‘Heals Whatever is Ailing You’: Health and Wellness Recipes in Prison Cookbooks

• In Event: Convict Criminology Panel #1: “Prison Experiences and Health”

Abstract

Food is a key feature of prison life and is often cited as adding significantly to the pains of imprisonment. To mitigate negative experiences with food, incarcerated individuals invent recipes made with ingredients from commissary and leftover meals. An emerging body of work has explored the symbolic and practical roles played by in-cell cooking, but no study has examined prison recipes from a healthworld perspective. Healthworld is a framework that investigates individuals’ perceptions of health and wellness, and their behavior aimed at achieving these states. The current study undertook a thematic content analysis of 22 prison cookbooks to demonstrate the ways in which recipe narratives construct healthworlds for individuals behind bars. Results suggest that recipes are part of a health and wellness strategy to address minor aches and pains, depression, and withdrawals, and to add extra protein or energy to the diet. Further, healthworlds are gendered, with women’s prison recipes providing emotional and bodily comfort, while men’s prison recipes seek to re-build the broken physical body. Lastly, healthworlds re-claim the body, resisting the total control of the Prison Industrial Complex. Narratives of health and wellness within prison cookbooks demonstrate agency and resistance, yet point to an urgent need for prison wellness programs, better access to healthy food, and processes that facilitate in-cell cooking.

Author

• A.E. Stearns, Coastal Carolina University