Impact Justice, a leading expert in prison food, is championing innovative improvements. Its work is captured in the 2026 James Beard Award-nominated book “Eating Behind Bars.”
by Tony Hicks June 10, 2026 (Berkeleyside.org)
An incarcerated man at California State Prison Solano holds a fresh pear distributed through the Harvest of the Month program led by Impact Justice in partnership with the UC Nutrition Policy Institute. Credit: Evett Kilmartin courtesy of Impact Justice
It was a throwaway comment, sparking unusual recognition of a throwaway topic for most Americans when discussing nutrition.
Impact Justice founder Alex Busansky was at a two-day Bay Area event in December 2017 put on by a funder of his Oakland-based nonprofit. Someone from Food Corp., a national nonprofit working for better food in middle schools, said during her presentation that some school lunches were worse than a meal in prison,” Busanky said.
An idea started percolating in his head. Busansky approached her afterward and asked what she knew about prison food. She didn’t know anything. Neither did he, though he’d been to prisons through his regular social justice work.
“I talked to her and went back to my hotel room and got on Google,” Busansky said. “I saw no one was doing much research on prison food.”
He called his national campaign people and connected them with the woman from Food Corp., to find out more about their work.
That call was like splitting the first intellectual atoms of a nine-year chain reaction at Impact Justice, exploding into a 2026 James Beard Foundation award nominee for books covering food issues and advocacy. The award winner will be announced June 13 in a ceremony in Chicago.
The book by Leslie Soble, Alex Busansky and Dr. Aishatu R. Yusuf, “Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison,” lifts the curtain on how, and what, the penal system feeds the humans inside its walls.
It’s not a pretty picture.
“Prisoners are purposely out of sight and out of mind,” said Yusuf, Impact Justice’s vice president of innovation programs. “If people saw prisons more often, it would be a bigger part of the discussion.”
The group’s interest began with a search for previous research on prison nutrition.
It didn’t exist, so they did their own.
Two years of research produced what they called the first national study of prison food. Their 2020 report, “Eating Behind Bars” made Impact Justice the leading national expert on prison food.
Released in 2025, the book was a natural extension of the report, with additional research and solutions.
Most of the focus was on state facilities, where the highest number of the nation’s incarcerated people live. From interviews with former prisoners, their families and friends, and current and former corrections officers, the authors discovered mealtimes are one of the most traumatic and humiliating aspects of incarceration.
Prisoners are no different than any human looking to food for comfort and sustenance, the authors say. What inmates are served is often unrecognizable slop, bereft of nutrition, in favor of ultra-processed meals high in sugar and sodium that favor shelf life over nutritional content.
Prison food is heavy on carbohydrates meant to merely meet caloric standards, which vary, depending on the jurisdiction. The authors said prisoners rarely get fresh fruits or vegetables, even in industrial-scale prison farms.
Much of the unpalatable food ends up in the trash, as prisoners would rather go hungry than try eating prison food. The results are malnutrition and an estimated 300,000 tons of food waste annually.
In the report, former prisoners described finding maggots, body parts of rats, or cockroaches in their food.
The authors said correctional facilities control mealtimes and food access — as well as the food itself — as a form of punishment. They single out something called “the loaf,” a disgusting mash of incompatible foods presented as a meal.
“The book isn’t laying out radical ideas,” said Busansky, the president and founder of Impact Justice. “Prisoners are people with the same hopes, wants and desires as the rest of us.”
Of formerly incarcerated people Impact Justice surveyed, 75% said they were served rotten or spoiled food in prison. More than 90% said they didn’t receive enough food to feel full.
Most of the country’s roughly 2 million prisoners came from low-income areas often described as “food deserts,” where access to fresh produce is limited. The food available in food deserts is often heavily processed and bought just to fill stomachs.
Yusuf said prisons are an opportunity for the government to educate the incarcerated — most of whom will be released and need to make food choices for themselves an their families — about nutrition and establish healthy habits.
“When individuals are in prisons, they are under state care; the state is responsible for them,” Yusuf said. “The decisions (prisoners) make are controlled by the state. We’re just talking about simple, healthy, everyday food.”
Busansky said prison food quality is a government choice. In 2024, California spent $4.20 a day on three meals for adult prisoners. By comparison, San Diego public schools spent $3.91 per child for usually one meal.
“We know how to feed people at scale – the military, schools, hospitals – and we do it well,” Busansky said. “We don’t have a constituency that fights for prisoners … We have people in prison who haven’t experienced the taste of a strawberry in 17 years.”
Busansky said there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that “what you eat affects your behavior.”
“We don’t think about the consequences of what happens in prisons,” Busansky said. “I know how I feel after a bad meal. Now multiply that by meal after meal, day after day.”
Bad nutrition also leads to more health problems like heart disease and diabetes, resulting in higher medical expenses for the state.
“Each year in prison shaves two years off someone’s life,” Yusuf said. “It’s an important factor.”
The book’s first part lays out the problem. The second discusses remedies.
“The book is different than the report,” Yusuf said. “It really focuses on solutions. Most of the solutions are new.”
The group immediately began forming alliances with other organizations to help.
“Once you take the veil off something to people, they can’t unsee it,” Yusuf said. “They engage with the project, and they want to know how they can help.”
Impact Justice’s Growing Justice initiative in California and South Carolina builds vertical farms inside women’s prisons to produce nutritious leafy greens and train women in indoor farming.
The organization has also created programs like Harvest of the Month, a partnership with regional food hubs, UC Berkeley’s Nutrition Policy Institute, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The program has delivered more than 600,000 pounds of fresh produce to about 90,000 incarcerated people since 2023.
Busansky said some prison systems, like California’s, are open to new ideas.
“There’s an openness to the conversation,” Busansky said. “It’s usually about the funding, doing something they’ve never done before.”
Impact Justice trains former prisoners to be food justice advocates in their communities and started a Chefs in Prisons program in Maine, which trains prisoners in culinary arts while creating better food for inmates. The model is catching on in other states.
“The majority of people incarcerated are parents,” Busansky said. “If you teach them about the benefits of nutritional food, that has an effect on generations.”
“We ask people to do something, now that you have the information,” Yusuf said. “We can’t forget about the people we don’t always see.”
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Tony Hicks is an East Bay native who spent 22 years working for Bay Area News Group, covering crime, education and the city of Berkeley. He also worked in the features department of the Contra Costa Times,… More by Tony Hicks
