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This is Joe Arpaio, or Sheriff Joe, or Uncle Joe, or America’s toughest sheriff, or Twitler,
depending on where you get your news, and what your opinion is on whether or not immigrants
deserve rights.
For our purposes though, just think of him as a sort of reincarnated Voldemort, but instead
of half a nose, he now has a nose-and-a-half.
This is Joe Arpaio’s reaction to eating the godless culinary creation called Nutraloaf—which
is, quite possibly, one of only a few things in the world more gross than Joe Arpaio.
Here comes the airplane and oh no, seems he doesn’t like it.
If a big tough guy without a soul can barely gag down a baby bite of this loaf, then it
must be bad.
So bad, in fact, that recently some have argued nutraloaf is so disgusting that serving it
in prison violates American’s constitutional rights.
Now in order to understand such legal claims, we need to take a closer look as to what Nutraloaf
actually is.
Let’s start with the name.
You can learn a lot from a name; look at Half as Interesting—in just three words, I’m
telling you right off the bat that you should probably be doing something else.
The name Nutraloaf is also quite telling.
Now I know you’re thinking, “well hey, anything that starts with Nutra must be good
to eat right?”
Well, tell that to all the people who have died swallowing their NutriBullet blenders.
In this case, Nutraloaf—or as some call it, food loaf, meal loaf, or the loaf—does
technically count as edible, and technically it does have the nutrients to sustain life,
but whether or not that really makes it food is another question.
So, what exactly is inside of a Nutraloaf you ask?
Well, that depends on your local correctional facility’s home recipe, but as a general
rule, there’s a lot of foods in a food loaf.
In Ohio, the recipe calls for salad, spaghetti with tomato sauce, green beans, white bread,
a chocolate chip cookie, and a cup of coffee, milk, or Kool-Aid to bind it.
But like flags, educational achievement, and opinions on the Civil War, Nutraloaf recipes
vary from state to state.
In Illinois, correctional facility cooks replaced Ohio’s cookies with a milder sweetener of
apple sauce mixed with breadcrumbs and garlic powder.
No matter what the combination, you just throw it all in a bowl, then blend, shape, and bake
it into loaf form, and boom, you’ve got a Nutraloaf.
This isn’t your mom’s meatloaf, your grandma’s malt loaf, or your dad’s MeatLoaf, this
is Nutraloaf—a hunk of compressed kitchen trash that looks like it was cooked by a rat,
and not a talking, Pixar-animated rat, just like… a rat.
Now, considering how cheap and easy a food like the loaf is to make, you’re probably
thinking that prisons started dishing loaf to keep food costs down, but good news: you’ll
be relieved to know that, in fact, the nutraloaf was designed in correctional test kitchens
as a form of punishment.
Oh wait, that wasn’t good news at all.
You see, if a prisoner were to break the rules—become hostile, throw a lunch tray, take part in
a pillow fight, start gossiping, reveal Downton Abbey spoilers, etc—they might be punished
with the loaf, served without silverware, at room temperature, tasting like the food
version of a tsunami, which supposedly would help deter future incidents and serve as punishment
without causing bodily harm—well, bodily harm beyond one’s taste-buds or ego, or
sense of identity and self worth that is—and it is this purpose, as punishment, that got
the room temperature loaf into hot water.
The thing is, in the USA we’re having a kind of hard time figuring out where to draw
the line with punishment—I mean some of us are watching The Masked Dancer by choice—and
the taste-bud busting nutraloaf has got caught up in the middle of this reckoning.
In the past few decades, a host of legal cases have questioned if the loaf represents a violation
of the eighth amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment.
These court cases, usually at the state level, have gone both ways—courts in some states
like Arizona, Illinois, and Nebraska have ruled that the loaf is all good since it meets
the nutritional needs of prisoners, while courts in Vermont and Washington, DC have
ruled that if used as a punishment, then the prisoners at least deserve a hearing prior
to being subjected to the loaf.
These mixed results from state to state all stem from the simple fact that it’s pretty
hard to define what exactly is “cruel and unusual.”
You see, unlike the fan-favorite fifth amendment, which set in stone that each and every American
has a right to Double Jeopardy!
At 4pm eastern before the local news, the eighth amendment is far less cut and dry.
If something is cruel and unusual largely boils down to a few questions: is it degrading
to human dignity?
Is it rejected by society?
Is it patently unnecessary?
But those questions are still so wishy washy it’s hard to pin down.
So while it might seem to many of us that a blended loaf of household leftovers at room
temperature might not fit the larger purpose of correcting criminal habits, the law folks
have had a hard time ridding the world of the loaf through legal means.
But legal confusion hasn’t stopped some states from losing the loaf.
Massachusetts, Minnesota, and most recently New York have banned Nutraloaf outright, and
pressure from activist groups have led to a decreasing use of the loaf in prisons across
the US.
So, while lawyers continue the uphill battle to display how gross, mean, and dumb equates
to cruel and unusual, public activists backed by woke twitterers, and now, semi-successful
YouTubers, I guess, have started to turn the tide in the war against the loathed loaf.
If you too have strong feelings about the Nutraloaf and want to make a difference in
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