A hot breakfast was the standard prison breakfast for many, many years for the same reasons that oatmeal
is a popular breakfast food on the outside: it's healthy, filling and inexpensive. But porridge is off the menus in British prisons, replaced with a
"breakfast pack" that costs only 27p per prisoner (about 46¢ US). The reason for the change, according
to audit investigators, was "because cooked breakfasts are no longer part of contemporary eating habits in the
wider community". Since the prison officials are so on top of food trends, they found it necessary to remove the
offending breakfast cereal from their menus.
It is highly that the change was made to save money. While the breakfast pack - which includes 1 cup of breakfast cereal, two slices of bread, jam or marmalade, margarine, tea bags, instant coffee and a small milk cartoon - might cost slightly more per serving than oatmeal, it is given to the prisoners the night before and prepared and eaten by them in the morning. This eliminates the need to have the kitchen staff on hand for one meal every day.
An average of £1.87 (about $3.25) is spent to feed each prisoner three meals a day. A long-term inmate in Leeds said, in response to inquiries, that both breakfast and dinner were cold meals, meaning that the prisoners only had one hot meal every 24 hours, at lunch. He said that he remembers "20 years ago in prison ... you would get a lot more."
Another article claimed that the oat grain used to make the prisoner's porridge came in huge bag labeled "Canadian Pig Meal, Grade 3," which put off fewer people than the breakfast packs.
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