 Get the most out of every ingredient. That's the mark of a maker. The KitchenAid Blender Collection. Hi everyone and welcome to the British Library. I'm Melissa Thompson, guest co-director of this year's Food Season, alongside fellow guest co-director Angela Clutton and the founder and curator Polly Russell. Before I introduce the event, a massive thank you to our sponsors KitchenAid, without whom the Food Season wouldn't be possible, and also they've got a competition running to win an espresso machine, one of three espresso machines on their website, on the Food Season website, sorry. So go and have a look. Tonight's event encapsulates everything that the Food Season is about. Looking at food, its consumption and the politics around it. What do prisoners eat? Should we care about what prisoners eat? And if we should care, why? Hosting tonight is the brilliant Kimberly Wilson, a chartered psychologist and lecturer and author whose work looks at the role that food and lifestyle plays in our mental health. And she also runs a brilliant podcast, Stronger Minds, and past episodes have touched on issues that we'll be discussing tonight, and they're brilliant. I really thoroughly recommend them. Sophie Barton Hawkins has spent time inside as a prisoner and now campaigns for better conditions on the inside, using her experiences, and she'll also share her experiences, past experiences, and some of the ingenious ways, ingenious methods employed by prisoners to eat better, it's fascinating. And then Lucy Vincent, who founded the charity Food Behind Bars, which campaigns for better food in prisons, and they run cooking lessons. I've been into one of their prisons, I'm not one of their prisons, I haven't run it, but I've been into one of the prisons they work with, and the enthusiasm from the prisoners is incredible. And they also have kitchen gardens, and the first butchery offering classes to a butcher inside a prison, a woman's prison, two days a week, which I think is incredible. They do really vital work. So that's our panel, and I hope you enjoy. Thank you very much. Thank you, Melissa, and I would like to echo and extend our thanks also to Angela and Polly, not just for this fantastic food season, but also this particular opportunity, because just sitting in the green room, we all have a shared experience of how lonely it is to be advocating for improved conditions, improved food, and just generally for sympathy and empathy for prisons and prisoners. So thank you very much for giving us this platform and this opportunity. Thank you to all of you for giving up your time to join us and be part of this conversation. And it will be a conversation. We're going to run it like a little fireside chat, I think. Very cozy. A little cozy chat with a little bit of political manifesto and campaigning on the side. So hopefully you will have lots of questions because what the plan is is that we will talk for about an hour or so, and then we will open up the floor for your questions and comments. So do hold on to your questions until the end, and we can do those all at once. But I guess we shouldn't waste the opportunity that we've been given. But to perhaps set the scene in terms of food, I thought I would start by asking both of you to tell me about your comfort food. Shall I go first, so? Mine's chicken keev, actually. Someone's asked me this question quite recently, and it is chicken keev chips, which is sometimes controversial, because there's a lot of mash fans about. But, personally, mash is not my favourite way of using a potato. So it's got to be chips and peas. And why is that? I don't know. Do you know what it is? It's just childhood food, I guess. Easy kind of end of the week. I don't know, if I ever kind of have a long week and there's nothing in the house, if I ever crave two things, it's like chicken keev vibe or a bowl of pasta. That's kind of my other one, really. Sophie? This is a hard one. I think, for me, my comfort food would be probably tuna pasta mounts, because comfort food should be quick so that you can just sit down and eat it. So tuna, mayonnaise, cheese, sweet corn, onion, hot pasta, mix it all in, sit down with a fork, dig in, introduce it to my nieces who live with me and is now one of their favourite foods, too. And you're just warm and stodgy afterwards, it's good. Do you remember when the first time was you made it? Where was the kind of birth of this delicious dish? Probably when I moved out of home and it was about 18 or 19, and I just sit to my cupboard and I'm like, I don't have much food, what can I make? And I made that and it was good. And so it's been a staple ever since. And I think both of you touch on one of the features of food. So we all come to food, I think, from a different direction. We come to prison food from different positions. But what we know about food is its role in connection and place, in comfort and soothing and, of course, through nourishment. And certainly for me, the argument in favour of improving food in prisons and we'll speak to Sophie in a moment about the state of food in prisons just so that we are all on the same page on this, is that food, good quality food, nutritious, nutrient dense food, shouldn't be considered a luxury. Our bodies are made of food, our brains are made of food. If you want someone's brain to function well, if we're talking about, for example, rehabilitation and people learning to manage their impulse control and to be less aggressive and less violent, then you need brains that are working well. And in order to do that, you need brains that are well nourished. And so, even from a basic rehabilitation, recidivism, prison safety position, decent quality food should be high on the agenda. And I think certainly what I have come up against in the past when talking about prison food is the idea that prison's a holiday camp, isn't it? You've got your own room, your own TV and play stations. Holloway had a swimming pool. And so, if prison was so easy, actually, shouldn't food be part of the punishment? Shouldn't food be part of the reason that it's hard to be in prison and you don't want to come back? But so, if you could you tell us something about what the food in prison was like and what the effect of the food in prison was on you and your fellow prisoners? So, the food in prison is very basic. It's very carb-heavy, it's very beige. All my friends would test the fact that I don't eat a great deal of beige food and I think that stems back to being in prison. It's cheap, it's easy to make, you don't need any skill to be cooking in the kitchen and prison generally. It's not made of any thoughts or feelings or care. And you get your food and you go and sit in your cell, you're three foot from an open toilet and you eat your food on your own, not behind a door. Then you've got to wash up your plate in your sink that you've got to use to brush your teeth and wash your body in. So, it's not just the food, it's the environment around the consuming of the food that is such a big issue in prison for me and just the quality is so poor. You eat, you sleep, you get up, you go to work, you eat, you sleep, that's pretty much it. Within, you know, eat two hours, bang up straight after lunch, you're sleeping for two hours straight away. That's not normal. It's funny you say that because in March I worked in Brixton prison, we were doing a street food course there and we had one session in the morning, had one session in the afternoon and the afternoon one was after lunch and I was going round and knocking and getting our guys basically for the afternoon session and I was going to the cell and they were fast asleep. You know, and that was actually the first time I'd seen that. You know, I'd heard about prisoners saying to me, you know, we just have our lunch and we're banged up, there's nothing to do, so we just go back to sleep. But it was actually quite shocking for me. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, you know, and I felt awful dragging them out to a classroom when they were in a dark cell asleep after their lunch. Your whole routine is out of work, I think. Yeah. And I think just to pick up on the question about quality, one of the reasons the quality of food in prisons is so bad is because the budget for food in prisons is so low. So we know that in order to meet the UK's, the UK government's eat well guidance for a healthy meal. You need to spend about £5.99 on your ingredients for an adult. And the budget for a meal for a full day, so three meals a day in a prison is just under £2. And so we're spending a third of the budget that the government knows you need in order for someone to have a healthy, adequate diet on people who actually can't choose anything else to eat because it's different, right? If you're out in the world and you have an opportunity to choose the food for yourself, but this is food that's provided, institutional nutrition, whether it's prisons, schools or hospitals, is literally food for people who cannot choose for themselves what they're eating. And yet we're here with an incredibly low budget and therefore, by definition, food that is going to be lower quality, less nutritious. What has been your experience talking to prisons about budgets and any budget constraints on the quality of food? A lot of them don't know the budget. So we often do kind of food forums because precisely what you said, you know, prisoners lack choice and kind of autonomy around their diets. So we often have food forums where we kind of have food reps per wing basically. So we have an individual on each wing who kind of represent the views of their wing around food. So if there's something really good that they like, if there's something bad, et cetera. And the whole point is they should meet with the catering manager, the people actually cooking the food. And so some of those changes can be implemented. And the first one I ever did, it was really interesting because it just ended up being actually really kind of positive conversation between the kitchen team and the people actually eating the food who rarely ever got the opportunity to talk actually. Unless you work in the kitchen, which none of these men did, you know, they didn't have the opportunity to talk and actually obviously the prisoners came in and they were like, the food's rubbish and you should