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Comment by ohyesyodo | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure you are not the only one, but why wouldn't the prison do that?

Why should a prison accommodate a prisoner who is a vegan any more than one who wants to eat filet mignon for every meal?

Probably because filet mignon is more expensive than a vegan meal.

In the scheme of things, the cost of losing economies of scale by providing many custom diets is probably the dominant cost factor to consider.

Why should a prison accommodate people who don't eat certain things based on religious guidelines? People are rarely vegan because they associate a vegan diet with one of luxury. They choose not to eat animal products because they have an ethical objection to them.

Vegan doesn't mean higher quality. It can mean a large serving of beans and broccoli.

Which makes the whole discussion rather bizarre. So you don't want meat slop on beans and rice, fine, take two scoops of rice and beans instead without the slop. Don't want pancakes and bacon, fine, take an extra pancake instead. If the servers won't cooperate, trade a slice of bacon to your neighbor in exchange for a pancake.

I suppose you could intentionally sabotage someone by putting bacon in with the beans, so just avoid mixing expensive bacon in with the cheap beans and I think everyone will be happy?

My guess is dietary sabotage is intentional, even if it takes more money and more effort, as a kind of psychological torture. "The guards will beat you if you don't put bacon bits on your salad because they know you're a vegan" type of thing.

(edited to explain, I ate years of institutional food in school lunches, then the Army, and then at University, pretty much my first quarter century of life, and I assumed its "about the same" in prison. Which is very interestingly, apparently, completely wrong. Prison is apparently more like every inmate gets "the" TV dinner today and there's no sharing/trading allowed.)

Vegan diets are much more difficult than that. Pancakes might use eggs, which aren't vegan.

Someone's been watching too much Hollywood. That's not how food inside works. Your meal is selected for you and given to you in a container, depending on facility. Some prisons have a system similar to what you describe, but inmates' hands are not on the serving equipment and you're only saying "yes"/"no" to things. The facility has strict counts of calories to maintain and putting a serving spoon in the hand of an inmate is a good way to throw a budget away.

In almost all cases in county, the food is already prepared in a plastic container and if you refuse what is offered to you, you do not eat, which means even kosher folks go without for a couple days until the records "catch up."

Not true in Texas, one of the large prison systems in the world.

> trade a slice of bacon to your neighbor in exchange for a pancake

That's what I did when I spent a week in jail (as a vegetarian). I ate fine, but had I been strictly vegan it may have been a different story.

Or one who refuses to eat pork.

From a purely practical point of view, food is something it's very easy to hunger-strike over.

I'm willing to bet there have been a number of hunger strikes over a lack of kosher of halal foods. It wouldn't surprise me if there have been a few prisoners who have refused to eat animal products behind bars, even when the vegetarian products were not nutritionally sufficient.

I would be highly surprised if there were any sustained hunger strikes over lack of gourmet food.

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