Nutrition Inside is a Portland nonprofit that launched last year to improve the quality of food for adults in custody in Oregon prisons. It delivers between 500 and 3,000 pounds of surplus food obtained from farms and hunger-fighting charities to correctional facilities across Oregon each week. The organization is volunteer-based and led by a group of current and former students from Lewis & Clark College. Co-founder Aidan O’Connor joins us for a conversation about the organization’s work. Also joining us is Noelle St John, an advisor to the organization who was formerly incarcerated at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland-based nonprofit Nutrition INSIDE launched last year with a pretty straightforward mission: to improve the quality of food for adults in custody in Oregon prisons. One year in, it now delivers anywhere from 500 to 3,000 pounds of surplus food to prisons across Oregon every week. It gets that food from farms and hunger fighting charities. The organization is volunteer-based and led by a group of current and former students from Lewis & Clark College.
Aidan O’Connor co-founded the nonprofit. He joins us now, along with Noelle St John; she is an advisor to the organization who was formerly incarcerated at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Noelle St John: Thank you.
Aidan O’Connor: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Miller: Noelle, first – When you were behind bars at Coffee Creek for seven years, can you describe what meals were like? Average meals?
St John: I think that a lot of people have this kind of stereotype – and it is kind of true – about the food that they feed you in the prisons. It’s a lot of carbs, not very nutritious, a lot of it is expired or some of the labels even say, “for inmate consumption only,” which you can only guess what that might mean. And it’s depressing to try to heal yourself when you’re also trying to feed yourself,.
Miller: Were there particular meals that you or fellow adults in custody thought of as the worst ones? Sort of notorious meals, but that you would have regularly?
St John: Yes. They call this like “the kitchen sink soup,” and it’s like everything that has been on the menu for the last three days goes into one pot. It’s basically a soup that you eat and you can only imagine what ends up being in there.
Miller: So we don’t have to imagine, what kinds of things would be in it?
St John: They would put, like, macaroni salad with stroganoff and corn that was served like four or five days ago.
Miller: Macaroni salad with mayonnaise?
St John: Yeah, and it would be all put together in one thing. It would be these little beef pellet things, like dog food almost. It was very, very, very depressing.
Miller: Were there any meals people looked forward to?
St John: Holiday meals, I think, because Nutrition INSIDE, they would donate food. So we would get maybe pears, watermelon or something – which was a huge thing – or extra vegetables or something like that. I think people really looked for the fresh foods during that time and I think that’s why it was so important during the holidays,
Miller: And those were special occasions.
St John: Special, like that was a maybe for the holidays thing. They might not have something one year, so it was never a guarantee to get anything special like that.
Miller: There are a lot of issues … We’ve talked to folks in prison and who’ve spent time in prison over the years a number of times, and food is just obviously one piece of life when you’re incarcerated. But if you can separate it out, what do you think the food that was served to you … how do you think that affected your life when you were in prison?
St John: Oh, it was huge. You might think of it as just food, but when you get the same stuff every single meal and it’s not good, it’s not good for you, you kind of regret … you actually don’t wanna go eat anything that they serve you, so you kind of avoid the chow hall. You avoid hanging out with people, cause you can only see people sometimes when you go into the cafeteria. Then you start to isolate yourself, as well, because you’re not seeing everybody during the day. You avoid the cafeteria with everything you can.
I think that when you’re trying to heal mental health issues, which is what gets a lot of the women in prison into there, having something to look forward to makes a huge difference. I’ve had to serve moldy sandwiches to people before, when I used to work in the kitchen. I was told I was gonna be put into segregation if not served.
Miller: Oh, you said we shouldn’t be doing this, or …
St John: Yeah, well, obviously we opened the cheese and there was like mold all over it. And I told the kitchen coordinator, which is a staff hired from the outside. I was like, “there’s mold on the grilled cheese.” And she was like, “well, either you serve it or you go to segregation.” And segregation is … you literally get an hour out of your cell, maybe, a day. To take a shower, they put you on an orange leash and they take you there, and you’re handcuffed while you’re taking a shower. It’s very degrading.
Miller: So you serve the moldy cheese.