be doing this, you should be doing that. The portions are tiny. And the catering team came in and said, look, we have £2.10 to spend, you know, we have these restrictions. And actually it was really good because the men had no idea, you know, they didn't know what the government budget was. They didn't know what could be spent. And it was really positive in that sense because we kind of ended it, I suppose, with a greater shared understanding. But that doesn't, you know, if that hadn't happened, then, you know, that kind of conversation wouldn't have taken place, I suppose, yeah. What is the best way to improve the food in prisons? Big question. I always say there's two sides of it. I think from, I guess, my experience, there's this kind of big systematic changes, I suppose, which budget certainly is one of them. And I think someone the other day kind of did a calculation on the way inflation has risen over the years and particularly now, for you know, talking about costs of living and costs of ingredients. And he said basically this is what the prison food budget should be, you know, and it was edging on £3. I mean, still that's, you know, relatively low compared to what you just said around the £5. So certainly budgets, I suppose, is a huge thing. Prison kitchens, they work with one supplier, that's a centralised approach and that is national across the board. So you could go to a prison kitchen in the north-east of England, you could go to a prison kitchen in London and they're all accessing the same ingredients from the same supplier. You know, there are benefits to that. I'm trying to be balanced here. There are benefits to that. The negatives of that is that catering teams can't work kind of seasonally or locally, ethically, you know, all of those things that we know are important in kind of good food and good diet. And then I guess that the third big kind of systematic thing really is, and Sophie, you touched on this, really is the logistics of prison and the environment. And actually, if I'm being honest, I think that probably is the one that I see play out the most. Yeah, sometimes just the journey from the oven to the plate can be this long journey, it can be hours long, you know, it can be sat on a hot trolley for 20 minutes, it can be sat under a light for 10 minutes while everyone's getting unlocked and then it's gone cold. And that journey can have a much bigger impact on that plate of food. Cos sometimes I see it coming out the oven and it looks all right. And then I go down to the wing and I'm like, what? So that journey has a real impact. And then I guess the second side of things, I guess more where we come in as a charity is there are changes that can be done. I think there are improvements that can be made as it is at the moment in terms of getting more variety onto prison menus, healthier dishes and just thinking a bit more creatively and thoughtfully most of the time, just thinking a little bit more about, yeah, who's eating that meal and what we can do to make it better. So there's certainly stuff that can be done as it is now, but I suppose thinking big for kind of true change to happen, I think, you know, those are the key things that would need to, yeah, change, yeah. And so thinking big on a systematic and policy and campaign level, but thinking small on an individual cell level, what Sophie are the things that you have seen or have done yourself, seen prisoners do to improve the quality of the food that they're eating or the variety, what are the creative means of improving an in-cell diet? I mean, prisoners are very, very resourceful. We've got lots of time to think about what we can do with things that maybe isn't their purpose. So something that I did and then it quickly cottoned on amongst other people in the prison was we get a canteen bag so you can order tuck shop basically. You get this once a week and it comes in a big C3 plastic bag and you get this normally on Friday. And so we were keeping these bags aside. We managed to tap up some people in the gardens, filled up some little pots of compost for us and then we were getting our very overripe tomatoes that came on our salads, popping the seeds out of a single bit of kitchen roll leaving the window to dry off, popping them in a plant pot, putting the plastic bag around them and we were growing tomato plants in ourselves because that was the only way we could guarantee we wouldn't get anything fresh. The fruit that we got was never fresh. The only thing we could really do with it was, well... Make hooch. Make hooch. I'm not going to beat around this. Make hooch. I'm not going to beat around this. Yeah, we used to ferment it. Right, so if you'd be honest. We used to make hooch with the fruit because it was just way too overripe to be eating. So the only way we could really supplement our diet was by trying to grow stuff and we were not allowed to do it, but Prysynosa did turn a blind eye because we weren't harming anybody. And then on the open wing, we could request salad boxes, so a group of us got together and one person would request chopped onions from the kitchen, one would request tomatoes, somebody else would request peppers and we had a hot grill, like a hot plate to make toasted sandwiches with the sandwiches we meant to be having for our lunches. And we just used a hot grill to fry up all these bits of veggies that we got and we just add them to noodles or chickpeas or whatever we had just to try and bulk it out and make it a bit more fresh for us. There are lots of Instagram accounts of serving prisoners showing them what they're doing to supplement their own meals. So cooking food in kettles, trying to, like, washing off buying the cooked chicken curry or something, rinsing it off and making something else with it to supplement the food that they're getting. And it strikes me, right, you're in prison. You've managed to smuggle in an illegal phone. And the thing that you're most outraged by is the quality of the food and that's what you're putting on your Instagram account. Like, it says something to me that that's the case. And just before my little raised eyebrow about the contracting is, I think as with so many of the services that have been privatised in terms of our public provision, I suspect very strongly that one of the big considerations for the company who have received these lucrative government contracts is the ability to make as much profit as possible from that government contract. And so, as soon as you make a public service, a private investment or a private endeavour, you automatically have a conflict between the need to provide for the people you're supposed to be looking after and your need to generate profit for your shareholders. And so, I suspect that there is little incentive for the big contractor who has the contract for, and it's, I think it's one contractor, has the contract for prison catering in the UK, to spend more money because the more money spent on improving the quality of the nutrition in prisons is less money for the bottom line for shareholders. Cost and efficiency. My supposition. Anybody have any thoughts or insight? Well, I get frustrated because part of what we do and it was not a strategy with the charity whatsoever. It was just I kept going to prisons and coming across unused or underused facilities. So, whether that was a bakery in a prison kitchen, a butchery, we've just taken on a butchery, and a kitchen garden. Again, all three of those, we're working with a bakery in a prison up north and a kitchen garden. And all three of those came about through complete chance. It was by me being in the prison and noticing that there were these incredible facilities that were not fully being utilized and above that, they provided employment and training for the people working in them. So it was a win-win. And actually, the more I looked into it, you know, 20 years ago, the prison system used to be pretty self-sufficient when it came to food. You know, it wasn't a centralized contract and they were growing their own food and kind of sourcing their own meat and baking their own bread and things like that. And slowly that has gone and it's worth noting that there are prisons that still do that, you know, often the smaller prisons. And as I say, it's something that we're trying to bring back in because often the facilities are there, you know, and we saw a bakery the other day in a prison. It was being used as a space to pack sandwiches. You know, it's just like all this amazing equipment that, you know, I know bakers on the outside. I thought you'd kill for this. And, you know, it was being used to kind of pack lunches. But it's such a wasted opportunity, particularly in terms of, as you say, rehabilitation skills training, giving people the skills that would help them to get into work, which we have some of the highest recidivism rates in Europe. More people come back, I think 70% within five years, come back to prison and are re-arrested. And it's usually because there's very little to go out to or you've gone out with very little. One of the things that in general nutrition and I think and speak a lot about the importance of food as a way of coming together and companionship and how sharing food with someone is often a sign of trust. You know, I'm comfortable with you if I can eat in front of you. It's that kind of thing. But in families, for example, we think about the importance of a communal table coming together, this shared space, because it's a time when your stress levels come down, you're less distracted, food helps you to feel calm and you have an opportunity to speak and commune and come together. And so that commensality is understood psychologically to be quite important in human psychology and sociality, but also just in well-being. And what you were saying earlier on, Sophie, about people being in their cells on their own, a few yards from a toilet. Rymwn. Do you have any thoughts on the opportunity? What would it be like to have a shared table in a prison dining hall, for example, on the end of a wing? I think it would be a very good thing for prisons to do. If the only time you're interacting with other prisoners, other people that you're incarcerated with, is in a workplace where you're not allowed to talk, or in an education setting where you're not allowed to talk, then there is