You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love a Kosher Prison Meal
By Dianne Frazee-Walker
Tired of prison food? Claim Judaism.
Frequent flyers have been doing it for years. After all, kosher food tastes better.
Gentile prisoners have caught on to what they have to do to exchange mundane fare for a decadent spread. The new trend is to pass for Jewish to legally order a meal as close to gourmet as it gets behind bars.
Even prison gang members are now going Kosher so they can partake in private dining with other gang members and quietly make plans around the meal table. Kosher meal subscribers are seated together for religious reasons.
Pleading Judaism to swap out a tray of mediocre food for fresh tastier morsels is a no brainer as long as you are not an inmate incarcerated in a Florida prison. Despite Florida having the third largest prison system in the U.S., it is one of only 15 states that no longer offers inmates a kosher diet system wide.
Serving kosher food in prison to suitable inmates has become a court approved contemporary practice in most states, however, the latest boom in non-Jewish inmates ordering kosher cuisine has alerted prison authorities and spoiling chow time for some main line diners.
Michael D. Crews, upcoming secretary of the Department of Corrections is already expressing concerns about the expense of religious meals. He predicts the last staggering calculation of 4,417 inmate requests for special meals will multiply if the program is delivered. This prophecy has Senator Greg Evers, the Republican chairman of the Senate Justice Committee inquiring, “Is bread and water considered kosher? Just a thought. Just a thought.”
