” He believes this contributes to recidivism.

After Sabur started visiting the former Black Panther Herman Bell and his co-defendant Jalil Muntaqim, he developed the Victory Bus Project, which not only provided transportation for families to visit their loved ones in New York State prisons but also gave them food from Sweet Freedom Farm for the inmates.

Programs like these that try to connect prisoners to the outside are often curtailed. Capers recalled that prison officers would throw away food the farm was trying to deliver, and eventually, it wasn’t allowed at all. After a 2022 rule change already adopted by many states across the country, New York inmates are no longer permitted to receive food packages during family visits. Instead, their loved ones must ship expensive care packages from approved private vendors.

Jeff Henderson spent nearly 10 years in federal prison, where he learned to cook. Since his release, he has held executive chef positions at the Bellagio hotel and Caesars Palace. He has spoken to many recently released people who, after years of eating the “sodium and bad stuff in the processed food that they sell at 70 percent markup,” are dealing with cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other diseases. Henderson’s experience is backed up by the data: Numerous studies have shown that incarcerated Americans are more likely to have a chronic health condition than the general population. “It’s almost like a death sentence,” Henderson said. “They sentenced you to five years, but they gave you a slow death sentence.”

“It’s meant to be punitive,” Shabazz explained. “The maggots are intentional. The hyper-processed food is intentional.” So is the caloric restriction. And the cruelty, he added, “inculcates the public to justify the system of absolute punitive harm at the cellular level.” For him, that aligns society “with a certain level of sadism.”

Humans need vitamin D, and that requires consistent exposure to the sun. But as of 2024, according to the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, only 10 states have a minimum requirement for time spent outdoors for incarcerated people, ranging from five to seven hours per week. With such little time allotted outside, many incarcerated people, including Wilson, suffer a vitamin D deficiency. Wilson also was diagnosed with gout while in prison, and while he receives medication for it, his treatment should include alterations to his diet as well. But it’s nearly impossible for people in prison to individualize their diets according to their health or religion. “They’re not going to provide me a special diet for this,” Wilson said. “So I have to be very careful and just look at the tray and say, ‘I can’t eat that, I can’t eat that, I can’t eat this.’” He is Muslim, and not only is halal meat not available, but meat is often unlabeled and mixed with pork, a problem throughout U.S. prisons, which are careless about accommodating daily meals and Ramadan fasts for Muslims.

Capers began developing heart disease and high blood pressure during his sentence. Both his father and his uncle died of massive heart attacks. “I was relatively healthy, based on my conditions,” he told me. “I worked out consistently. I ate as healthy as possible. And still, none of that, none of those factors mitigated my health outcome. That compelled me to look at the food system as part of the problem.” His research led him to epigenetic trauma — the health consequences of slavery over generations, and being confined to a food desert even before he entered prison. He became a vegetarian, thinking that a plant-based diet could mitigate the harm to his body. But any kind of food or health autonomy inside was nearly impossible. “I had to depend heavily on my family to send me produce, because the institution didn’t really offer those options. I had to try to create my own food system outside of them,” he said. He grew certain that his and his family’s health issues were systemic: “It’s all part of a larger system that’s used to hinder and harm Black and brown bodies.” Yet while he was incarcerated he opened a bakery, selling doughnuts and cakes to other inmates. “I strongly opposed the trauma,” he said. Despite the dehumanization of prison, he found his identity: “I realized who I wanted to be based on what I was deprived of.”

When Henderson went to federal prison in the late 1980s, the first time he was sent to the prison kitchen was to wash dishes. He rose to head inmate cook and baker, the equivalent of a restaurant’s executive chef. His food conditions were much different than those in prisons today. Federal prison was called “Club Fed” then, he said, because of all “the Wall Street, white-collar bankers, investors, hedge fund guys, dozens of greedy, high-level cartel members, high-level counterfeiters, and law enforcement officials who went rogue” in there. Such privileged and high-profile inmates got food that was decent — sometimes more than decent. “When I first went in, we were getting T-bone steaks every week. Chicken twice a week,” he remembered. But after Black people flooded federal prisons in the fiercely racist war on drugs, Henderson heard from people still on the inside that the food got worse, leading to the rotten, overprocessed starvation portions incarcerated people know today. Companies like Aramark, the Pennsylvania-based food vendor that makes big profits from increasingly privatized prison food, are one reason why the food quality decreased so quickly and drastically. Aramark has been repeatedly sued by incarcerated people for poor sanitation and inadequate portions, including maggots in food, spoiled chicken masked with vinegar, and meat thinned out with vats of ketchup.