no space for normal conversations to happen. And so maybe if you had a communal space, that would reduce prison violence because people are sitting down and chatting rather than mixed messages being spread or, you know, window-wariaring, we called it. So if your window-wariaring is shouting from window to window or passing notes on their lines, swinging it down. So having that communal space, you'd have a much more open area for conversation. The meal becomes a shared experience. And maybe they don't want people eating together. They don't want a load of people being in a room saying, this food is shit. Because you've got, you know, 40 angry people eating crap food. I think as well, it's so interesting what you say about how communal dining would be something that would reduce violence. And I agree with you on that, but the prison service would see it as something that it would be a point in day 100 people together around a table. Well, that's, you know, a pinch point. And that's why communal dining doesn't exist in prison because staffing, it's no staffing to kind of facilitate that. I guess I'm thinking, because I worked in Holloway for a number of years. Some years. And so the end of the wing, it was a kind of end of the wing. And there was a kind of, it was, again, an unused big space. I had one sofa and a broken TV that nobody ever used. It's where the breakfast packs were left in the morning just for people to kind of maybe have a piece of toast or something. And, you know, I can understand the safety risks and the safe, but there's also something about understanding that prisoners are people too and that when you show someone basic respect, they're much more likely to respond to that. And we value being respected. And we're much more likely to kind of behave than if not. I think going back to the purpose of prison, prison in itself is punishment. It's not there to give you further punishment once you're in prison. And there's so many things within the prison system that are purely there to be punitive. You know, it's not about progression. And the lack of choice around food, so you choose your food two weeks in advance. So I don't know what you want to eat next Friday, but half you don't know what you want to eat next Friday, but in prison you have to know. So it's stripping everything away. And food just shows up so hugely, so vividly in prison of how much you don't have any control over anything. And yeah, it's just another way to punish people by not letting you sit with your peers to eat, not letting you have choice, giving you your breakfast pack the night before. You know, it's that kind of thing. I think it like, as well, instills bad habits in people. Sometimes quite odd habits, like when I speak to people in prison, and the whole thing of lunch is served at half 11, dinner is served at half 4, you know, you're eating at weird times, the food is served in a strange way, you're eating next to your toilet in your cell, and then all the other weird experiences are prison. You know, even the kettle cooking, you know, even people opening a can with a pair of nail clippers. You know, none of it's normal. And yet you kind of expect someone to come out and then just go on and lead a normal life. And it's like, you know, some people have been in prison for a long time and they've been living like that. Fundamentally, you change as a person. You know, I don't think we can expect people to come out and have a great relationship with food and, you know, go back to kind of, you might not completely go back to communal dining. Or I don't know, it's, I think you can pick up very odd habits that aren't, isn't, through no fault of your own, that, you know, aren't normal and don't encourage, you know, good relationship with food, really. I think that's a really good point that actually through food, and, you know, there are lots of other things we could be thinking about, but, you know, this is where we are. But food would be an opportunity to help instill good habits in the prison environment. I remember when I was working, there was, it wasn't the client of mine, it was, I ran a team and someone was reporting back. Someone had never eaten at a table before. And it was such a profound experience that they said, well, when I get out of prison, I'm going to buy a table and me and my daughter are going to eat a table together. And that was something that wouldn't have happened, if not for prison, but that was a very particular setting at a very particular time. So there's an opportunity for prisons to help instill good habits that would be beneficial if we could be a bit, I think, more open and creative about it. I mean, prison is an opportunity. I think you've got a captive audience. Do you know what I mean? You kind of have, you know, you have a captive audience and that opportunity is being missed. And I think what you touched upon is, you know, there are lots of different types of people in prison and I hate to kind of blanket rule at all, but a lot of people in prison are coming in with an unhealthy relationship with food through whatever reason, upbringing, addiction issues, et cetera. Or they might just not, you know, healthy eating might not have played a big part of their life before. And we're working in a young offenders prison at the moment, you know, 17, 18-year-old men. And they're not familiar with particular ingredients and so it is an opportunity and what's a shame is that they come in and then that almost kind of gets even worse because there's not that opportunity to kind of build that relationship. And, you know, I kind of see that quite a lot, actually. Yeah. You mentioned young offenders and earlier on we touched on aggression and violence and I think some of you, if you follow me or listen to the podcast, you will have heard about the prison studies and it's one of the things that I bang on about relentlessly. So I'll do it again here since I have been here with me and for the audience at home. But again, these studies demonstrate that food has an opportunity to improve conditions not just for prisoners, but also for prison staff and for people on the outside once prisoners are released. But the prison studies are a series of randomised control trials. So what we consider the gold standard when looking at causality in clinical research. And they stretch back to 1997, so, you know, nearly 30 years. And what's really interesting about the prison studies but what's really interesting about them is that often when you do a clinical trial in a different location, you get quite different results. You know, you might get a small effect over here but a larger effect over there and you have to make, you have to work out whether that's about the particular methodology you've used or the particular population you have, the particular expectations of the researchers. These studies are remarkable in the consistency of the effect that they demonstrate. And so in these four different locations, the US, the UK, the Netherlands and Singapore, improving nutritional status in this situation through supplementation, so that you can do a placebo. You can't really placebo a whole meal often. But improving nutritional status of prisoners through supplementation reduced objective incidents of violence by 30%. And what's really interesting about that is not just how remarkably consistent that outcome is, but what's really remarkable about that is that if I were Kim Pharmaceuticals and I were going to the government or the FDA or NICE or whomever and I said, I have a drug, I have a pill that is going to help to make your prison safer because they help people to manage their impulses. They make people less violent and they make them less aggressive and they do it by a whopping 30%. I would be a rich woman. I would be off by myself in the Bahamas. So, we know and we have clinical evidence. And in fact, if it were a drug, I would only need one or two trials demonstrating positive effect because you ignore the ones that show negative effect when you're putting a drug on the market. So, we have an effective, cheap, accessible, low risk intervention. So, the only side effects of nutrients is that you might get a bit healthier on nothing. Intervention that could materially improve the wellbeing of offenders and prisoners, the staffing because violent prisons are not nice places for people to work and they tend to leave and there's a very high throughput and a very high turnover of staff and morale gets very low and then the qualified experienced people leave and the unqualified younger people come in and they can manage it very well and prisons become more dangerous as a consequence. Why do you think we're not doing it? That's hard to say. Let's have a little speculate. What are your thoughts as to why, whether it's through supplementation or improvements in the diet, the government isn't doing anything about this opportunity to improve outcomes? I think it's a thorny issue and I think part of the reason I got involved in prison food is that I felt frustrated. Well, I came across the subject and I realised that no one was talking about it and there was a lack of accurate information out there on what it was actually like to eat in prison and there was certainly a lack of information that came from prisoners or ex-prisoners themselves. The information was from the media or from inspectors and things like that and so, yeah, I started talking about prison food and I guess that was me saying, well, there's no voice here, there's no one representing this issue and the only reason I could imagine that no one was representing the issue is that, not that people didn't care, but it existed, prison food doesn't touch most of our lives in the way that perhaps school or hospital food would, other institutional settings, we've all been to school or we have children that go to school, we might have been to hospital, we might have family been to hospital, so we almost have experiences of those other settings whereas most people will never experience or know what the food is like in prison and I think that makes it much easier to exist under the radar and for people to ignore it, first and foremost. And I guess the other reason is changing prison foods, I suppose what I've learnt is a monumental task. It's not as simple as just giving a few new recipes to the