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Inside the Kitchen of New York City’s Rikers Island

Inside the Kitchen of New York City’s Rikers Island


Luis Reina was getting ready dinner for a crowd: turkey stew, rice and cucumber salad. The recipes have been easy — chop the greens, brown the meat — however the course of was something however simple.

Each field of elements needed to be looked for contraband. The knife was tethered to the counter by a sturdy chain, and the metallic spoons got here from a cupboard flanked by safety guards. The sharp-edged lids from tomato cans needed to be tossed right into a trash can inside a locked cage. Several kitchen assistants have been clad in jumpsuits and punctiliously patted down earlier than they might begin work on the meal — for 3,800 individuals.

Mr. Reina, 56, is a prepare dinner on Rikers Island, New York City’s infamous 415-acre jail advanced in Queens. He commutes two hours from Flatbush, Brooklyn, to arrange meals for the jail inhabitants and workers alongside roughly 50 different cooks within the bigger of two kitchens on the island.

He says he’s pissed off by the poor high quality of the meals, through which each ingredient and recipe has been dictated by the town Department of Correction. Most greens and fruit arrive on the jail canned or frozen. Salt is off the desk, banned since 2014 for well being causes.

“People say the meals on Rikers Island is nasty, and they’re wanting on the cooks,” Mr. Reina mentioned. “I solely prepare dinner what I used to be instructed to prepare dinner.”

But the meals is getting its most vital overhaul in roughly 15 years. A yr in the past, the town obtained a $100,000 grant from the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, a bunch combating local weather change, to develop plant-based recipes for Rikers and retrain its cooks. The outdated menu “was heavy on carbs and heavy on processing,” mentioned Lynelle Maginley-Liddie, the town’s correction commissioner.

This new program — which doesn’t remove meat however incorporates extra vegetable dishes like chana masala and spinach artichoke pasta — is a key mission for Mayor Eric Adams and his Office of Food Policy, who’ve directed the town’s hospitals and faculties to supply extra plant-based meals (to blended evaluations).

Rikers, in fact, isn’t simply any metropolis establishment. Housing roughly 6,600 adults, most awaiting trial and others serving sentences of lower than a yr, the jail has come below a long time of scrutiny for inhumane circumstances and uncontrolled violence. A federal judge lately held the town in contempt for failing to deal with these issues, which can result in a takeover of Rikers by a federal courtroom. The metropolis faces a deadline to shut the jail by August 2027 and substitute it with 4 smaller facilities — a authorized mandate it’s unlikely to satisfy.

In the meantime, the Rikers kitchen by no means sleeps. And a menu overhaul received’t relieve the pains of the cooks’ work — eight-hour shifts confined behind a protracted collection of locked doorways, for a beginning annual wage of $38,858.

Theirs could be a unusual expertise: Although the cooks mentioned they don’t really feel in peril, the specter of violence nonetheless hangs over the advanced. While they work with some detainees, they by no means see the general public they feed.

Yet a number of cooks The New York Times interviewed on the job mentioned they noticed the work as an opportunity to make a distinction within the lives of the detainees, offering them a uncommon reminder of their humanity: a meal.

“We develop into extra reliable due to the meals,” mentioned Mr. Reina, a cheerful man with an understated swagger who has cooked at Rikers for 29 years. “Because they wish to eat higher.”

His job includes rather more than cooking — he considers himself a therapist, teacher and mentor for the detainees who assist in the kitchen. He by no means asks them what they did to finish up at Rikers.

“Anybody might be on the opposite aspect of that fence,” he mentioned. “I don’t judge.”

A co-worker, Tamara Craddock, mentioned mealtimes are “the one connection the blokes need to staying sane.” Food isn’t simply humanizing, she mentioned, however stabilizing; if there have been shortages, there can be riots.

Ms. Craddock, an immigrant from Guyana who commutes in from Flatbush, Brooklyn, recalled the day 4 years in the past when she first arrived for work. She dropped her belongings in a locker, handed via a metallic detector and made the lengthy stroll to the kitchen as gate after gate slammed behind her.

“At first it’s terrifying, coming into it,” she mentioned. During coaching, the cooks are instructed what to anticipate, however “truly experiencing it, it’s completely different.”

She had left a profession in eating places for the stabler hours, well being advantages and pension of a authorities job. She quickly realized that the detainees she labored alongside have been like another co-workers. “I’m a individuals individual,” mentioned Ms. Craddock, 38. “I strive my finest to respect the blokes, they usually return that respect.”

She cheers them up in the event that they get dangerous information at a courtroom listening to. To boost their meals, she mixes ketchup and jelly to improvise a barbecue sauce. “I need them to have a very good day,” she mentioned. “And they arrive in and say, ‘Good morning! Hi Ms. Craddock.’ They have a giant outdated smile on their face.”

She can’t share an excessive amount of: the cooks usually go by solely their final names and don’t talk about their private lives with detainees, for security causes. “You can’t get too comfy, as a result of any person might let you know an actual story and also you’re feeling sorry for them, they usually may ask you to carry stuff in, like contraband,” she mentioned. Above all, “it’s important to not present any concern.”

The environment can really feel constricting, mentioned Kay Fraser, who got here to Rikers 18 years in the past after working as a pastry prepare dinner in a spot that appears a world away: the American Girl Place doll retailer in Midtown Manhattan.

