Tent City Food

This week’s post will be about the Tent City Cuisine.

Food as defined by www.dictionary.com  is “more or less solid nourishment, as distinguished from liquids.”

Whoever submitted that utilitarian definition must have spent time in Tent City.  I really couldn’t describe Tent City food any better than that.  It is a completely and utterly unremarkable and flavorless form of sustenance.

Does it look gross?  Yes. But if you can get past the appearance, it doesn’t really taste like much at all.  The flavor has somehow been removed.  Basically it is, more or less, a solid that provides nourishment.  The best thing you could say about what they serve in Tent City is that if you eat it, it will go into your stomach, form a bolus in your intestines and eventually form an equally unremarkable turd.  

The first food I received during my Tent City extravaganza was during the first day’s marathon check in procedure. Having reported at 8AM that morning, by 7PM on that first night, it had been over 12 hours since I had eaten anything.  I know some of my cell mates hadn’t even had breakfast so they were probably going on 24 hours.  We were all pretty damn hungry.

Finally some food showed up.  The first thing I was given to eat was something the inmates called a Ladmo Bag.  If you grew up in Arizona you will remember the Ladmo Bag as the paper lunch sack filled with junk food that was provided by sponsors of the Wallace and Ladmo Show which was the morning kid’s show that ran for 35 years from 1954 to 1989.

This Ladmo Bag at Tent City is a clear plastic bag filled with the following items:

·         2 wheat rolls that are sealed inside their own plastic bag yet are somehow completely dried out when you bite into them.  They are shaped sort of like mini Nerf footballs and are roughly the same flavor.

·         1 or 2 pieces of citrus. This is the only thing in the jail that consistently tastes good because they haven’t yet found a way to extract the flavor from it.  I’m sure they’re working on it.  I had an orange in my bag and I traded it for 2 grapefruits which was my first jailhouse transaction. 

·         An oatmeal cookie with cream filling.  It looked like a Little Debbie but I’m sure that they would never go for a top-shelf item like that.

·         Peanut butter in a plastic ramekin.    I don’t know where they got this peanut butter.  It was more like peanut sauce.  If you’ve ever been to a mediocre Thai restaurant, you may have experienced that thin, wet, peanut salad dressing that they drizzle over a couple of pieces of iceberg lettuce and call it a salad.  Well that’s about what my peanut butter was like.  More disturbing than that, was the guy right next to me had really clumpy dry peanut butter in his Ladmo Bag.  I guess that he got the last scoop out of the peanut butter container in the food factory, so they had to bust open a fresh 55 gallon drum of peanut butter for my serving and all the oil was sitting on top.  Even though my peanut butter container had a lid on it, whoever prepped my Ladmo Bag managed to get this greasy peanut stuff to coat everything else in my bag.  Just disgusting.  And of course I ate it all.

The next morning while still waiting in our cell we received another Ladmo bag.  It had all the same items except they replaced the greasy/oily/dry/clumpy peanut butter with a piece of meat of some kind.  I’m not kidding.  I really don’t know what it was.  The only reason I tasted it was because I knew already that I was going to write a blog about my experience so I wanted to make sure I took it all in.  It tasted vaguely like ham but the meat was more grey than ham and it had striations and lines running through the meat from one side to the other.  It looked like somebody put a piece of ham on the ground, donned track shoes and then did the moon walk on it. 

Not to be outdone by the monkey that sloppily got peanut butter all over everything in my previous Ladmo Bag, the food factory worker that packed this Ladmo Bag was able to get this ham-like substance to ooze moisture all over the rest of the stuff in my bag.  Fortunately, I was not nearly hungry enough to take more than just the one research bite of this meat entrée.

The next meal was dinner on Sunday night.  How delightful.  Sunday dinner.  Every night they serve a “hot” meal.  Hot being a relative term.  Is it hotter than say, Pluto or liquid nitrogen? Yes it is.  Is it hotter than the peanut butter sauce or the enigmatic meat slice that was in the Ladmo Bag.  Not really. It was actually just room temperature.  The criteria for calling something a hot meal is if it would be served hot in the outside world.  They could give you ice-cold chili and call it a hot meal because usually chili is served hot.  Since they serve it in a four compartment heat tray and its food that theoretically is supposed to be hot, they call it a hot meal.

Here is what the Sunday night hot meal consisted of:

Meat stew.  Again, I can’t get any more specific on the meat but we’ll go ahead and say it was something cow related.  There were slivers of meat mixed with slivers of vegetable all folded into a thick, mucousy looking, yellow, I don’t know, I guess the word would be gravy. 