catering manager, we're talking about changing a culture and a mindset and a way of doing things and educating a population and that is a monumental task, it's not easy and it would take effort, I mean supplementing would be a lot easier, but I don't know, I don't know what people... I raise an eyebrow about the... I think you're right, but I raise an eyebrow at the monumental task bit because I think what COVID has demonstrated to us is that where the government does have a sense of the urgency and the need, we can implement policy very quickly, we can get things moving, we can have people staying in their homes, we can change supply lines, we can have vaccines distributed across the country, where there's will... There's a way. There's a way. Did you have any thoughts on that area? I think... I know... I know... I know the answer! I know the answer, no, no. I know that the media perception of prisoners is not great and I think if they were to improve prison food, which is definitely something that 100% needs to be happening, I think the media backlash off the back of that because people have got no idea what the baseline is, it's interesting you were saying it's £2.10 a day now when I was in prison in 2007, 2010, it was £1.90, so it's got a 20p essentially in 12 to 15 years. So people don't quite recognise what the baseline is and as you were saying, TVs in south and play stations, well, yeah, they're babysitters basically, that reduces staff costs. So that has already caused enough uproar. So by not having a publicised baseline of, actually this is what prison food looks like, people will just be like, oh, they're giving prisoners more money, why are they doing this? Because generally that is how the press treat prisoners and the whole need of improving prison food, the whole message I think would just get lost, unfortunately. I think there's an argument to say that until public perception changes, prison food can't change, it's something I've said a few times over the years because it does feel like that a little bit. It feels like the risk might be too great for the government, and it all ends up in the Daily Mail and I just, yeah, I don't know. It's very interesting, I think you're right, but it's the way that nobody cares about prisoners or prison food or the plight of prisoners until election time. And suddenly when there's an election coming up in the next six months or so, we're getting tough on crime, we're increasing prison sentences, we're making things safer for hardworking people, but for the rest of the time is absolutely no interest and so there's this way in which, and I think about prison and prisoners as the unconscious of society. It's the place that we like to push the things that we don't like to think about, it's the place that we want to project all of our own meanness and our worst qualities, at least I'm not like them, we put it over there somewhere, and it allows us to forget about it and not think about it, not think about prisons, not think about prisoners. And I think the government and the media use this because it's a great kind of scarecrow to drag out every time there's an election to say, oh, here's these terrible people, they're not like you, they want to hurt you. And what that means is that public opinion can't change if it is in the service of politicians for public opinion to stay where it is. I think people don't realise that there's a huge variety of individuals in prison and I feel incredibly lucky to do the job I do every day because it's a very grounding experience really to go into a prison and realise actually, I think anyone could end up here, you know, and I do, I meet such a variety of people for all sorts of reasons who have ended up in prison and there's no getting away from the fact that they have done something to receive that sentence, but the way I see it is they're all in prison, you know, that's happened and they're here and it's not a case of lock the door and forget about them. It's like, what do we do with them now? And I think for most of the public, the journey ends when they go to prison basically, I think. And that's kind of where the thinking hasn't really evolved, I suppose, yeah, over time. And my cynical side is really coming out. I'm usually very optimistic. I'll get the conspiracy theories out. The final thing is just that, you know, this I think generally is first a negative view that the public has of prisoners. Prisoners tend to be the people who get caught and can't afford to pay in a very expensive lawyer. You know, there are very prominent, wealthy and royal people who have done quite serious crimes, but have managed to avoid having a day in court. So it's a big, maybe we get back to the... Yeah. So what do you think would be the quickest, easiest thing to change if you're understanding from the inside the difficulty of, you know, getting food to prisoners, getting food that prisoners like? What would be an effective best bang for your buck intervention, do you think? I think create your own ecosystem if you like in prison, have prisoners growing vegetables, chickens, lay and eggs, because then the nutrition side is covered. You can get your protein from suppliers, you can get your chicken and, you know, saw your toe through that kind of stuff. Get that from suppliers and have everything else come in. It's seasonal, it's not going to be full of chemicals, it's not going to be treated with stuff to make it last longer in the fridge. And I think that's going to be the quickest way because prisons have got a lot of green space. I think it's not being used. Every prison I've been in has got a massive gardens team, massive greenhouses, and literally what they do is grow flowers. And the only reason they grow flowers is not for the prison to look nice for the prisoners, it's not for us to enjoy. We don't sit outside, you don't get that opportunity, you don't get that freedom. So convert that space and make it something to produce food and teach people the relationship with food, because as you've mentioned, people have got no relationship with food. If you live in a chaotic life, food is not your focal point on the outside. So get them in prison, teach them growing food, where food comes from, like the life of the prisoners. The food that you're eating makes them healthier when they get out, they can continue that. Because people don't have these skills and that'll be the easiest way to improve the food for everybody in each prison. And then, you know, if you've got a wing or you know what people will eat so you know how many people you've got, how many potatoes you need to be growing, you can control that and you can process food and freeze it and then you've got it in the kitchens ready. I think that'll be the easiest way because Holloway used to have award-winning gardens. You're absolutely right and flowers, beautiful flowers and I think towards the end of my time there, they had chickens. I think they were called the jailbirds. And it strikes me that people would be very keen to learn how to grow vegetables and grow food and take care. I mean, it was considered a privilege to be able to look after chickens and people were very, very keen to kind of get on to that course. Do you think switching from flowers to food would be a popular option? I think so because there's something in it for the prisoners then because there's nothing in it growing flowers. I don't know about yourself, you don't sit in a vase because you can't have vases. I think it would make a massive difference. I think anything to do with food in prison is so popular as well, isn't it? Any opportunities to get on to food is so popular as well, isn't it? Any opportunities to get stuck in in a kitchen? It gives you ownership, that you have ownership of nothing. Everything is out of your control in prison. Even basics like having to go and ask for toilet roll. You ask your wing officer, I need some more loo roll. You don't have control over anything to be able to have control over something and have an ownership of something would be so powerful and you're giving that person back and that would be amazing. But I think, thank you, that's really lovely and I know you're a keen allotmenter as well. Is that right? But as you're talking, it just strikes me that that thing, even when you're growing kind of a little crest, even in school where you put crest in a little egg shell and you've got a little crest head, but being able to see that progression and having a direct contact with something that is growing and living and thriving and you are taking care of and tending can be deeply soothing as well, I think. I mean, tell me about your allotment and what you get from it. So I've got allotment. It's not just an allotment, so it is it. More than that. Here's my space. So I've got allotment and for me being able to go stuff in the ground and grow it is amazing. My kitchen table at home currently is full of broad beans and tomatoes and all sorts of stuff that's getting ready to go outside and it's just having that relationship with nature which is something you don't have in prison because you spend forever indoors. I mean you probably walk a thousand steps a day if you're lucky. So actually being able to be outside getting the microbes in the soil, being hands on because you're not hands on with anything in prison. And an allotment or just generally having a garden and having outside space that you can potter in does massively quiet the mind and in prison you've got nowhere quiet in the mind. You can't really do hobbies and you're so easily because you can't get the stuff in to do it. So I think having that space is really important and for me my allotment is a place for my friends to come a place for my nieces to come with me and then we just cook stuff up that we've grown and we grow weird stuff and I flavour gin and I make wine so I've got my own little like self-sufficiency going on just from having the allotment which was never the planned outcome but that's what has happened from it. So nice. Lucy have you seen with your projects an impact on the mental health of the people or the well-being? Yeah definitely. I mean the kitchen garden is one and then I was thinking because we're about to bring in some bees to prison which I was a bit... I was a bit sceptical about before I thought it was going to