Omnivore Atlanta

LUNCH CRUNCH: Should Georgia's prisoners get lunch every day?

Georgia prisons are getting national attention this morning for their initiative to save money by not giving prisoners lunch three days a week. According to an Associated Press article running in some major newspapers today, prisoners in Georgia will still get the same amount of calories every day (2,800 for men and 2,300 for women), but now won’t get lunch on Fridays – in addition to Saturdays and Sundays, when state prisoners have been lunch-less for years now. Instead, they’ll get bigger portions at breakfast and dinner on those days.

As the fifth-largest prison system in the nation, the Georgia Department of Corrections has seen some major budget cuts within the last fiscal year, and they have to make up for the difference any way they can. And at a time when Georgia has a child food insecurity rate of almost 20 percent, it’s hard to decide just who deserves a free and healthy lunch every day.

Opponents of the prison lunch cut back say it increases violence in prisons because inmates become disgruntled as food becomes a hot commodity. The AP pulled up reports of inmate assaults through an open records request for their story and found that reports of inmate assaults have increased “substantially” in Georgia prisons for fiscal year 2009 over the previous year. However, it is unclear if there is any connection between the assaults and the lack of lunch.

(Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

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Coca-Cola Co., Pepsi Co., Kraft Foods Inc., Kelloggs, and General Mills Inc. are participating in a national dietary program called Smart Choices, which will basically relocate all box and can labels to the front of the package in 2009 . The purpose? Our national dietitians believe this program will improve public health and simplify healthy decision-making at the supermarket. Here’s a quote from the Associated Press article:

Consumers wanted to have the guesswork taken out of figuring out other key nutritional information, like calories and servings. Moving it to the front of the box allows people to make decisions more quickly.

WHAT?

Have we really strayed so far from kinetic motion that there has to be a national program (with big money invested, no doubt) to avoid turning over a box of frozen fish sticks to read the label? Furthermore, if there is so much “guesswork” involved label-reading, how is moving identical information from the back to the front going to help someone who can’t read it in the first place?

I say do away with this “calories per serving” BS and just tell us the total amount of calories we are consuming. Inform us how fat our asses will be after scratching the bottom of a Cherry Garcia pint because the label read 100 calories per serving and we mistook it for the whole carton. Tell us it’s really 8 billion calories, 2 billion from fat, and the inches it will add to our waistlines. That is public health regulation. And leave it on the back of the package, an extra turn of the wrist can’t hurt.

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)

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