A taste of freedom: in-cell group cooking and culinary redemption in an Israeli prison

The prison’s culinary sphere is a vibrant social arena where the institution’s power structure and dynamics are exposed, enforced, negotiated, and restructured. In Israel, the practice of cooking inside the prison cells is not officially permitted (or forbidden) but is generally tolerated by the prison staff. People in Israeli prisons form ethnic-based in-cell cooking groups, allot resources, and invest skills, time, and effort in cooking their own meals. In this article, we explore the meanings attributed to in-cell group cooking by people incarcerated in Israeli prisons. We applied interpretive phenomenological analysis to interviews with 18 people in prison. Three themes emerged from the participants’ narratives: (1) in-cell group cooking as an ambiguous practice, (2) the cooking group as a hub for conflict resolution and maintenance of community life, and (3) the cooking group as an opportunity to preserve some aspects of out-of-prison identity and freedom. In the discussion, we introduce the term "culinary redemption" and argue that prison food is a powerful marker of “being inside,” while the substantial efforts invested by people in prison to improve their diet and create alternatives aim at changing their self-perception from inmates to free persons, at least to a certain extent.