be a health and safety red tape nightmare but apparently not and also I didn't know how it was going to go again this is the young offenders prison and I thought how is this going to be popular and honestly like they're so excited because I think it's just caring for something I know it's a bee but caring for something depending to it and seeing a result at the end of it you know I think for them the idea of getting honey at the end of it is the exciting part of it so I think that journey particularly and yeah mental health wise and that kind of the therapy that you get from that so I would say our kitchen garden project 100% is a no brainer and some people who are working on the grounds there you speak to them and they're like they're just doing it for a job to get out of their cell and in my opinion that is a 100% legitimate excuse to do that job you know you don't have to want to be a gardener but you know working five days a week out kind of on the grounds I think it's hugely beneficial and then yeah I suppose with our other projects I mean we do some food education but we've also kind of introduced some new recipes onto menus at a prison a men's prison up north which has been really interesting and it's been a really interesting kind of process for us to understand yeah it's the first time we've actually put our own dishes onto the menu and it's been a really interesting process of looking at what people are picking what's can you give an example of what this is yeah well we went quite now my development chef she's amazing in the audience and she did all the recipes and both her and I because it was the first time we were doing it we went quite ambitious you know we did 60% kind of plant based recipes and it has some amazing stuff on there and using different ingredients and actually when we were looking at it and there's five choices a day so I mean you have our choice and then you might have a chicken curry and lasagna and things like that and actually if our choice, if our gorgeous Brazilian feshwada with salsa was next to a chicken curry and lasagna it would get eclipsed by the chicken curry on the lasagna and I thought it's really been a good process in thinking about what do people want from prison food and it's much more than it just being a source of nutrition I think and it's that comfort element and that familiarity and we're doing another kind of cycle of recipes at the moment and we've changed tact slightly I mean we have had some really popular dishes and particularly with the vegetarians and vegans who were often a really they often get a bit of a bad time of it on the prison menus to be honest because the vegan options are a little uninspiring so it's been great for that but I think we've changed tact slightly and started thinking about food in a more emotional way and it's a bit of it I suppose and you know on a Friday people do want a chicken curry you know I certainly do and just thinking about it in a slightly different way I suppose so yeah I think food education and like you say any opportunity to get stuck in with food in prison is hugely popular it's a release I think and even just working with different ingredients I mean we did a baking project in a prison at Christmas we kind of got in some managed to get some amazing donations and ingredients and worked with some incredible suppliers and local suppliers and even just working with like some beautiful cheese you know and everyone just went mad they were like real cheese you know they're real cheese and yeah I think even just that it can create a really lasting impact on someone within that environment you know yeah because we remember food experience we remember them they sit I mean they literally become part of us and you spoke about the idea of the the young offenders caring for the bees and it brought to mind the idea of care and kind of colloquially we're all well versed with the idea that we often show people that we care through food you know whether we're cooking for you or whether it's a comfort food whether I've made you a bowl of soup when you're ill we understand that through food conveys something else food has meaning it says something about how I feel about you you know will I give you my last rolo that kind of thing and and so that always makes me think about the meaning that is received when a prisoner gets handed a kind of congealed cold uncared for meal at the end of the day you know does it feel like a slap in the face does it really feel like actually nobody really cares about you there were certain foods that everybody ate and normally it was the foods that were cooked by the foreign national prisoners because food within their community was a communal thing so the curries we had cooked by a lady called Mrs Patel I remember her name because her food was amazing so there are really strong memories around decent food but getting that cold congealed mess beige burnt boring on a daily basis you just it just strips away anything you're just eating purely because you need to put food in your body and out of boredom not because you want to be doing it I think it almost makes subjects of prison food a bit more complicated because an example is we work with Brickston prison and the catering manager there, Felix he's a legend, the best catering manager in the country, he's actually just been shortlisted for the best catering manager of the year award and Brickston's being kind of voted if you look at the prisoner surveys it comes out top in terms of food satisfaction and when I first met Felix a few years ago I was like what is this guy doing that's different and it felt different, his kitchen felt different it was such a positive environment there was a huge amount of respect the men were treated very professionally it was like a restaurant kitchen basically and actually when you read his menu it didn't look that dissimilar to another prison menu some dishes I saw were a little bit more interesting varied but a lot of it seemed quite similar the end product was very very very different and it was honestly just down to a catering manager who cared very deeply about that plate of food and about the people eating it and he shows that care and love kind of every day really and I know it's emotional and that was the difference to me in a sense it makes things harder certainly makes our job harder because I look at someone like Felix and I was like okay how can we bottle you and put you here and actually I don't think you can do that because I think that's him as a person that is just who he is and how he kind of shows his love and respect but my god it really does show in that end plate of food and actually if you speak to anyone at Brixton they are very positive about the foods especially people who've been to other prisons they can really see the difference What have you found is the most frustrating barrier in any part of your conversation about improving prison food? Yeah I think I get told a lot that prisoners only want junk food and that really annoys me I think there's a and it's really difficult because again when I was at Brixton the other week I was making everyone in my little group a cup of tea in the morning and they were like nine sugars four sugars I was like you guys have so much sugar he's cut down your sugar so on the one hand I understand there are people in prison with the poor relationship with diet I don't think prison helps that you know but on the other hand you can't tarnish everyone with the same brush and yeah I've been told that so many times over the years you know it comes from the public it comes from people within the system and for me that's a problem because if you think that everyone in this system only wants bad food you're only going to kind of give them bad food I suppose you're not going to do anything to improve that and personally my experiences have been not that people want bad food it's that they might have never experienced healthier food or different ingredients and actually the minute you add some context and educate them and introduce them to it of course you know they want it of course they want to try it it's just that they haven't before you know so that frustrates me and I do think it kind of holds things back sometimes that mindset I think yeah Have you encountered that you're nodding along so if you want to defeat that just agreeing with what Lucy was saying there yeah it's very frustrating What has been because I know you not necessarily around food but you do work in prisons around restorative justice what has been for you the most frustrating encounter either when you talk about your work or when you're trying to go back into prisons and meet with people what do you come up against I mean I've had it I've had it quite easy getting back into prisons the prison governor of HNP Downview said to me the gates always open and I thought well it would be nice if you told me that 12 years ago you know but yeah so I've been very fortunate but the thing that I find so frustrating is the lack of progression everything is still the same as it was all those years ago and it's almost like stepping back into that I mean the only differences now is there's mobile phones in prison which I wasn't and Instagram exists so you can now find out more about prison so there's more connection to the outside world, the inside world, not always positive but that's there but it's the wasted space HNP Downview has got an astroturf pitch you're not allowed to use it as a prisoner just for staff you've got an entire picture, if you want people to be healthy you need to be making them exercise you can't go to the gym if you've been in trouble it's these things again it's still more punitive measures and just that whole exercise healthy eating, the whole mind needs to massively shift so the stuff that actually we're told is a basic health needs that we should all be doing every day are in some cases used as privileges if you're naughty you can't go down to the gym you can't get it whereas if you're naughty you've probably got some undynau of mental health conditions doing something in the gym or exercising or eating healthily would control that behaviour I think that's a good point because it's something I see a lot and the naughtiest people often are the people who leave the wing the least basically so they have the least