St John: Yep, and quietly told people that there was mold in the sandwiches, and just kind of went about my day.
Miller: Aidan, my understanding is that you did a survey of people who are currently serving time in Oregon prisons – this was about a year ago – asking them about their food experiences. What did you hear?
O’Connor: Yeah, I did that survey at six different correctional facilities. And I think, unfortunately, most people think of prison food … they think it’s bad, right? But hearing these really detailed responses about how much it affects them physically, mentally, like Noelle said, people skipping certain days because they know it’s going to be bad, it was just really devastating. I think for me, food is such an important part of my life, so I just could not imagine not having any access to some of the foods I really count on.
Miller: Are there any particular comments that stand out to you most?
O’Connor: I remember one of the guys had told me that he had gotten sick from the food multiple times. I’ve had foodborne illnesses, I’m sure we all have. It lasts for a long time and being ill is really hard. So getting sick, I just can’t imagine not knowing when you’re going to be sick and not knowing to be able to trust the food that you’re eating.
Miller: What did you do with the information you got from that survey?
O’Connor: I was really treating all of the AICs as like a customer, so I was sending out this questionnaire to just see, how bad is the food and how can we make it better? As I’m getting out those surveys, everyone was asking me, “What are you gonna do about the food? Why are we taking these surveys? Is anything going to come from this?” And I told them, I’m working with this food recovery organization at the time, Farmlink Project; they deliver millions of pounds of food all over the U.S., so maybe we can try to start sending food into correctional facilities. That got people really invested and really wanting to support that as much as they could. So then we tried to make that happen, called a bunch of different food providers and had our first delivery into a prison.
Miller: What was the first food that you tried to bring into a prison?
O’Connor: The first food we tried to bring into a prison was a half a pallet of blackberries. It actually came from the Portland Fruit Tree Project and we naively just took it into the correctional facility, CRCI, and thought, we’ll go knock on the door and say, “hey, we have half a pallet of blackberries.”
Miller: Wait, without talking to them in advance? You had hundreds and hundreds of pounds of blackberries, and knocked on the door?
O’Connor: I had talked to them, but I didn’t ever get the confirmed time and date. I had just talked to one of the guys, the food service managers there, and he was like, “yeah, we’d love more food.” And then I brought it by and they were like, “no, we’re not going to take that.” So I had to take it across the street to the Oregon Food Bank, actually.
Miller: Noelle, you’re nodding.
St John: Yeah, I always tell them, too … because Aidan will call me and ask advice or whatever. I’ve talked to a couple of people who work with Nutrition INSIDE and I always tell them to be polite, but be persistent, because you’ll run into a correctional officer who’s having a bad day, who just decides, “I don’t want to take the donated food. I don’t care that you had to set up time to donate food. I’m not doing it.” And until you get to a higher up who’s going to actually put forth the effort to make sure that it happens, sometimes you will get rejected. It’s really disheartening when you know that people need it inside, but you can’t actually give it to them. And you have it. You have this food that’s just waiting for people to experience something different and something that’s gonna help them in a positive way, but you can’t donate it.
Miller: What are the reasons, do you think, for that hesitancy to accept food?
St John: I think that people … for instance, we had, there’s a firefighting crew in Coffee Creek. We had girls fainting from not getting enough nutrition on the firefighting crew. I had my mother donate three boxes of protein bars. And the CO that accepted them said, “St John, we don’t run a homeless camp.” I think that they’re a little bit ashamed, and they don’t know how to let the pride go and say, “We need help in this situation. We need to help the women in here. They deserve the help.” And men, too, deserve the help, and they don’t want to open those doors. They don’t want to admit that something is wrong.
Miller: Interesting, so …
St John: Yeah, I think it’s shame.
Miller: But shame about the …
St John: The handout.
Miller: … the situation of what they’re actually providing to adults in custody.
St John: Yeah, and the handout. They feel like it makes us look bad, them look bad. And it is bad, you know?
Miller: So Aidan, how have you dealt with that? So that first day with the blackberries, the food didn’t go to waste. You took it to the Food Bank. But since then, as I mentioned at the beginning, there could be weeks now where you bring thousands of pounds of food to different prisons all across the state. So what kinds of conversations have followed that first blackberry day?