Prison chefs had to use their ingenuity in response. Henderson described creative chefs making cheesecakes in microwaves out of crumbled-up cookies wrapped in plastic and single-serve cream-cheese containers. Grilled cheese sandwiches were prepared with irons and a little bit of stolen bell pepper or onion. Wilson said that every day on the block, people are cooking their own meals, trying to wrestle what autonomy they can back from the state. “We have an incredible chef on our block. He has a whole menu that he puts out,” he told me before asking a friend nearby what the menu had been that week. “Burritos, fish cakes, rice bowls,” the friend responded from the other side of the room. With pride, Wilson told me that the chef was also planning an Eid feast to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Inmates have shown their culinary acumen on social media, displaying dishes like pork rinds glazed with hot sauce and packets of grape jelly. “Some Michelin-starred chefs ain’t coming up with creativity like that,” said Henderson.

Sbicca told me how inmates engage in “fugitive culinary practices” in prison by repurposing “the ingredients that are made available to them so that they can build community.” Many people who cook in prison are reclaiming culturally specific foods, remaking tacos, soul food, tamales, and Southeast Asian noodle dishes with limited ingredients and access. “People come from a place, people come from traditions, and even in the face of incarceration, people still carry those things with them into this new, unfree space,” he said.

Henderson had become a millionaire by age 19 dealing crack in San Diego, but he didn’t know what his job prospects would be after prison. “I was searching, asking, ‘What am I going to do when I get out?’ I have no career, no particular sales skills,” he said. His caseworker gave him a USA Today article about the top Black chefs in America. That’s where he learned about Robert Gadsby. “I just saw myself in him,” he said. When Henderson was released, Gadsby was opening a new restaurant in Los Angeles and gave him a shot. “I went from washing prison pots and pans to buying German wineglasses and French Bernardaud china,” he told me.

It’s easy to view Henderson’s story as an inspiring outlier. Yet many of the people he met working in the back of the house went through prison. He pointed out that former inmates are uniquely suited to handle the pressures of a busy kitchen and the physical and mental toll, adding, “What translates into the professional culinary world is drive, passion, the natural ability to flavor, and how you process and think out a dish.” The catch is “they’ll let some of us gifted Black chefs in there, but we’re held to number two and number three positions,” he said, adding that it’s rare for former inmates to be executive chefs, own their own restaurants, or be the face of a business, even though they may be the driving creative force in the back of the house.

“The prison population now seems pretty stable; it’s hovering at just under two million. But as people continue to go in and out, and in and out, and those elements of prison life are moving back and forth between those communities,” Shabazz said, prison food aesthetics are “going to proliferate out into the broader society. I’m absolutely certain of it.”

“About four months ago, we had some Puerto Rican prisoners on the block who went and got pigeons from out in the yard,” Wilson said. “They got two pigeons, and they made some pigeon stew.” Capers told me that he knew a Black Jamaican man who used to go out to the prison yard and pick dandelion root: “Everybody used to look at him like he was crazy.” Capers said he asked the man, “Why are you always picking these things and putting it into your water?” The man told him to research the benefits of the plants, and Capers had his family send him printed information on dandelion root and clover. He learned that enslaved people in North America foraged dandelion — a plant integral to both Black and Indigenous herbalist traditions — both to eat and to make medicine. A few weeks later, he went back to the man and asked what other herbs could benefit him, which is how he learned about the mint in the yard.

In her 2024 book Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, Brea Baker wrote that after emancipation, “For Black people who remained in the Deep South, the land that may have once felt like a captor was now beginning to feel like a fellow hostage yearning to be free. A kindred relationship was reborn.” Mass incarceration, climate crisis, and land theft led to a dampening of that feeling of hope. There’s “an ecotherapy aspect of being on land,” Baker said, but it was denied to us “when someone is holding the lash above us.” Prison geographies still hold the lash. But activists fight back, turning seeds into swords.

When Capers read Malcolm X’s quote “Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality,” it distilled many of his ideas about plant medicine, the prison industrial complex, food, and health. “With land, we can create our own systems,” he said. “We can create our own food systems … our own mechanism of partnering and being in community with one another in the system.” Land, he said, “lets us create a decolonial world, decolonial practices, and live our truth as Black and brown people.”

Sometimes the transformation is literal. Growing Change is turning a former North Carolina prison into a farm. Sabur and Baker have been learning to hunt, fish, and forage; so have I. For Sabur, reconnecting with the land gave him insight into the importance of land knowledge for fugitive rebels like Harriet Tubman, whose plant and celestial navigation knowledge helped her free at least 70 slaves.

The state is terrified of a people who can feed themselves, because that means they can defend themselves. It’s why they feed prisoners rotten food. It’s why Chicago police broke into a church and urinated on the food the Black Panthers planned to give children, and why Baltimore police raided the Black Panthers’ free breakfast program while children ate. Feeding yourself is protection, but it’s also declaring sovereignty. And in a prison geography, declaring sovereignty is declaring war.