access to education and they're probably the people that need it the most and they are the people that just get worse the environment just kind of makes them worse and takes its toll on them and that's really frustrating completely backward I think as well on top of that you're right prisons move incredibly slow and Covid I think has pushed things backwards and I think we're coming out of that and I think there's some good stuff going on but also there's an acceptance of I guess a new regime and during Covid just to let you know it's kind of 23 hour bang up kind of across the prison estate and less time out of cell less association time and that meant that violence kind of went down because people are getting together less but mental health is now at kind of record levels in prison but it's very difficult it's like you said if violence has gone down in prisons the staff are like yay! Violence has gone down but self harm has gone up Exactly but because the violence has gone down it's kind of fully opened up again and there's a lot of staff that have started during Covid who don't know what the prison system was like before when there was kind of free flow in association and things like that So are the regimes still on lockdown? No so they've been kind of there's different stages and they're slowly going back to normal That wasn't my terminology that's the terminology in prison is regime not timetable but regime sorry when it's different at each prison and if there is an outbreak it kind of might go back for a bit but yeah things have opened up but yeah sometimes in a bit reduced way So let's flip that question because we're getting towards the end of our kind of main time and what are the things that make you hopeful what are the signs of optimism what makes it worth going in? For me the main sign of optimism is the food behind bars project at first off because that is such a massive step I mean we talk about food a lot generally in life but in terms of prison it's just such a huge huge step and seeing more charities haven't accessed I mean there are cuts across a border prison like arts, creative stuff not happening, there's no funding for it anymore there's no money coming in for it so seeing the ability for charities to adapt to what's going on and provide stuff that the prisons are not providing because they can't prison governors want to do more than what they are doing but their hands are tied they've got more red tape than anybody else to navigate so things for hope for me are definitely the fact that more charities have more of an impact in prisons more of a footprint that's last and longest when the charities step back these activities can still continue in a different way and I see this when I go in I find out about new charities that are set up new charities run different courses in the prison and that can only benefit the people in there and they're not coming at it from the wrong agenda they're doing it from the right place and that's the best place to start Well I'm an eternal optimist even sometimes it's hard but I I think as awful in a place prison is there are pockets of joy and that's kind of why I continue doing what I'm doing because I do see those kind of pockets of joy I suppose I mean from my perspective I think particularly since setting up the charity the response from prisons and not just the prisoners obviously the prisoners want better foods so we get a good response there but I mean from the decision makers and the prison staff particularly governors who are thinking and do want the best for their prison you know there's a demand there and people want this and for me that's hugely positive it was kind of why I set up the charities because I felt that there was a demand and actually over the years that's kind of only got got greater so I think people want this and I think for me that's that's what keeps me going and yeah the optimism I think for me comes from working with the people that we work with really and seeing an impact and seeing that need and why we're doing what we're doing and as I say I think the final thing to add and Felix is a great example of that every prison is very different and there's problems across the board but there's also kind of amazing greatness happening across the board as well and whenever I come across something like that in prison I'm like and also as well it makes you realise that it can be done you know I think it can be done because we can be served if it's being done in one place it can be done elsewhere in my opinion so yeah I think that note of optimism is I had a particularly difficult time so maybe my difficulty with the particular regime that I was you're scarred by it so that's a very helpful balancing point I wondered so I did say that this was going to be a lovely cosy chat but also a political manifesto is there something that you would want to hear we've got 300 people at home maybe this will get out even further we don't know who's watching but is there something either a myth you would like to dispel or a fact that you would like people to know a truth that you would like people to understand about the work that you do or your experience in this area hmm well I mean I didn't prep them I'll give you a moment to be honest it almost goes back to the prisoners wanting junk food thing and also the the kind of prisoners about people narrative as well which I understand is a difficult one for some people to get their head around I think we have quite a black and white view in this country of good and bad whereas for me it's a lot more complicated than that and I think it would be worth people understanding that a little bit more and obviously I'm lucky to get to go into prisons and so that comes, I see that it's very difficult for the public when we have a mainstream media that does encourage that narrative of good and bad so I think it is hard for the public to kind of I don't know not get my point across but you know what I mean I think it's just understanding just having some understanding and empathy about other people's situations I suppose is I think I often think we like to think that where we are through our own kind of tenacity and intellect and hard work but it's very when you hear people's stories it's very much there by the grace of God go I you got lucky very often or you were born to the right parents or you were born in the right place or you got in with the right group of friends that meant you didn't go down a different path but I think we're much closer and I think as well the final thing is that recently one of these people was going to come out of society and I remember when I first started this I spoke to a prison governor he was amazing and he put it in context to me it's like these people are going to come out they're going to live in our communities they could be your neighbour what kind of state do you want them to be in when they come out and if you want them to come out what do we need to do while they're in prison to make sure of that and I think we lose sight of that journey a little bit in everyday life I think mine's just going to heart back to the imprisonment itself as a punishment there doesn't need to be further deprivation liberties when you're in prison and as Lucy said if you want people to be well rounded members of society going back into society you've got to give them that skill set in prison you've got the best opportunity the best time to give people a routine where they're going to bed at a normal time and getting up at a normal time and having a day filled with meaningful activity two hours in the morning of doing something to our bang up over lunch and two hours for something in the afternoon that is not a normal routine and so we need to fill that time more effectively get more stuff happening within prisons to give people the knowledge they need when they get out they can just settle into society as a normal person because not everyone will have the opportunity to be an open prisoner and get used to that routine before they're released quite often people would just be you know there you go 50 quid in the bus pass or travel card you're on your way and they've not learnt anything in prison I think particularly over COVID it's just been really difficult full stop for prisoners to be given any any information and any support at all so you've got a captive audience in prison make it work it's more cost effective you know speculate to accumulate spend the money now you're not going to be spending it on re-arresting people re-arresting people taking up spaces in police cells access in mental health units in the community you can stop that in prison so there's not going to happen again for that person thank you thank you both very much thank you Sophie, thank you Lucy thank all of you for listening I'm now going to open up the floor for some questions I do have one note on that, which is we do have an audience at home so please wait for the mic to arrive because if you start speaking the people at home can't hear the question so that is the only thing but happy to take your questions go wild this lady here hi, so thank you for the talk and please excuse my ignorance I've got two questions and maybe one for Sophie and one for Lucy if I may one is the social aspect of it what happens do you guys get meals around the celebration times and how does that work on the gap do you get to sit around the table at those times and the second one is can you speak a little bit more about the the structure between the training courses and feeding the prison population how come it doesn't join up your question so if I take the celebration question so interestingly in prison quite a lot of people change religion because the food is better during Ramadan because it just is but again I remember seeing women running across and getting their kettle pots of food and going straight back to their sale so there is no celebrations that happen Christmas dinner in your sale you get a bar of chocolate though from the chaplaincy team but again you're given the food there is no communal eating around that time normally because any religious celebration is normally spent with your family with your community, with your peers so it's a very emotional time for a lot of people so again emotions can be quite heightened not always in the best way so I think