O’Connor: We set up a system where we have a date, a time and an email. So when we go to the gate or the control room, and we see the CO there, you say, “Hey, Gushard (that’s one of the food service coordinators) we have this email from Gushard that says she wants this food. Here’s the email.” They look at it and they say, “OK, we’ll try to make it happen.” Do we still get turned around? Yes, but that’s been the most effective system for us.
Miller: It’s interesting – Would you say that it’s been harder for you to get food accepted in prisons than to get it donated to you in the first place?
O’Connor: That’s a good question. I think, yeah. I think that that becomes more of a problem that’s more consistent. The donations, in the beginning, it was hard to find them. Then, once we got the first one rolling, more and more people heard about us, and now we’re at a point where we’re kind of at capacity. So more people come to us with donations, but we still have that problem of getting in.
Miller: Do all the folks who are giving food to you – whether it’s that they’ve grown it themselves or this is surplus food in the system – know where it’s going, where you intend it to go: to adults in custody, to people who are behind bars in prisons?
O’Connor: Oh, most definitely, yeah. We tell them what our project is, send them to our website and things like that.
Miller: Has anyone ever said to you, “I’d rather this food go to a food bank than to a prison?”
O’Connor: Oh, I mean, that happens all the time. Just talking about the project, and they’re like, “aren’t there hungry children out there?”
Miller: How do you respond? The answer is obviously, yes, there are hungry children out there. You have a different mission. So what do you say?
O’Connor: Yeah, I say we’re uniquely positioned to have access to correctional facilities, and we’re the only project in the U.S. that’s doing this. Surplus to institution hasn’t been done on this kind of scale. If everybody had that thought, the food would never get better inside of correctional facilities. We’re uniquely positioned to do that, so that’s what we do.
Miller: Noelle, I’m curious how you think about what we just heard from Aidan, that some people have said, “aren’t there hungry kids out there?” And I guess the part that wasn’t explicitly said there, but you can imagine someone who [asked] the question about kids, is, “Don’t those kids deserve this food more than these adults who’ve done bad things?” I imagine that’s sort of the unsaid piece of it.
St John: It is.
Miller: That’s an assumption, but let’s say that someone thinks that. How would you respond to that?
St John: You know, it’s true. There are hungry children out there. I think that there’s more opportunities out here to get children food. I think that there’s not as many for women and men who are incarcerated. I think that that’s the problem. Yes, these women and men have done something that was, for whatever reason – mental health, drug use, domestic violence, all of those things – yes, they got them where they are, but you’re supposed to rehabilitate. That’s the point of prison. That’s supposed to be the point, is to heal people, not punish. They’re going in there; that’s punishment enough. You’re taking away their jobs, their family. Yes, they got themselves there, that’s true, and they’re working on themselves. Trust me, they have to put all the work in.
But, hindering that, even in what some people consider a small way like food – which it’s not, I think it’s very important – it’s not gonna make anybody better. And they’re going to be released. That’s the thing, they’re not gonna be there forever. Most people get out. So, what do you want? Do you want somebody who’s healed or on the way to being healed, getting out, or someone who’s still suffering and didn’t make any progress?
Miller: Aidan, can you give us a sense for what kind of food you’re delivering on any given day?
O’Connor: Yeah, I was going to say this as well. A lot of the food we get is grown for processing, so it needs to be incorporated into meals. It needs to have a big kitchen that they have at correctional facilities so they can make it into meals. So we’re getting donations in the summer – that’s our peak season – of blueberries, blackberries, loganberries, persimmons, avocados, all of this really fresh food. And it’s getting incorporated into meals and it’s making a big change.
St John: Mhmm.
Miller: Noelle, I’m not sure which fruit that he mentioned made you say, “Mhmm,” but was it avocado?
St John: Yeah, it’s like gold in there. The minute I was released, I bought like 15 of them and I only ate avocados for a whole week. Women and men, I don’t know what it is, but we never get avocados, ever. Everybody, everytime they make a wish list or something, in their heads, it’s always, “I want avocado, I want grapes.”
Miller: Have you been inside a prison to see some of the women or men who are the recipients of the food for this project? I mean, have you seen what the reaction is among adults in custody?