The next compartment had an orange vegetable.  You really couldn’t tell what it was by looking at it.  It could have been pumpkin, carrots or sweet potatoes if you only gave a visual inspection.  By tasting it, you could eke out just enough flavor to realize that they used to be carrots.

Then there is the big section of the tray filled with beans and another one of those famous wheat rolls I told you about earlier.  When these rolls originally come off of the Nerf assembly line they are probably 2 inches thick.  The stackable dinner trays are only 1 inch thick.  In order to allow the trays to stack properly they have to squish the rolls down into the beans.  You end up with your Nerf roll half submerged in these beans.  A normal roll would get soggy under such conditions, but you can pull the Nerf roll out of the beans, wipe off of the bean residue and your roll is still bone dry.  It really is amazing.  Its the opposite of a Sham-wow.

The beans have absolutely no flavor.  It’s as if they have a flavor extracting centrifuge that they pour the food into, it spins around at 3000 miles per hour until all spices, nutrients and flavor have been freed from the food and then they replace it with wood filler.  I am convinced that they make a concerted effort to make the food worse than it would be than if they just opened cans of the cheapest, most low rent beans you could find and threw them in a pot. 

Luckily, I was on work release during my stay at Tent City which meant that I got to leave at 8AM on weekdays and stay out until 8PM.  I would obviously wait until I leave to eat breakfast.  Spend my day at work.  Go home and eat dinner.  Check myself back in with a full stomach. Rinse. Repeat.

The problem is when I check in on Friday night, I have to be in there until Monday morning.  I’m not going to go on a hunger strike but I’m also not going to eat the crap that they serve.  Luckily we have the commissary.

When Tour Guide mentioned the commissary, I was picturing maybe a small store with hot dogs, nachos, cokes, sandwiches etc.  Someplace you could go to get food instead of eating the excrement that they were serving to us as “hot meals”.  It turns out the commissary was actually just a bank of 6 vending machines. 

According to my fellow inmates, the machines are owned and operated by members of Sheriff Arpaio’s family.  No wonder the free food that they serve is so bland.  The more people that refuse the meals means more money into the vending machines.  With 400 to 500 inmates spending probably 2-3 bucks each on the vending machines each day, the machines must generate easily over a half million dollars a year in revenue and probably 250,000 in profit.

The machines have the normal stuff you might expect like snickers and butterfingers but there is one that has exotic items like a bag of chili, a ham and cheese sandwich, tortillas and honeybuns.  These are all premium items and if you aren’t one of the first 50-60 people to get into the commissary after the machines are restocked you may not get one.

Tour guide showed me how to make an actual hot meal with items from the commissary.  He bought the chili from the vending machine then he took it to the laundry room and set it behind the vent of one of the dryers to heat it up.   It actually does get the chili warmer than any of the hot food that is served.  That’s good eating in Tent City.  I suggested that he just throw the chili packet directly in the dryer and then it would get even hotter.  Of course, he already knew this method but he didn’t want to throw his chili in with somebody else’s clothes.  Who says prisoners aren’t civilized?

During the weekends I got by on grapefruits, snickers, jerky, oatmeal cookies and peanut M&Ms.  As one final indignity of being in Tent City, their vending machines sold RC Cola instead of Coke or Pepsi.  I can take a lot of shit, but this needs to be reported to amnesty international.  We as inmates will pay the extra 10-15 cents for Coke or Pepsi.  Throw us a bone here.

I did discover that you can lose a lot of weight with the grapefruit, snickers, jerky, M&M diet.  I would go in to jail on Friday night weighing in at about 220 pounds.  When I would get home on Monday morning I would be at around 212 pounds.  That’s from one weekend of eating just grapefruits and junk food.  Its all about portion control.  In order to eat the quantity of food that I usually eat, I would have had to spend 25 dollars on the vending machine, which I wasn’t about to do.

Needless to say, I am glad that the Tent City experience is over.  While I was in there, I met people that made one mistake and have learned their lesson but there are plenty that have been in on four or five different occasions for various issues including multiple DUI offenses.  Some of them are becoming institutionalized, which means they have become so accustomed to the routine of

the Tent City life that they are becoming incapable of managing a life outside.  Fortunately that will never happen to me.

I’ve got to go now because my daughter is waking up and I need to throw some pancakes in the dryer for breakfast.