that's again just a safety aspect of no you can't celebrate this New Year's Eve is great we all run around with toilet paper but actually sitting down for meals doesn't happen because one of the things as a therapeutic team we understood very well and it seems strange when the outside of it but the points of highest anxiety and distress in prison are Christmas in the women's prison mother's day birthdays, anniversaries times when people are acutely feeling the separation from the people that know them and the people who perhaps they feel cared about them the most and so I wonder if maybe even if you couldn't have a communal meal maybe just a better meal like a proper Christmas dinner I wonder what that would do I think no well I was just thinking because we did this for precisely that reason because Christmas in particular can be a very isolating time in prison and also it's a trigger point for mental health and violence as well and we did a baking project at Christmas in the bakery at one of the prisons where we're working at and I mean logistically it was an absolute nightmare but we were 850 men in the prison and we created a little bakery box for each of them that was distributed the week before Christmas so we had the men making three baked goods so wherever three times by 850 was that was the only product we made and that was when we got the real cheese in and yeah we just gave them a little and it had a note on it and said you know happy Christmas and it was something quite small but actually the feedback that we got that it was actually a big deal and actually even like a gift you don't get Christmas gifts so I think even just having something that was something for yourself yeah so in answer to your second question I guess so yeah so we do education and training like you said and I suppose we do some work as well with prison kitchens and catering managers around getting new stuff on the menu we will always try our best to link the two together so I mean the kitchen garden everything that we're growing is going to the prison kitchen and we're kind of helping support the prison kitchen in utilising some of those ingredients because that's quite a new way of working for them not at all prisons but this particular one the bakery as well I mean as I say we're running a bakery training course but the bakery is within the prison kitchen so a lot of the stuff they're working on is being served on the menus and we want to kind of push that further but I guess the kind of missing link for me and something that we're developing more as a charity and I suppose something that particularly in the last year I've realised there's a real need for in a really holistic sense so it's not about training someone to go and work in hospitality it's actually about all of those food habits and stuff that I spoke about and that kind of education in my opinion needs to be accessed by every single person in the prison and I think if we're going to get people picking the healthier option on the menu for example or changing their eating habits there needs to be a huge amount of work done on educating those people as to why they might want to pick that and that's really difficult I mean even just getting 10 people in a room together in prison is really difficult so it's something that we're trying to factor into our work and particularly now Covid's kind of yes coming to a relative end is something that we think is integral because actually I think there's two sides of changing prison food yes there's improving the actual food but I think that's only half the story really and that's been a learning of mine I suppose and something that we're trying to factor into our work I hope that answers your question Is that one from online? I'm a GP working this is from someone who I think is called Heli I'm a GP working in a Scottish prison I was told that the healthiest item on the menu was a pie I spend a lot of time in GP consultations advising my patients to lose weight get more exercise most of my patients have mood addiction and musculoskeletal scletal complaints we know that nutrition is central to these conditions has there ever been a survey of prison population staff or governors on this subject? Not that I'm aware of there's surveys that go out to prisoners and they're often done around inspection times in terms of like they are food satisfaction there are some fantastic prisons who do that kind of consultation regularly that question really touches upon a subject but I totally get the frustration healthcare is a kind of you would know an independent part of the prison but kind of independent and it's really frustrating there are dieticians who work in prison I've been in touch with them before and it's really frustrating for them to sit down with their patients, the prisoners and say you need to be having five portions of fruit and veg per day you need to be going and then that prisoner saying well I can't and honestly and I don't know yeah it's so difficult and you know I even had a prisoner who had diabetes and yeah he was being told to kind of eat certain things and not eat certain things and yet he couldn't have access to those things and there's a real mismatch there I think so I feel for her because I do see that happening quite a bit actually and healthcare is a very difficult job in that sense because they're trying to give healthy advice that actually is not something they can't implement it yeah so I don't have an answer to that it's a big challenge yeah we don't think so seems to be the answer this lady here thank you it's just a question about the budgets point so I guess that's probably one of the key drivers of that centralized supply chain cost and efficiency so sort of who do you think is responsible for driving change in that 2010 should that come from I know Governors have a little bit of autonomy to supplement that so should catering managers sort of be lobbying Governors or should Governors be feeding that back to HM BPS and MOJ like what's that sort of feedback loop to make that change yeah so it's a good point actually and good to explain how the budgets work because Governors do have autonomy and that wasn't always the case so a Governor in the prison manages their budgets across the prison and food comes under that so they do have the autonomy to set those budgets as far as I know at the moment the average seems to be coming in at £2.11 I'm expecting that to go up because of where food prices are at the moment yeah I'm not saying they have more money to spend in that sense and that system can work and it cannot work so if you have a Governor who really values the food in that prison as I say they can top it up and we've seen really good examples of that if they don't it can drop under that £2 limit and they can kind of detract from that I suppose that the budgets in a sense even though the Governors have relative autonomy within reason really that has to come from the top the decision makers at the top the Ministry of Justice the Justice Minister Government I think any kind of increase in that would have to come from the decision makers at the top I suppose I think so I've been focusing on this side of the room just to reflect on it and then we'll come So from what I understand as well in the US too prisoners also eat at really weird times Why? What's the mentality behind that? So staff can take their lunch on time and they can have dinner and it's to do with the shift changeovers for staff it depends what their rotas are and it's just easier to do it that way It's a prison myth actually it's a good prison myth not a prison myth but a truth about prison and again before I started working there I had no idea how things work but there is a regime and typically that regime involves being unlocked perhaps at half past eight-ish to attend education for example coming back onto the wing for 11, 15, half, 11 lunch is served at half past 11 and then education or work doesn't commence again until 2pm and then they come back to the wing at four o'clock and it is for that reason so if you obviously know that the prisoners have their lunch and then the staff have their lunch so obviously when prisoners have lunch it requires a relative amount of staff resource actually unlocking them and facilitating that and then the staff have their lunch break as well so that tends to be why there's that gap in the day again it's frustrating because it's frustrating for us actually as an education provider because we always have a weird gap in the middle of the day and also quite short sessions and also if you're trying to get someone kind of work ready I suppose for me that isn't how the well I don't know maybe some of your working days are like that, good for you in so but most of us don't have a 2.5 hour break in the middle of the day, yeah Are you aware of any positive initiatives or models from other countries that we could learn from in the UK? Scandinavia, I mean you've been to different countries and been to prisons in other countries haven't you? Yeah, yeah but not good ones There are some countries that have got imprisonment spot on in terms of the activities that people do within the prison setting and there's prisons where the men and women cater for themselves they have the budget and they are told what meal is going to cook for the wing this week and they do the shopping, get it in and they cook that way it tends to be in countries where the risk of violence is much lower so the prisoners going to prison for violent offences is lower because as a nation it's a less violent country so that wouldn't always work I think second to that from my experience and from what I've kind of seen and read in the statistics I suppose the most successful examples are the self-catering examples and that's where you have a kitchen out on the wing for example and you all pal together and that works for obvious reasons because you have that choice, you work together you can eat when you like etc and they tend to be in Scandinavian countries and Scandinavian countries have the lowest re-offending rates in Europe and we have the highest re-offending rates in Europe so you do the maths Italy has one of the best well catered well I heard that in Italy you get a glass of wine at lunch but I don't think that was from a reputable source maybe I thought they'd sleep for 