The Dublin prison is acknowledging its ethnically diverse population nextweek by offering inmates international dishes. Conor Lally reports
Everybody loves their food. But for prisoners locked up for huge chunks of the day, mealtimes take on a whole new meaning. They are often the only times in the boring daily routine to offer any comfort.
Next week, at Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, the daily grind is set for a lift. Inmates are looking forward to exotic meals each day laid on under the watchful eye of Austin Stack, the jail's head chef, as part of National Ethnic Week.
Stack believes food plays a central role in prison life. "A lot of our inmates would be drug users and their diets would not be great at the best of times. So if the food is good and they enjoy it, then inmates will not be getting sick as often. It also gives them one less thing to complain about. From my experience, if the food is good it keeps a lid on the prison, and nine times out of 10 the place works very well."
The prison cooks all of its food using a complex preparation system developed by NASA in the 1960s. Its attention to detail ensures food is stored and prepared as safely as possible, and it is still used to keep astronauts' food free of contamination.
The increase in the number of foreigners in Mountjoy in recent years has resulted in a culinary windfall for guests of the State in the north Dublin establishment. The menu has been adjusted to suit all palates. Coddle is still the most popular dish, but there is something for everyone on today's prison menu.
"At the moment we have 18 prisoners working in the kitchen," says Stack. "We have seven Chinese, two South Africans, a Frenchman and an Australian guy working alongside seven Irish, so you can see from that that there is now a real mix of prisoners in the wider prison. Because of that we have tweaked the menu in recent years."
John Lonergan, the prison's governor, asked Stack's team to plan a week of special menus for an Ethnic Food Week. Everything from the old reliables to Indian samosas, pork flamande (that is, garnished with braised cabbage, carrots, turnips and potatoes) and Vienna steak (an elaborate hamburger, essentially) is down for consumption.
There are four qualified chefs on the prison staff. Each has a National Certificate in professional cookery. Stack also has a diploma in culinary arts and a National Certificate in gastronomy, which includes training in the preparation of ethnic cuisine. He is a certified catering auditor, too - a vital qualification when you are overseeing the storage, preparation and cooking of food for up to 800 prisoners every day.
All of the food is kept, prepared and cooked using the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, or HACCP, system. NASA developed HACCP at the outset of its space programme. This complex system lays down the most stringent controls possible for the storing and cooking of food. The temperature of all supplies is checked several times from the moment they come into the jail until they are consumed. There are strict rules governing hygiene and related matters. And samples of all foods are kept for at least three days, so they can be tested should anybody get food poisoning.
"Most of the non-national prisoners enjoy Irish dishes like coddle, but we'd also serve up lots of rice and things like curries and stir-fry. We also have a fair amount of vegetarian prisoners, and obviously we would do special dishes catering for them.
"And because we have a few Muslims now, we would also respect that their needs have to be met. So we'd source all of their food from a halal butcher and make sure it is cooked as they require. We wouldn't cook any of their dishes in the same oil as we would the other prisoners'."