Udgita Pamidigantam
The first thing you notice is the sound. Stainless steel trays meeting the lip of the conveyor belt with a rhythm too precise to be accidental. The line moves like a metronome. Scoop, slide, stack, repeat. Each motion practiced enough to look effortless, though nothing here is.
The kitchen hums with fluorescent light and industrial refrigeration. My hairnet keeps slipping. The others, the men in khaki scrubs with Department of Corrections stamped across the back, don’t seem to mind the heat. The air smells like salt and wet cardboard.
A man named Reese stands at the head of the line, portioning out the main dish. He doesn’t speak much. When he does, his voice has a soft composure that I don’t expect here. His scoop is always level, even when the ladle trembles in his hand. “Keep it neat,” he tells the new guy beside him. “They count it after.”
We are told this work teaches responsibility. It’s supposed to build skills, restore dignity, offer something like care. But the care looks like this: ten hours on your feet, wearing gloves that never quite fit, doling out lukewarm protein substitute that arrives in vacuum-sealed bags labeled Beef Flavor #3.
“Three ounces,” the supervisor reminds us, pointing to the scale that sits between the rice bin and the beans. Every ounce over is an infraction. Every ounce under, a complaint. Care, here, is a matter of measurement.
There’s a kind of choreography to the line. Scoop, drop, slide, stack. The trays glide down the belt toward a man who seals them in cling film. When the film catches on the edge, he curses softly, peels it back, and starts again. Behind him, a woman counts trays in stacks of twenty-five. She keeps a clipboard pressed to her stomach like a shield.
Reese hums sometimes, low enough that I can’t tell the tune. When I ask what it is, he says, “Something from before.” I don’t ask before what.
Lunch is the same as yesterday and the day before: soy patty, mashed potatoes, white bread, canned pears. Tan on tan, beige on beige. The color scheme never changes.
Someone drops a tray, and the sound is sharp enough to make everyone pause. The supervisor looks up, expressionless. “Start over,” he says. We scrape the spilled food into the waste bin. It’s still warm, steaming faintly.
In the pause that follows, I think about what it means to feed people you’ll never see eat. About what it means to prepare nourishment designed solely for containment. Food that sustains the body but not the person.
The line starts again. Scoop, slide, stack.
When I was assigned here, I thought it would be quiet work. A place to keep my head down. But quiet is a myth in carceral kitchens. The hum of machines is constant. The clang of trays punctuates every hour.
Even the silence between shifts feels mechanical and timed.
At 10:45, we stop for a break. We aren’t allowed to eat the food we prepare. The kitchen has its own stash of peanut butter packets and white bread. I spread the peanut butter with a plastic knife, the same motion I’ve done all morning. Reese sits across from me, his hands still gloved, eating slow. He doesn’t remove the gloves even to wipe his mouth.
“You ever think about what happens to the food after?” I ask.
He shrugs. “It goes where it goes.” His answer lands heavier than he means it to.
When we return, the temperature has risen. The floor is slick with condensation. The supervisor announces that tomorrow we’ll switch to the dinner line. Same process, different hour. The trays will leave the kitchen at 4:00 p.m., reach the units by 4:15. Dinner at a time when sunlight still clings to the windows.
I imagine the trays moving through the prison like a bloodstream, distributing calories instead of oxygen. Each portion carefully calibrated to sustain life, not to enrich it. Care, as maintenance. Maintenance, as survival.
At the end of the shift, we scrub the counters with bleach. The smell burns my nose. Reese hums again. The supervisor inspects each surface with a flashlight, nods, signs off on the sheet. “Good work,” he says. The words sound like closure, but the work will start again in less than twelve hours.
Before leaving, Reese takes one extra pear cup from the line and slips it into the trash bag. A small rebellion. Or maybe a gesture of care, disguised as waste.
When the last tray disappears into the loading cart, the hum of the belt stops. I remove my gloves, peel them off finger by finger. The skin underneath smells faintly of metal.
Outside, the air is cold. I can still feel the rhythm of the line in my wrists: scoop, slide, stack. Somewhere behind the walls, the trays are being unwrapped, the contents cooling fast. The body eats because it must. The institution feeds because it must. Between those two necessities lies a space that could almost be mistaken for care.
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Udgita Pamidigantam is an undergraduate student and researcher at Johns Hopkins University studying Molecular and Cellular Biology and Medicine, Science & the Humanities. Her work centers on the narratives of care and healing that emerge within systems of constraint.