I just wanted to share this update. It is not good news.
Everything the Weston A. Price Foundation did to get the soy removed from the Illinois Department of Correction diet was set aside with a change of governor.
During the Republican leadership of Governor Rauner, the soy was removed from the prison diet. He did not get into bed with the Archer Daniel Midland soybean company located in Decatur, Illinois. We received real meat products. Not the best cuts from the market by far, but it was real beef, real pork, real turkey. The hamburgers may have been made from beef skull scrapings, but we did not mind it, for it was real meat. The pork sausages and patties had the pork fat in them—something required to make our bodies function right—a piece of knowledge passed to me by the Weston A. Price Foundation.
Return to Scraps and Sludge
Now we are back to the poultry scrapes mixed with soy bean sludge. This meat substitute has no animal fat in the products made—a fact that needs to be addressed. For the human brain and joints need the animal fats to work right, to maintain good health.
Then you have the debilitating effect of soy consumption on the male thyroid gland and libido. For soybean sludge is loaded with estrogen. Now we have a diet given to the prisoner that is detrimental to his health.
When this prisoner is released to society, his health care needs will still be a burden passed on to the Illinois taxpayer. Under the reign of Governor Pritzker, the soy substitutes have returned. No longer is any real meat found in the prisoner diet.
So, the Illinois men’s prisoner population becomes the Illinois “Lab Rats” again. Under the Eight Amendment to the U.S. Constitution the State, is required to provide its prisoner population with a diet to sustain health, not one that is detrimental in order to save money on dietary cost.
There are two points I want to raise for food for thought…
1.
Under this medical pandemic lockdown the prisoner body does not go to the dining hall. The State dietary tray is brought to the cell for all three meals each day. Each day around eighty percent of the trays are brought to the cell house and passed out to the prisoners. Many are refused and many more dumped into the trash. Every day I witness the meal brought to the cellhouse, only to be dumped into a garbage can, and then carried out to the trash dumpster. Oh, what a waste of taxpayer money! Most prisoners survive off the food bought at the prisoner commissary (the store).
Recently the prisoner body won the grievance on this issue. Week access to the commissary was returned to the prisoner body. It had migrated to once every four to five weeks. Why? Who knows the real reason. But the prisoner body won it back. They needed access to the commissary to sustain their health. For only the destitute prisoner without support from the outside world eats these state dietary trays.
2.
If the soy-based prisoner diet is so great, why does the Officers Kitchen and Dining Room prepare a special no-soy meal for staff each day? The IDOC rules state the officer and staff are to eat that same meal served to the prisoner population. The only difference is that each staff shift may get to make a choice from the lunch and supper meal, or the supper and breakfast meal served to the prisoner population. But special food is ordered for the Staff Kitchen from the Prisoner dietary budget every six months even though there is no separate dietary budget for the Staff Kitchen. Why? Because they are to be fed the same food as the prisoner body. But that is not the way things are done in the Illinois Department of Corrections. So if the soy food is not detrimental to the male prisoner’s health, why is it not fed to the female prisoners, or the IDOC staff? Just some food for thought with this dietary update.
Your writer in irons,
Larry “Rocky” Harris N-57672