St John: No, but being in the garden program and being a gardener that got to grow some of the food in the women’s prison, I got to see people’s expression when they got a tomato for the first time that year, or when they came over to minimum,and they got a tomato from being in medium for eight years. So they’re going to do their last four in minimum …
Miller: Minimum security?
St John: Minimum security.
Miller: So a lower level of security – there, then you could actually have access to fresher fruits or vegetables?
St John: Yes. They just recently made a smaller garden in medium as well, which is awesome. But before women would get moved to minimum, like with four years left, they wouldn’t have any fresh fruit or vegetables at all. When they would come to minimum, I’d hand them a tomato or something, and the change in their face was just incredible. It was like their whole demeanor changed, like they were just like reliving every moment that they’ve had something delicious in their life, and you can just see it changed their whole day. Just a tomato, a small thing that you see every day in the supermarket in stacks.
Miller: Aidan, what about you? I mean, do you get to see the sort of the end result of your work?
O’Connor: Yeah, it’s really funny, I was thinking when you said that. We get a lot of donations from Dave’s Killer Bread; obviously, the story of Dave’s Killer Bread, they really want to support our program. So some of the guys at CRCI – that’s the one here in Portland – will come up to me and say, “Where’s the Dave’s Killer bread guy?”
Miller: They think of you as a Dave’s Killer bread guy.
O’Connor: [Laughter] Yes, and then, “When’s the next time we’re gonna get that?” A guy came up to me and said, “You know, it really makes a sandwich a sandwich. It really changes a burger into a burger. I’ll usually just buy all my stuff off a canteen, but now I’m starting to come to the chow hall just to see if there’s something new there.”
Miller: That’s the first time you talked about the other piece of this, which is spending your own money that’s in your account or that you’ve earned to supplement food. So how does that work?
St John: Yeah. We get these orders every week, and it takes a week for your order to go through, and you spend your own money to put in an order. Imagine if 7-Eleven had, like, their own little grocery list and that’s all you shop from.
Miller: Cup O’ Noodles …
St John: Cup O’ Noodles, ramen, candy. That’s why the weight gain problem is so bad. People who have emotional issues usually turn towards something they can get their hands on, which is food, especially if they have some sort of income. They turn towards that and will just purchase lots of like carby, sugary items to kind of dull the pain.
Miller: Aidan, Noelle mentioned working in the garden program. This is sort of the other half of your work, the Growing Gardens program. What is it and how does it work?
O’Connor: Yeah, so Growing Gardens has three programs. They have Home Gardens, Youth Grow, and Lettuce Grow. Nutrition INSIDE is underneath the Lettuce Grow program. And Lettuce Grow has hands-on garden education inside of all 14 correctional facilities across the state of Oregon.
Miller: And what are you doing with the adults there?
O’Connor: Gardening education. I’m actually doing halftime Nutrition INSIDE, halftime gardening education. We have classes that we’re giving to students where you sit in a classroom and learn about how to garden, and then you actually get to go out and do that in the yard.
St John: And you get a certificate and everything.
O’Connor: Yeah, exactly.
Miller: Noelle, what has it been like for you to do this work, and in some cases, I guess, to go back to Coffee Creek where you were incarcerated yourself for seven years?
St John: Oh, that was the whole goal the whole time. I’d never been in trouble before and I thought, even when I was in there, “I want to come back here.”
Miller: Before you’d served your time and you were let out, your dream was to come back to work there?
St John: Yeah. I wanted people to know that you can do something with your life. I wanted things to be different. I’ve recently been released from parole, so I don’t have to check in anymore. I can get my volunteer badge. I wanna go in there and I wanna teach some type of art class, or show them that you can get out and you can do something with yourself. I think that that really will show people that you don’t have to just get out and act like prison was something shameful. You can share your story and be, not proud of it, but proud of where you came, like how you made it work.
Miller: Noelle and Aidan, thanks very much.
St John: Thank you.
O’Connor: Thank you so much. This is amazing.
Miller: Noelle St John is an advisor for the nonprofit Nutrition INSIDE. Aidan O’Connor is one of the co-founders of the Portland-based nonprofit.
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