Soylent Brown

Dinah wanted me to talk about the alleged Texas cannibal that PETA is using to promote vegetarianism.

I have to say, cannibalism is not nearly as interesting as what's being served on the prison menu these days.

I've eaten in the officer's dining room, and it's an experience. Most of the bugs stay on the walls but occasionally you see a little baby bug crawling along the edge of the salad bar. The inmate workers who serve the food all wear gloves and hair nets. I really don't notice the tattoos anymore. They're friendly and polite. They ask if you want the soggy vegetables or the dry white bread or they'll ladle a few scoops of thick sludgy soup into a styrofoam cup for you. On fried chicken days the line is always long, but they still ask if you want extra fries with that. There's always enough little ketchup packets to go with the fries. On non-chicken days, they have a brown square of some meat-type thingie. I'm still working on that one, trying to figure out if it's from the land, from the sea or from the air. At this point I just call it Soylent Brown.

One of the kitchen cadre workers told me that Soylent Brown is a staple of the inmate diet. It's from the food contractor, who I guess buys it by the truckload. For inmates who want a vegetarian diet I guess they can be reassured---my cadre worker tells me Soylent Brown is 90% soy and ten percent meat flavoring, according to what's listed on the box.

Several years ago there was a science fiction movie called Soylent Green. Like all great science fiction movies it starred Charlton Heston. It was set in the future when human overpopulation and global warming had killed off all the world's resources, and the entire human race was dependent on a type of food called Soylent Green. To make a very long story short, Heston played a detective who eventually discovered that Soylent Green was made out of recycled humans. I've included a UTube link to the crucial scene at the top of this post.

(Incidentally, when people talk about physician-assisted suicide I always free associate to the euthanasia scene from Soylent Green.)

So anyway, most of the civilian staff bring their lunches to work rather than risk the food in the officer's dining room. That worked fine until some unspecified employees (whether civilian or custody staff, I don't know) started smuggling contraband in inside their lunch bags. So then all the employees were required to bring their lunches in using clear plastic containers to make it easier to inspect the food on entry. So fine, everybody gets a clear plastic container.

Then more stuff gets smuggled in. Security rules change. There is a proposal to ban all outside food from coming in to the institution. The civilians are horrified that they might have to choose between starvation (only having a half hour for lunch means you can't really go out to eat) and eating Soylent Brown. We're talking Survivor-type reality show here. We're talking 'I may be forced to eat my co-worker' decisions. Fortunately, the no-outside-food rule gets voted down. Somehow the warden's office still gets to bring in catered food for special events; don't ask.

The bottom line is that news stories about cannibalism aren't nearly as interesting to me as the ever-changing security rules related to prison food. It's one of the things about my job that makes the work consistently challenging.

Death & Hot Fudge Sundaes

I’ve been thinking a lot about death and hot fudge sundaes.

Yesterday, there were no blog entries because I spent most of the day on a train, traveling to and from the funeral for a member of my extended family. His death was tragic and completely unexpected—a healthy man who should have lived for decades more, he died at work from a cerebral hemorrhage.

A few weeks ago, I also lost a patient to a chronic and incapacitating illness. The death was horrible, culminating in pain and cachexia, but it was not unexpected, and perhaps there was, at least for the patient, some sense that death would yield relief.

At any rate, death has been on my mind lately.

So, we try to live life right: there is a list. The list is fairly long, though I think I can summarize at least some of it. Low fat (or, this week, low trans fat), diet, regular exercise, lots of calcium (oops, that may have been last week), no smoking, drink only in moderation—and, please, red wine. Seat belts. No illicit drugs; caffeine (sorry, Clinkshrink), and aspartame are a little lower down on the list but still there. Smoke detectors, definitely, and remember to check the batteries once a month. Multivitamin and baby aspirin, perhaps. Sunblock. And finally there’s the medical screenings: mammogram, Pap smear, PSA, colonoscopy, to name just a few. Hormone replacement therapy is out, fish oil supplements are in. I’m sure you can add to the list.

We grow up listening to directives on how we should live as determined by the medical community, or perhaps by the medical community in concert with the pharmaceutical industry and unclear political agendas. The Food Pyramid, as taught to all our children and described on the back of every cereal box, was never a scientifically-determined recipe for good health, it was voted on by a committee, and it sure sounded good.

The pretext of how to live life right is that if you follow the directives, you get to live a long, healthy, and fruitful (pun intended) life-- if all that exercise doesn’t destroy your joints, that is. The subtexts, however, are ones of guilt, fear, and social ostracism. We live in a society that praises “taking care of yourself,” where foregoing hedonist pursuits and rigid self-discipline are something to aspire to. Of course our neighbor had a heart attack, didn’t you see him chowing down that chocolate éclair the other day? Do you know how many grams of fat are in that thing? And if you aren’t on a low-fat, high-fiber diet, exercising a minimum of four hours a week, then perhaps you deserve to have that recurrence of your breast cancer. We fool ourselves into thinking other people get what they deserve and if only we do it all exactly right, we won’t die. While, as a physician, I won’t encourage anyone to smoke or drive after drinking-- or even to skip the next dose of lipitor-- the truth, I believe, is that we live until we die and we have much less control then we think.

People have many anxieties, as a psychiatrist I get to hear them. Terrorists, bird flu, violent criminals, shark attacks, plane crashes-- we all have things we worry about, many of them are things beyond our control.

I am worried that I will miss a hot fudge sundae. I carry this fear that I will do it all right, follow all the rules, say No to yet another hot fudge sundae—all in the name of healthy living and the pursuit of longevity-- and what if, in the end it doesn’t matter?