BUT FIRST OFF: a thank you.

This is our 13th edition of Food Policy Debrief, and our first anniversary (or, if you want an excuse to eat cake, we can say birthday🎂). Throughout this year, your support, subscribership, and feedback has kept us going. If you don’t already follow us on LinkedIn or In stagram, we’d love you to follow us on those platforms, or send us along to a friend who would make a great subscriber. To date, FPD has been a volunteer labor of love, and we are so, so appreciative of you, our readers. We look forward to our next year and beyond!

TL;DR

Ice cream attacks, Walmart WIC shopping, and more food policy news
Three positive food systems-related bills were introduced (finally, some action!)
Independent grocery stores stand up against SNAP cuts
An incredible interview with the organization working to improve the food & nutrition in prisons

This Month’s Standout Food Stories

👀 Policy Movement We’re Tracking

🥫 The NO TIME TO Waste Act—a bipartisan bill designed to help reduce food loss and waste in the U.S.—was reintroduced in the House and Senate.

🍗 Another group of lawmakers introduced the Hot Foods Act , a bill that would allow SNAP recipients to purchase hot, prepared meals with their benefits (yes, folks currently cannot buy a rotisserie chicken with their benefits).

✉️ Senator Klobuchar (a ranking member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture) wrote an open letter to the public in defiance of Republicans’ budget resolution plan. It was endorsed by almost all Senate Democrats.

🎒 New York state passed statewide universal school meals for FY 2026. Shoutout to Healthy School Meals for All NY Kids for its advocacy work on this!

**How You Can Progress Food Policy This Month**

For Individuals

Urge your legislators to stop the cuts to Americorps and protect the program’s future with this simple, effective tool. It takes two clicks!
We know the desire to check out is so real, but staying informed is key to resisting. Stay up to date with what’s happening in the anti-hunger space by listening to the Alliance to End Hunger’s new podcast , “Voices to End Hunger.”

For organizations

Sign your organization on to a letter urging Congress to restore Patrick Leahy Farm to School and Local Food for School (LFS) funds. (BTW, this grant enables underfunded school meal programs to offer students more fresh, local foods). Sign here!

Social Impact Spotlight

Shedding light on companies leading by example and engaging in the food system in a meaningful way

**The National Grocers Association Announced its Pushing Back Against SNAP Cuts**

We see you, National Grocers Association! The group, also known as NGA, represents independent community grocers across the country. Earlier this month, NGA released a statement with major concerns over the Congressional proposal to drastically cut funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). NGA made it clear that cutting the program by 20 percent will significantly affect both food access and America’s workforce, stating “SNAP funding also supports over 300,000 American jobs throughout the food supply chain and across the United States.”

In order to make its point heard, NGA also met with Congressional offices where it shared the independent grocery industry’s perspective on the proposed cuts, highlighting the potential impact on millions of low-income Americans and the local grocers who serve them. Learn more here—and find your local NGA-member grocery store here!

Interview: Inside the Fight to Improve Food & Nutrition in Prisons

When most people think of food systems, they think of grocery stores, restaurants, farms, food banks, or schools. Often overlooked are prison and jails, despite the fact that these institutions are responsible for feeding up to 2 million Americans a day.

As a country with one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, the U.S. spends an estimated $182 billion annually on prisons and jails. Despite these staggering statistics (don’t get us started…) we rarely hear about what people in these settings eat, beyond insensitive jokes about “prison food” (more on this below). To go a step further, we almost never hear about how carceral food systems affect public health more broadly. But one organization is trying to fix that.

Enter the Coalition for Carceral Nutrition, a group working to improve nutrition in jails and prisons across the country to effect healthier and more cost-effective outcomes for all stakeholders. This month, we’re talking to Daniel Rosen, the Coalition’s co-founder and Director of Advocacy & Partnerships, about how it’s working to #ChangetheTray. Let’s get into it.

The following responses might be edited for brevity or clarity.

FPD: Daniel, thanks for taking the time to talk to us this month. You've been a friend of ours for a while and we’ve long admired your work. How did you end up co-founding the Coalition for Carceral Nutrition?

