Which makes the whole discussion rather bizarre. So you don't want meat slop on beans and rice, fine, take two scoops of rice and beans instead without the slop. Don't want pancakes and bacon, fine, take an extra pancake instead. If the servers won't cooperate, trade a slice of bacon to your neighbor in exchange for a pancake.
I suppose you could intentionally sabotage someone by putting bacon in with the beans, so just avoid mixing expensive bacon in with the cheap beans and I think everyone will be happy?
My guess is dietary sabotage is intentional, even if it takes more money and more effort, as a kind of psychological torture. "The guards will beat you if you don't put bacon bits on your salad because they know you're a vegan" type of thing.
(edited to explain, I ate years of institutional food in school lunches, then the Army, and then at University, pretty much my first quarter century of life, and I assumed its "about the same" in prison. Which is very interestingly, apparently, completely wrong. Prison is apparently more like every inmate gets "the" TV dinner today and there's no sharing/trading allowed.)
Someone's been watching too much Hollywood. That's not how food inside works. Your meal is selected for you and given to you in a container, depending on facility. Some prisons have a system similar to what you describe, but inmates' hands are not on the serving equipment and you're only saying "yes"/"no" to things. The facility has strict counts of calories to maintain and putting a serving spoon in the hand of an inmate is a good way to throw a budget away.
In almost all cases in county, the food is already prepared in a plastic container and if you refuse what is offered to you, you do not eat, which means even kosher folks go without for a couple days until the records "catch up."
I suppose you could intentionally sabotage someone by putting bacon in with the beans, so just avoid mixing expensive bacon in with the cheap beans and I think everyone will be happy?
My guess is dietary sabotage is intentional, even if it takes more money and more effort, as a kind of psychological torture. "The guards will beat you if you don't put bacon bits on your salad because they know you're a vegan" type of thing.
(edited to explain, I ate years of institutional food in school lunches, then the Army, and then at University, pretty much my first quarter century of life, and I assumed its "about the same" in prison. Which is very interestingly, apparently, completely wrong. Prison is apparently more like every inmate gets "the" TV dinner today and there's no sharing/trading allowed.)