In Bangladeshi prisons, the breakfast menu for its 81,000 residents has been updated for the first time in 200 years. Instead of bread and molasses, prisoners can now expect to receive vegetables, lentils, and spiced rice.

In England and Wales, where national wealth exceeds Bangladesh by some margin, breakfast for its 81,000 prison residents remains the same. A small bag of cereal, and 186mls of semi skimmed milk. If it’s your first morning inside, you mightn’t even have a bowl to eat it from.

The difference between these two breakfasts, is that one of them is ultra-processed. A new term in the medical research, describing a group of foods containing high levels of additives such as salt, sugar, and preservatives, whilst usually low in nutrients and fibre. The constituent ingredients within are altered, or processed, so that the end product easier to store, digest, or stomach.

To use our example of breakfast cereal. What was once a plant, whole grains rich in nutrients and fibre, would spoil quickly. They would be hard to cook within a prison kettle. So, cereal manufacturers subject the grains to a multitude of industrial processes. Stripping the fibrous and nutrient filled layers of the grain away, to leave only a starchy mush. This is combined with sugar syrup, and formed into frosted flakes. The end product is convenient, long lasting, and easy to eat. Yet, this cereal is so stripped of any nutritional value, that the manufactures need to add back in the very vitamins they removed.

Despite this readdiction of vitamins, and the insistence on the packet and TV adverts that this constitutes a healthy meal, breakfast cereal remains a poor start to the day. The fibre content is so low, that the starch within is digested into sugar quickly. Your blood sugar level spikes, then quickly plummets, leaving you tired and hungry during your morning work session. It will be hours before you can sate this with the cheese sandwich they give you at lunch.

Compare this to those eating the Bangladeshi breakfast. The lentils and vegetables ingested break down more slowly. The prisoners there state they remain full, and energised from their non-processed meal.

According to the British Medical Journal, other ultra-processed foods include “packaged baked goods and snacks, fizzy drinks, sugary cereals, ready meals containing food additives, dehydrated vegetable soups, and reconstituted meat and fish products”.

Sound familiar? It should. With food standards within prisons set so low, the diet within is inherently structured around ultra-processed food. Food designed to survive the realities of prison, rather than to help you survive.

It is estimated that in normal British society, between 25-60% of diet is composed of ultra-processed foods. But within prison, this figure must surely be nearer 100%.

You starve until lunchtime, only to receive your cheese sandwich. Ultra-processed white bread (bleached flour, germ removed, mixed into a slurry, engineered yeast used to quickly make the bread rise, fortified with a few of the vitamins they removed, but not all, and none of the fibre), filled with a slice of ultra-processed cheese (pasteurised milk, with gelling agents added, reconstituted into single squares for ease of use). The only colour within this meal arising if you happen to have a wing toaster, to turn it from beige to brown.

The evening meal. Your mandated one hot meal of the day. A protein item, such as beef or chicken burgers, filler material bound with salt and sugar, with traces of meat added back in if you look hard enough. Yet even this ultra-processing cannot keep it in good form while it sits about in the kitchens waiting to be served. Dehydrated to the point of texturally resembling flip flops.

Carbohydrates. Rice if you’re lucky. Though always the white variety, bleached and scrubbed of anything useful. Potatoes if you’re not, arriving soggy as they hit the plate, before turning dry as they stick in the gullet. 

The one redeeming item of the day - a portion of vegetables. But the definition of vegetable is stretched, with sweetcorn and baked beans often moonlighting as the designated nutritious component. 

And then there’s all the other stuff you get. Yoghurts, pasteurised and preserved to the point of not requiring refrigeration, to be stored in windows between the bars. Cake bars which drip with syrup. The only thing close to a vegetable is the refined palm oil within the biscuits.

Many reports rightly criticise prison food as being substandard. Complaints about food are the backbone of any prison memoirs, poems, or podcasts. Unsurprising, as it is the thing you are exposed to constantly and reliably. And you should write about what you know.

But this constant exposure to ultra-processed foods is a problem when it comes to your health.

There is now convincing research that links ultra-processed foods to a number of health conditions. The fact that the food makes you hungry soon after, means people eat more of it, and risk obesity. The additives, such as the salt and sugar, have effects on blood sugar, and blood pressure, leading to cardiovascular risks. Strokes and heart attacks to name a few.

In normal society, we get to choose what we eat. We may be unduly influenced by advertising, or not understand the impact of diet, but essentially, we are free to eat what we want, and the impacts this has on our health is on us.

In prison, you have no choice. There is no alternative menu. You are doomed to consume the ultra-processed foods that the prison service feed to you, and suffer the health consequences. Year after year.

And sadly, this damage is cumulative. Each year in prison, is another year of higher blood pressure, higher blood sugar, weight gain, and myriad other health effects resulting from ultra-processed foods.

Whilst health equivalence is enshrined in law, and numerous UN conventions, in practice, this always falls short. And through the food we force upon prisoners, their health suffers over and above someone in the community.

The state has a duty to protect prisoners’ health from the dangers of ultra-processed foods. Instead, in a dereliction of this duty, it serves them up obesogenic, diabetogenic calories.

The reason ultra-processed food is so appealing to prisons, is that the menu must be one simple enough that it can be constructed with untrained labour, should the entire kitchen staff that morning be put on basic. Hence, easy to turn out, ultra-processed food is served out of convenience.

But there could be another way. When I was in residential rehab, we were served freshly cooked and prepared food three times a day. Replete with whole grains, vegetables, and adequate portion sizes.

The difference between the catering in rehab, and the catering in prisons, is staff. Trained catering professionals, allowed to cook as their skills facilitate.

Because unlike in schools, where children don’t miss lessons to cook lunch. And unlike in nursing homes, where residents don’t make the tea in between medication windows. In prisons, prisoners are made to work in the kitchens.

Prisoners cooking the prison food, earning a fraction of even minimum wage, is a cost saver. But it also appeals to the idea that prisons should be punishing. That prisoners shouldn’t be gifted anything, not even the sustenance to live. These are outdated and pernicious views, like the outdated menu in Bangladesh.

That unhealthy Bangladeshi prison breakfast of old, was introduced in the 18th century by British colonial rulers. It is imperative we look to overthrow the diet enforced by the current rulers of prisons in Britain, and replace it with a safe alternative. For the health of our current prisoners, and the citizens they go on to be.