“I at all times say we’re ‘out-carcerated,’” mentioned Ms. Fraser, who generally drives to work from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, along with her daughter, an officer at Rikers. “We come and go as we please however at work, we’re locked in.”

Ms. Fraser, 62, takes a tough-love method with detainees. “I inform them, ‘I’m not your buddy, I’m not your mom, sister, no relative of yours,’” she mentioned. “I’m right here to do a job to one of the best of my means and that will help you in your corrective measures.”

If certainly one of them lands again in Rikers after being launched, “I say, ‘Is your identify engraved on a mattress or a cot in right here?’”

The cooks are excited in regards to the menu overhaul as a result of it includes precise cooking. These days, a lot of their time remains to be spent defrosting packaged meals, like burritos and pizza pockets, that they know detainees don’t like.

“The wagons come again full,” mentioned Janelle Anderson, a Rikers prepare dinner for 10 years. “The majority of the meals goes within the rubbish.”

The kitchen lies deep inside the Anna M. Kross Center, a 47-year-old decommissioned jail separate from the detainee housing, previous lengthy corridors lined with painted handprints, “No Talking” indicators and small home windows going through onto basketball courts and barbed-wire fences.

On a current Tuesday morning, Prestly Rhynie was chopping cucumbers with a blunt blade, the clang of the knife’s chain reverberating with every slice.

The detainees have been taking a break, consuming turkey stew and boiled eggs whereas passing round a bathtub of mayonnaise. One did pull-ups from the door body of the walk-in fridge. (The solely detainees allowed to work within the Rikers kitchens are nonviolent offenders with sentences of a yr or much less or who’re awaiting trial, and they’re restricted to duties like carrying containers and cleansing counters. They make $1.45 an hour.)

The stew had already been portioned into resort pans and positioned in wagons that might quickly head to the assorted jail buildings, the place most detainees are served in recreation rooms. Those who’ve dedicated violent crimes whereas incarcerated get their meals on sealed trays of their cells.

The cooks have been educated to make dishes like butternut squash macaroni and cheese and vegan sancocho, a beloved Puerto Rican stew, by Hot Bread Kitchen, the nonprofit managing the brand new program. The preliminary targets are modest: The new plant-based dishes will probably be included into two meals per week, with the aim of accelerating to 4 meals in 9 to 12 months.

In the dish room, on one other day, a bunch of detainees washed and wiped down pans. One of them, Jonathan Harvey, had been at Rikers simply shy of eight months and was set to be launched the next week, in time to spend Thanksgiving together with his household, he mentioned.

He labored within the kitchen so he might purchase snacks from the commissary. “Sometimes,” he mentioned, “I simply don’t wish to eat this jail meals.”

Diamond Wynn, a lead culinary teacher at Hot Bread Kitchen, desires to alter that mind-set. In the break room, she taught the cooks in regards to the variations between roasting and baking, and provided a tray of macaroni and cheese for them to pattern.

“If you wouldn’t eat it your self, don’t serve it,” she instructed them.

Ms. Wynn and her crew have skilled the restrictions of the Rikers kitchen firsthand as they develop recipes. No tremendous chopping; the knives are boring and time is brief. No sauces that require mixing; there’s no industrial-size blender. And no salt.

“I genuinely don’t assume that any of the meals they produce are dangerous or not tasty,” she mentioned. “They simply lack salt.”

Ms. Wynn’s workaround is utilizing spice mixes that include salt, like jerk or taco seasoning, that are one way or the other allowed within the kitchen — a paradox she finds irritating.

“It reveals the blind spots in dietary evaluation,” she mentioned.

She has the cooks follow every recipe with and with out sure elements to allow them to adapt if shortages come up. Her crew lately performed tastings with detainees, who she mentioned loved dishes like Rasta Pasta and Cajun rice that have been spiced generously and reminded a few of dwelling.

But she has reservations about this system. “A authorities mandate for meals to be plant-based is already intimidating and tough for people who in any other case desire animal protein of their diets,” she mentioned. “Some even gave the suggestions {that a} meal with out meat triggers reminiscences of poverty.”

Mr. Reina, an immigrant from Panama with six grown youngsters, has cooked at Rikers lengthy sufficient to recollect when the jail served dishes like fried rooster, pizza and roasted pork chops — earlier than it shifted towards more healthy dishes in 2010 (seemingly a response to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s 2008 government order that metropolis businesses observe sure dietary requirements for the meals they serve).

Mr. Reina will often veer from a recipe and perk up a dish with slightly soy sauce or black pepper.

No matter what he cooks, detainees complain. “In my 29 years, you’ll be able to’t please them,” he mentioned. “This isn’t Applebee’s, however we do one of the best with what we have now.”

He has his personal complaints. His wage has risen solely $15,000, to $49,000 a yr, in almost three a long time of labor. He’s been cursed at by those that dislike the meals. And he’s unsettled by a number of the tales he hears about Rikers.

“There is plenty of inhumane stuff: violence and chopping and medicines,” he mentioned. “Trust me, it does occur.” But he mentioned he has stayed as a result of he loves his co-workers.

In a yr and a half, Mr. Reina plans to retire. “Half my life I’ve been coming to this island,” he mentioned. Spending this a lot time inside has given him an itch to journey — to go on a cruise, go to his household in Panama and eat pasta in Italy.

“You wish to get out and discover,” he mentioned.

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Written by EGN NEWS DESK

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