Thanks so much for this opportunity to talk to your readers about carceral food systems. As one of my must-read food resources, I appreciate FPD highlighting this issue and our work!

I know jails and prisons may not be a focus for many of your readers, but the connections between carceral food systems, public health, and public safety deserve more attention. There’s growing awareness in both policy and practice of food and nutrition’s importance in health, and my goal is to shine a light on the harmful public health effects of jail and prison food systems. We can do so much better! I hope folks will reach out if they want to hear more.

I came home from six years of incarceration in 2021 and understood my own responsibility in changing our carceral system. I kept coming back to food injustice as such a fundamental problem. It’s one way (among many) that we make a bad situation worse, and then expect people to come home and be good friends, neighbors, family and community members. Food behind bars should help heal people, not harm them further, but that’s what we’re doing, every day—feeding people in all the ways we know are harmful: highly processed foods, starchy, empty calories, minimal nutrient dense foods, and inadequate fresh fruits and vegetables. Cost is often the main consideration, and national standards don’t exist. Calorie counts are used as a measure of sufficiency, but calorie or nutrient thresholds don’t matter much if food is thrown away because it’s disgusting. People develop chronic diet-related diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension at very high rates while in the care of the state, and it costs taxpayers untold millions later.

Before I was incarcerated I had a bout with cancer, so I started to pay attention to food and nutrition and worked to understand the role of nutrition in my health. When I went to prison, I struggled to eat healthily, as does everyone inside who cares about this. I went to great lengths to procure fruits and vegetables that the facility and the system regarded as contraband. When we've made fresh food into contraband, food systems are deeply dysfunctional! I did what I could to take care of my health and wellness, but it's very difficult to find reasonably nutritious food inside. We need to give incarcerated people the dignity to choose their health and nutrition, if they desire.

My co-founder (also formerly incarcerated and based in New York) and I talked for months about how little is being done in this space, who the stakeholders are, and what we could accomplish, and decided to put our efforts into creating change in carceral food systems. The public health and public safety impacts are largely unexplored and unaddressed, and they’re too important to ignore.

FPD: Recently, Starved For Care released a report on individuals who had died in incarceration with nutrition-related illnesses, and other research indicates incarcerated individuals experience higher rates of chronic diseases because of the quality of foods in prisons. The stories are truly heartbreaking. Given the energy around Food is Medicine (FIM) lately, how can this movement play a role in preventing deaths and improving health outcomes for individuals who are incarcerated?

The stories linked above are shocking examples of all-too-common negligence. The Starved for Care reporting looks at cases of severe medical neglect, and in many cases that means dietary neglect too—but it’s not exactly about the day-in, day-out dietary malpractice we see across carceral food systems that’s affecting peoples’ long-term health. Most people have no idea just how poorly incarcerated people are being fed with their tax dollars, unless they’ve experienced it or have a loved one behind bars.

In my own observation, this still-developing movement is very focused on individual, patient-centered care and models. It seems like institutional food service is somewhere in the background at best. But we, as a society, feed large numbers of people in grade schools, hospitals, prisons, military bases, colleges, and other institutional settings every day. In some of those places, healthier choices, medically-tailored choices—or choices at all—are available, and in others they aren’t.

Jails and prisons—which house people with high incidence of diet-related chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, and obesity—will tell you they provide medical diets, but those trays often look nothing like medically tailored meals or produce prescriptions that the FIM movement would recognize as valid. The Food is Medicine movement would do well to develop institutional food-service models that advance public health goals alongside single-patient focused systems of care, and prisons and jails are a good place to start. We’re here for it, and ready to collaborate with FIM practitioners to begin changing carceral food systems for everyone in jails and prisons, but especially for those who need more targeted interventions.

FPD: What are some of the biggest challenges you face as a movement?

