Wanted: Culinary consultants to improve Israeli prisoners' food

The Israel Prison Service is set to expand a pilot program to improve its food offerings, run last year in 12 prisons, to the 20 other prisons throughout the country.

The Prison Service says the idea is to improve the cooking and thus the health of the country's 26,000 prisoners as well as prison guards. After the program proved successful, the Prison Service decided to publish a tender for culinary consultants to see to the upgrading of food service - from purchasing to preparation. The pilot program was instituted after the prisons' food supply services were separated from those of the defense establishment. To replace outdated "nutritional tables," which had undergone many changes in the army but not in the prisons, the service brought chefs to the prisons to give theoretical and practical advice on how to prepare meals with a focus on higher nutritional value.

The head of the Prison Service logistical support administration, Brigadier Anna Polansky says, "We want to teach them how to do it right. Therefore we need special oversight, to learn from private companies that know how to do it better than we do at the moment."

The expanded program will see every prison kitchen receive a chef-consultant for five days of basic training, which will include planning, ordering supplies, cooking the meals and even improving service in the dining room. The chef will continue overseeing the kitchen all year long.

New menu

"Every prison population has its own needs, and therefore it requires a new menu of its own," Polansky says. Among other things, the new menus are to be rich in calcium, which is especially important for incarcerated teens.

The new menus are also to contain less margarine than in the past, due to the fact that it is not considered healthy, and food is to be prepared with less oil - using the healthier canola and olive oil from now on. A wider variety of vegetables, fruit and protein will also be available. Dinners are to be filled out with carbohydrates and soup, which is expected to help improve the mood and behavior of the prisoners at night.

According to Polansky, prisoners involved in the pilot program responded very positively to the improved menus. When it comes to their mood, Polansky says, "food is a very significant component, especially for prisoners who are incarcerated for many years. Better food will certainly improve their mood and the atmosphere in the prisons."