![]() Krista Okerholm, director of culinary and food sustainability for the Windham facilities, said the Maine DOC has 127 inmates working in facility kitchens, with another 55 enrolled in food certification programs. ![]() Giusti said he hopes also to develop a Brigaid certification process, accepted nationwide, that vouches for the certificate holder’s core competencies in the kitchen. The state’s corrections system already offers culinary training and line cook apprenticeship programs, along with providing ServSafe and food preservation certifications. Training the kitchen staff is another of Brigaid’s key concerns when partnering with institutions, though in this case the training will be geared even more toward potential work in the future. “What we want to do is package this all up in a way that’s digestible, and put out a model that’s very practical that any prison system can also use,” Giusti said. While the food in Maine’s prisons can still be further improved, he said the chief focus of the pilot program will be to codify the food system. ![]() “When I saw the food they were serving, it seemed foolish for improving the food to be the initiative,” Giusti said. Shawn Patrick Ouellette/Staff Photographer They already do a good job in these kitchens – the standard is already very high,” said Dan Giusti, founder of Brigaid, who visited Maine correctional facilities multiple times last year to prepare for this initiative.įresh rolls on a cooling rack at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham. “The folks at Maine DOC are forward-thinking. “If we demonstrate success in Maine with this, I know it can be replicated nationally.” “We’ve already had other states come see what we’re doing, and in the spring, we’ll have a bunch more come, I’m certain of it,” said Randall Liberty, commissioner of the state’s Department of Corrections. The innovative program – funded entirely by private foundation grants and individual donations – intends to make Maine’s approach the standard operating procedure at prisons across the country. Now, the Maine DOC has entered into a new, first-of-its-kind pilot program with Impact Justice and Brigaid – a Connecticut-based company founded in 2016 by a former chef of Copenhagen’s famed Noma restaurant that uses trained chefs as advisors to improve institutional food in settings like school cafeterias, hospitals and senior centers.īrigaid has provided the Maine DOC with a chef, Colin Freeman from Philadelphia, who starts work in Windham on Tuesday. You’re not worthy of care.”Ī tray of food at the Maine Correctional Center in Windham gets finished off with a ripe banana and Oakhurst milk. “The message we’re sending people who are incarcerated is: You’re less than human. “The state of prison food in this country is unacceptable,” Soble said. Some of the inmates surveyed had worked in their prison kitchens, and recalled cooking and serving canned products years past their expiration dates, as well as packages of chicken and beef marked “not for human consumption.” It’s no surprise, then, that incarcerated people are six times more likely than the general public to be sickened by foodborne illness, as the Impact Justice report notes. In a 2020 survey of former state prison inmates nationwide – undertaken by Impact Justice, a California-based nonprofit prison-reform group – 75 percent of respondents said their meal trays were all too often filled with spoiled food like moldy bread, curdled milk, rotten meat and slimy bagged salad mix. “It’s already at a standard that is higher than pretty much anywhere else in the country.” “Maine is one of the most progressive DOCs in the country, and certainly when it comes to food,” said Leslie Soble, senior manager for Impact Justice’s Food in Prison program. That could change, though, with a new initiative just getting underway that aims to turn the Maine Department of Corrections’ food program into a model that other states can replicate. The workers finished the trays with ripe-and-ready bananas and cartons of local milk from Oakhurst Dairy, nourishing ingredients that are a rarity at prisons in this country, where the food typically ranges from unappealing to inedible. ![]()
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