2 hours I don't know sounds very Italian do you want to do another one? Thank you a lot of people say that I'm a medical student working in inclusion health I was wondering how you overcome the difficulty of trying to affect positive change for a population whose suffering is almost necessary for society to feel comfortable or better about themselves Gosh that's very deep I think it kind of goes back to the way we see prisoners I suppose it feels quite sad thinking that that's a necessary part of society I suppose because does it have to be I don't know I think in terms of generating positive change and like I said I think public perception and the way we see prisoners is probably our biggest barrier I mean we had this conversation actually in the room before and I have felt as though particularly during Covid there's been an increased empathy or understanding of perhaps what it might be like being locked away certainly as a charity we felt an increase in support I think and just understanding I think me personally as well when I first started kind of campaigning for an improvement in prison food about six years ago and I was 24 and I was doing it by myself and I think that was when I got loads of awful comments about prisoners only deserve dog food and terrible things and but I think when it was just me I think almost I was more of a target whereas we've been a charity now for two years and that has eased off a little bit slightly because yeah I'm not saying you can't troll a charity you probably could but maybe it still exists but I just don't kind of feel it as much I suppose or witness it I think to kind of extend the analogy the way in which we make it less necessary to have this function of the unconscious expressory prisons is through more visibility this is what we do in a therapeutic sense is like we take that stuff that you don't want to talk about admit to yourself or even tell someone else and we bring it to light so we can see what it's really about and is it as scary as you think it is sometimes it is but often not and I think it's the same thing I think more visibility for prisoners and former offenders so that we can understand that they're not kind of ogres with red eyes to are out to steal your dreams that they're people who have had certain experiences and are trying to get their lives back I think would be very helpful that doesn't kind of directly answer the question but I think that's a necessary part of the process which is making all aspects of human life and human experience more visible and open for conversation and communing I agree It was more of a comment about prisons in other countries that are doing it well and it seems like there's a very clear link between countries have good social welfare versus what prisons like the autonomy and I did study criminology for four years so in terms of like my public perception in the public or whatever I don't think prisons should exist for the most part they're expensive and I think the public forget that all the time and did I have a question probably That's a lovely comment No, I think you're absolutely right that actually if you have a society that is the more unequal a society the more violence you have, the more crime you have the more abuse you experience and then you put those people into prison and expect that the prison system is somehow going to make it better and it doesn't make sense someone needs to make it make sense and conversely when people grow up with a sense of social security where a sense that the government cares about them and the sense that they might have a future they think that their lives and their incomes and their rent is secure and they don't have to fight every day for their dignity you're going to have less people turning against that society I think that's This isn't an easy question to answer because if you do tackle food then you tackle physical health and mental health and surely that's a saving for a prison just from a financial point of view I think it's a very outdated I think public service and I guess public sector and I never worked in it before my background's in the creative industry and I came into it kind of naively I suppose and realized quite quickly that it's outdated you know there's a lot of red tape there's a way of doing things and there's a reluctance for change I think definitely and yeah and prisons are 10 years behind society for the most part I think you know obviously there's always some good stuff going on but for the most part it just feels I guess with talking about progressive ideas and looking at things in a more holistic way that is a very new concept that's not how they work but that's not to say that they don't want to work in that way I suppose and I think what I've tried to do is sometimes that's what we're bringing in you know often even in the prison kitchen catering managers got so much to deal with that actually thinking holistically and progressively and you know creatively about dishes is just not you know they can't do that it doesn't mean that they don't want to but it's about how we kind of get that in I think yeah thank you yeah I wanted to ask a question about scalability I work in a prison that has about 1300 people in it and I know increasingly in this country we're looking to build bigger and bigger prisons yeah I would love to hear your thoughts on what good practice on a really large scale looks like probably I was like a second question will you be going to shape an informed culture in any of the new prisons that are being burned in this country yeah so I mean it was actually I was thinking about it earlier because I was thinking about the self-sufficiency thing and why that existed 20 years ago and why that doesn't exist now and we work with this centralized supplier and I think you know two decades ago the prison population was half of what it is now and obviously the government at the moment have a policy of building more prisons big building kind of super prisons longer sentences and locking people up that kind of population is only going to increase and it's concerning because actually I think the bigger the population gets the more we do work towards that kind of centralized approach and the further we move away from this kind of holistic more kind of bespoke way of working so I'm not answering your question because it's really difficult and I suppose some of the new prisons as well we're not working with any of the new prisons at the moment but I would love to because it's a nice opportunity to I suppose set the bar I guess the only thing I often find the prison system is particularly catering managers and catering teams is that most of them have worked in the prison system for a very long time worked at several prisons a lot of them come from a military background so mass catering kind of as part of the military so it's not to say that they don't have good intentions it's just to say that they are almost kind of institutionalized themselves into a way of working and that's why you find that prison foods doesn't differ hugely across the board yeah I guess this will be the last question and it's quite a good one to finish on and I guess for all of you what can we Joe and Joe Public do about addressing this issue You can donate to Food Behind Bars No I think for me it's just about engaging in the issue I suppose and that is as simple as coming to something like tonight or speaking to someone about it I always get it people are like I've never thought about this before I've never thought about prison food and most people haven't so I think even in that you're doing your part I suppose and engaging in some of the charities and organisations that are working around the issue and there are quite a few actually and kind of supporting their work and yeah I'd say just have conversations and forums like this is a great conversation starter you know a lot of people come in to the subject of food and prisons from ignorance because they don't know because it isn't spoken about and by having the ability to share what prison food really is like people get the education that then starts conversations amongst their peers and it becomes more of a wider thought a wider knowledge bank of actually how food and prison it is and what we can do to make it better and I would say let's take it let's take it a level of that listen to the crime and nourishment podcast I did a four part podcast series that was funded by the Wellcome Trust which looked into these prison studies and spoke to some of the researchers and his quote was after you bang your head against a brick wall long enough you just get a headache so listen to the crime and nourishment series so you have a kind of working knowledge of the research and then drop an email to your MP just for that hey did you know this because it's about getting the conversation a having the conversation but basically getting the conversation to happen in the room where where it happens so your MP if you fancy writing a a card to a lord then do that apparently cards work better for all lords so cards for lords or an email for your MP just so you start getting more people thinking about it more people in high places thinking about it so that the next time it ends up on the front of a red top actually more people have an informed opinion about it we get a larger conversation and that's I think it's going to be political will that drives the agenda we can treat prison food as a non-issue as long as most of the public don't care but as soon as the public have something to say about it then the government has to start listening so inform an email and we have to stop there I think are you going to close this that was amazing thank you so much and yeah I think we all got a real sense of the frustration of working in this area but it's actually reassuring to know that there are people like you three kind of working and you know sort of campaigning and trying to actually make real change so thank you for what you do really appreciate it just to say there are a few copies of Kimberley's book out in the foyer I forgot to ask if you'd sign on your book if you would you sign it I rather really put you on the spot yeah brilliant book so thank you so much sorry I didn't get to all the online questions but yeah you've been brilliant so thank you very much thanks everyone