Another Alternative: Eat Shit and Die

One too many bouts of flatulence and cramping has led a Florida inmate to sue the Department of Corrections, arguing that the prison’s soy-based turkey dogs and sloppy Joes amount to cruel and unusual punishment.


Eric D. Harris, 34, who is serving a life sentence for sexual battery on a child, said the soy in his prison chow is threatening his health by endangering his thyroid and immune system.


As an inmate at the Lake Correctional Institution, near Orlando, Mr. Harris, a former paralegal, has few culinary choices. He can eat 100 grams of soy protein a day, use his own money to buy food at the commissary or eat a vegan diet, he said in the lawsuit, which was filed in state court in Tallahassee and which The Orlando Sentinel reported on this week.


Gretl Plessinger, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections, said inmates can choose an alternative vegan meal if they do not want soy. “We have a constitutional obligation to feed them healthy, nutritious food, but we don’t have an obligation to feed them beef,” she said.


“Excessive soy can be toxic to the thyroid gland,” said Sally Fallon Morell, the president and treasurer of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates a diet of whole, largely unprocessed foods and food high in saturated fats, and is publicizing the lawsuit. “It can have hormonal effects.”

Yeah, we wouldn't want to affect your hormones. You might lose control and do something crazy, like sexual battery on a child.

Oh, wait, you did that when you were normal, before the state started fucking with your thyroid. My bad.

To hear that you've got to serve a life sentence with tummy troubles, … Well, my ass bleeds for you.

Of course, I mean that only figuratively. Your victim would probably have to end that turn of phrase with “literally.”

Oh, right, you did sexual battery on a child, not sexual assault, which if this source is to be believed, means you didn't do any penetrating violations of the bleed-y kind. Nope, you went right up to the sodomy abyss, and only looked in. I hope they commended you for your restraint during sentencing; I'm guessing from the life sentence, they didn't: Tough break, that.

But—as is so often the case—I digress.

Where was I, then?

Oh, yeah, I can see why you balked at eating soy and taking up a vegan diet. I had to do that for health reasons once, and it was not fun.

While you're being forced to adopt this dietary change, too, let's be candid, and admit the obvious difference. Side effects from medication forced me to adopt a soy-heavy diet; the state of Florida is forcing you to. And why? Because you couldn't keep your hands (and other parts) off our children even when we—the rest of society—politely asked you not to. (We passed a law and everything.)

If your dining choices are now limited because you couldn't not bad-touch children despite our protests, I'm sorry, but I don't really give a shit.

Yeah, I think that was my point.