What Martha Stewart Thought About The Food In Prison

Martha Stewart is one of America's preeminent queens of homemaking, with a successful empire spanning housewares, cookbooks, TV, and more. With Stewart being famous for her easy, delicious recipes, it was a shock to the senses for her to experience the food in federal prison.

"We had the worst coffee imaginable," she remembers in "Martha", the bombshell-filled 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 did five months at 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 sentence was big news at the time — America's most famous homemaker doing federal time. "Putting me here is a joke," Stewart wrote on day two of her prison diary, "and everyone seems to know that."

By her second day locked up, Martha Stewart was already concerned 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 unavailability of fresh anything, as there are many starches and many carbs, many fat foods. No pure anything." When Stewart took note of her 7 a.m. coffee that day, she put "coffee" in scare quotes.

Unfortunately, the ultra-low quality of food that Stewart described 20 years ago is more-or-less the status quo for prison food today. Prison meals are notoriously unhealthy, sometimes even spoiled, moldy, or rotten — to say nothing of the atrocious taste. The food served to the incarcerated is designed primarily to be cheap, which means loads of refined carbs, a ton of sugar and sodium, and not much else.

Wardens might retort that "nutriloaf" has plenty of nutrients to keep inmates healthy. The pale brown slop, often made of whatever happens to be in the kitchen, is so unappetizing that it is sometimes served as punishment, and spawned lawsuits alleging cruel and unusual treatment. Courts, however, have generally found it constitutional to serve prisoners a dirt-flavored fruitcake from hell. We can only imagine how relieved Martha must have been to get back to her kitchen.