Nutrition Behind Bars : Food: Lancaster prison feeds inmates according to American Dietetic Assn. guidelines. It’s not haute cuisine, but it’s done on a budget of $2.45 per person a day.

Jerald Garner starts the day by stirring a paddle the size of an oar through a 75-gallon vat of oatmeal.

No one would ever accuse him of creating haute cuisine, but he can take comfort in the fact that he has a captive clientele. Garner is an inmate and cook at the California State Prison in Lancaster, where he helps prepare meals for 4,000 fellow prisoners daily.

The results, he admits, do not compare to his grandmother’s cooking, “but we have to eat it, too, so we try to do a good job,” said Garner, 35, who is serving a robbery sentence.

Of course, how good could the grub be on a budget allotment of $2.45 per day per inmate? That’s only 10 cents more than the state prison allotment was 14 years ago, according to Dean Crenshaw, a former prison kitchen supervisor who is spokesman for the Lancaster facility.

Nonetheless, the prison cannot let the quality slip too low. “One of the things that causes most prison riots is where the food has been bad,” Crenshaw said. “There are just so few privileges or things to look forward to in prison. They’ve got their mail, their visits and the food.”

Ironically, as the state prison population has dramatically increased over the last few years--from 36,000 a decade ago to 126,000 now--it has become easier to stay on budget.

“Any time you can triple your population and you can buy your food in greater volume, you’re trimming your costs,” Crenshaw noted.

The annual shopping list for just the Lancaster prison includes more than 3 million pounds of ground beef, 1 1/2 million half-pint cartons of milk and the same number of apples.

“Everything is in the thousands, and it goes over into the millions annually,” said Joel Jastrab, the supervising cook.

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Nutritional standards for prison food are set by the state Department of Corrections based on the American Dietetic Assn.’s standard guide for 25- to 35-year-old males, said Don Barker, food administrator for the department. He said the standards call for a diet of 3,700 calories a day, consisting of 15% protein, 55% carbohydrates and 30% fat.

“We don’t have to have a different diet for every age group,” he said. “The older people won’t eat all the food anyway.”

Substitutions are not made for inmates who are vegetarians or who follow religious dietary laws. (Many Muslims and Jews, for example, do not eat pork.) But prisoners avoiding meat will still get an acceptable 2,500 calories a day from the other foods on the menu, Barker said.

A change in prison menus this year reflects the national trend toward curbing fat. In accordance with a change in American Dietetic Assn. guidelines, the amount of meat served to inmates was reduced from 68 to 63 pounds per quarter.

“We’ve reduced the red meat to cut down the fat,” Barker said. “We have increased the grain products and stuff like that to make up for it.”

According to a menu issued by the prison, breakfast today will consist of half of a grapefruit, six ounces of hot grits, three pancakes, a packet of maple syrup, a pat of butter, a carton of milk and a cup of coffee.

The lunch entree is a “turkey Mediterranean” casserole, plus a slice of cheese, a piece of bread, an apple, chips, a cookie and a fruit drink.

Dinner, in celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which was Sunday, was from a “holiday menu” featuring a cheeseburger, green salad, french fries, baked beans, pickles, Brussels sprouts, chocolate cake and coffee.

In the past, the state prisons made use of prepackaged entrees, ready to heat up and serve. To save money, they now make most entrees from scratch.

At Lancaster, as in other modern state prisons, a cook-and-chill food processing system is used to allow the foods to be prepared up to five days in advance.

“Let’s suppose we’re supposed to serve fried potatoes on Monday and Wednesday,” Crenshaw said. “Instead of making a huge mess we have to clean up both days, we just make up one batch.”

It is no surprise that some believe aging does not improve the taste. “Working in the central kitchen is better for me because I’m around it all the time and I get it right off the grill,” said one inmate. “The others are getting the TV dinner stuff.”

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Even though the kitchen work is hard--Garner has built up formidable forearms stirring vats as large as 150 gallons--a job there is highly prized. The oft-present racial and gang-related tensions of prison life are generally absent, according to one inmate. “Whenever you come to the kitchen it is like holy ground,” he said.

There is still plenty here, however, to remind one that the kitchen is inside a prison.

Utensils must be checked out from locked cabinets and more potentially dangerous items, such as knives, are chained to preparation tables. Supervisors taste all food before it goes out, to make sure a disgruntled inmate has not sabotaged a recipe by, for example, dumping a box of salt into a pot.

Once prepared, the meals are placed on plastic trays in an assembly-line fashion by inmates and then passed through a slot in the wall to an inmate waiting in line in the dining room. Workers cannot see who will get which tray.

“In the olden days, if you saw your buddy coming down the line you gave the biggest piece of meat to your buddy,” Crenshaw said.

About 300 inmates can fit into each dining room at the prison, taking assigned seats and eating in 15 minutes. A sign on the wall advises diners that “no warning shots will be fired” if a disturbance breaks out.

And how is the food?

“The portions are smaller and the quality is lower,” critiqued Johnathan Taylor, 20, an inmate who has been working in the kitchen for the past two years. He especially dislikes the cook-and-chill system.

Another inmate worker praised the offerings. “I’ve been in five different kitchens,” he said. “This is the best one I’ve ever seen.”