What Martha Stewart thought about prison food

Martha Stewart is one of America's most important housewives, with a successful empire that includes home goods, cookbooks, television and more. Because Stewart is known for her simple, delicious recipes, experiencing federal prison food was a shock to her senses.

“We had the worst coffee you could imagine,” she recalls in “Martha,” the bombastic Netflix documentary about her life and career. “I wasn't a coffee drinker anyway, but boy, that coffee was terrible. And the milk was terrible – everything was terrible.”

In 2004, Stewart served five months at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia, after being found guilty of obstruction of justice in an insider trading case, followed by another five months of house arrest. Stewart's verdict was big news at the time – America's most famous housewife was serving federally. “Bringing me here is a joke,” Stewart wrote on the second day of her prison diary, “and everyone seems to know it.”

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“Very poor quality… Nothing pure”

By the second day of her incarceration, Martha Stewart was already worried about the food in federal prison. As she revealed in her Netflix documentary Martha, she wrote in her diary: “What worries me is the very poor quality of food and the unavailability of fresh food as there are a lot of starches and a lot of carbohydrates and a lot of fatty foods . “No in everything.” When Stewart acknowledged her coffee at 7 a.m. that day, she put “coffee” in cringe-worthy quotation marks.

Unfortunately, the extremely poor quality of food that Stewart described 20 years ago is more or less the status quo for prison food today. Prison meals are notoriously unhealthy, sometimes even spoiled, moldy or rotten – not to mention disgusting in taste. The food served to detainees is primarily designed to be cheap, meaning it's high in refined carbohydrates, a lot of sugar and sodium, and not much else.

Guards might respond that “Nutriloaf” contains many nutrients to ensure the health of inmates. The pale brown sludge, often made from whatever happens to be in the kitchen, is so unappetizing that it is sometimes served as punishment and leads to lawsuits for cruel and unusual treatment. However, courts generally found it constitutional to serve prisoners a dirt-flavored fruitcake from hell. We can only imagine how relieved Martha must have been when she returned to her kitchen.

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