Martha Stewart is one of America’s leading queens of homemaking, with a successful empire spanning home goods, cookbooks, TV and more. Because Stewart was famous for her easy, delicious recipes, experiencing federal prison food was a shock to the senses.

“We had the worst coffee imaginable,” she recalls in “Martha,” the bombshell Netflix documentary about her life and career. “I wasn’t a coffee drinker anyway, but boy, that coffee was terrible. And the milk was ter – everything was terrible.”

In 2004, Stewart spent five months in the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia, after being found guilty of obstruction of justice in an insider trading case, followed by another five months of house arrest. Stewart’s verdict was big news at the time: America’s most famous housewife was doing federal time. “It’s a joke to put me here,” Stewart wrote on day two of her prison diary, “and everyone seems to know it.”

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‘Very poor quality…nothing pure’

On her second day incarcerated, Martha Stewart was already worried about the food in federal prison. As revealed in her Netflix documentary ‘Martha’, she wrote in her diary: ‘What worries me is the very poor quality of the food and the fact that nothing fresh is available, because there is a lot of starch, a lot of carbohydrates and a lot of fatty food. pure everything.” When Stewart took note of her coffee at 7 a.m. that day, she put “coffee” in scare quotes.

Unfortunately, the ultra-low quality of food that Stewart described twenty years ago is more or less the status quo for prison food today. Prison food is notoriously unhealthy, sometimes even spoiled, moldy or rotten – not to mention horrible in taste. The food served to the prisoners is primarily designed to be cheap, meaning it contains a lot of refined carbohydrates, a ton of sugar and sodium, and not much else.

Guards might respond that “nutriloaf” contains enough nutrients to keep prisoners healthy. The light brown porridge, often made from whatever is in the kitchen, is so unappetizing that it is sometimes imposed as a punishment, prompting lawsuits for cruel and unusual treatment. However, courts have generally found it constitutional to serve inmates a hellish, foul-tasting fruitcake. We can only imagine how relieved Martha must have been when she returned to her kitchen.

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