Spread it on

Even the smell of food makes me hungry, reading about it in great detail makes it much worse. I don’t know how to explain it. There are days when I eat full meals and I walk past something and catch a whiff of something tasty and my stomach begins to growl. Food is a big part of my life, and I used to take it for granted, then I spent the better part of a day in jail. I’m not going to go into detail as to how I got there, but I got arrested this past summer and had to spend the morning in my town’s jail and then the better part of the afternoon in county because that’s where my bond hearing was.

After reading Cate’s article on how inmates made “spreads” out of ingredients they’d collected throughout the day I thought to myself “That probably would’ve been smart,” but I never stayed overnight so there wasn’t much time for me to fashion a spread. To the inmates who are in CJ5, making spreads is a means of expression and a social activity. They can make it in larger portions for many inmates, or for themselves when they are hungry late at night after a bland 4 o’clock dinner. I found the part of Cate’s study where she compared making spreads as a way for inmates to feel free of authority. She states, “Spread, on the other hand, reflects personal taste and individual access to resources. As such, it is an inmate’s product of choice, not under the control of any authority” (20). This was most interesting to me because people who are stuck and suffering in jail are looking for an excuse to do something they haven’t yet, in this case it may be create an elaborate spread

O’Donnell’s study covered the shifting in China’s post-Mao eating habits. Southerners eat fish because it is the most readily available item and northerners stick to more beef because cattle graze in the northern part of the country. O’Donnell explains, “In fact, eating is central to the Chinese understanding of what it means to be human” (32). This basically means that food plays a vital role in Chinese society. Food also plays a large role in American society, and I see many similarities in the ways food plays into both our societies. What I found most interesting was that O’Donnell noticed that shared meals “Deepened friendships, greased business deals, and reaffirmed hometown identities” just like it does in American (34).