One concern everywhere is funding, because on average, states spend just $2.54 per day feeding incarcerated people. You may have seen the “SNAP challenge” online, where people try to eat on $6 a day? I was grateful for SNAP when I came home; I relied on it, but I wish people would try to eat on less than half that. You just cannot feed people adequately at that price point—and we’re subsidizing carceral food service companies (Aramark, Trinity, Summit) to serve up diet-related chronic diseases we’ll all pay for later as taxpayers. Most state correctional agencies spend as much as a quarter of their annual budget on health care—but only spend low single-digit percentages of that annual budget to feed people. Those numbers are directly related, and the math isn’t mathing.

FPD: One of your forthcoming initiatives is the Department of Corrections 50 State Food Grades Map. Tell us more about what we can expect from this initiative, how you’re doing this research, and what barriers you may be encountering?

It’s definitely a priority for us to develop a more coherent national picture of how states and counties are feeding people in jails and prisons because it doesn’t really exist. We’re developing the metrics to do that, in order to have a baseline and a set of criteria for change. We’re looking at everything from nutrition quality to food safety, from procurement policies to culinary programming, from the eating experience to supplemental food like commissaries, to mention a few areas of concern.

Our carceral systems are really atomized, with 50 separate state systems and about 3,500 county jails, plus youth and immigration detention, and tribal jails too. Right now, states and localities essentially feed people behind bars however they want to. There are no national standards at all, the way there are with school lunch—and that’s a problem. It’s not enough to say the food is bad. We already know that. But in what ways, specifically? Where should we be looking to improve things?

For the most part the landscape is bleak. The federal system has moved to a “national menu,” and there are dedicated people there working to maximize nutrition, but it’s also resource-starved. In short, there’s no one really pulling together the big picture, and we intend to do that.

More to come as we map out carceral food systems, develop criteria for assessing states and localities, and call out those systems with actual grades. Watch that space!

FPD: What kind of policies, and at what levels, can help improve these conditions? How can regular people be involved in bringing attention to these issues?

Here in DC, we’ve worked with the city council to change local legislation around D.C. Jail food service in order to mandate higher nutrition standards, which advocates are now pressing for full funding for in the upcoming budget cycle. We’re working with the local Department of Corrections to try to put policy into practice and change menus and get more fresh fruits and vegetables served. Legislative change is important, funding is important, but corrections agencies have to actually implement change.

For now, we have to work with states and localities that see the value—and the potential return on investment—in feeding people better. That’s where the decisions are being made that impact how we feed two million incarcerated people every day. Maine is ahead in this area because they have leadership that gets it; corrections officials know that better-fed incarcerated people are healthier, more successful when they come home, and frankly, contribute to jails and prisons with less security problems that are safer for their staff too.

Our goal is to #changethetray, everywhere it needs to change, and I don’t think we’ll do that until we start to change the narrative around prison and jail food. Prison food is literally a joke: It’s what people in the free world say when their food looks really awful. I was served plenty of trays that looked like these below, and I wasn’t laughing.

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FPD: Beyond individual advocacy and learning more, how can our readers help advance the Coalition’s goals?

We should all ask ourselves: "Who deserves a decent meal?" The answer to me of course is: everyone. When we start treating incarcerated human beings like people, by feeding them decently among other things, we will pave the road to ending mass incarceration. Because when incarcerated people have a tray of decent food, cooked with care and served in a dignified way, they will see themselves as still worthy of dignity. That is a starting point for decarceration and a necessary precursor to successful reintegration. Years of dehumanizing meals can make incarcerated people feel less-than-human, and unworthy of redemption.

Food is one key way that the state removes not just dignity, but agency too from people upon incarceration. That also means that food can also be an avenue for reclaiming agency, and reclaiming our sovereignty, to choose better for ourselves. If we don’t give people the ability to make positive decisions around their health, wellness, and nutrition, we can’t expect them to come home and succeed in life. Ask yourself what kind of neighbors you want when they come home. And get more familiar with how we’re treating people behind those walls. Let’s #ChangeTheTray

Learn more about this work here, and hit the “stay informed” button, or follow the Coalition for Carceral Nutrition on LinkedIn here!