Ahmed M was making a speech to members of the Pentonville prison art group. It concerned prison food. “They say a picture speaks a thousand words,” he said. “If only my tastebuds could paint a picture. Being a big foodie has made food an issue for me at HMP Pentonville. Before I even arrived here, for the second time, I was dreading how much weight I would lose.”
When Ahmed M finished reading his text, the art room at Pentonville erupted. Surrounded by walls of art made by past members, the group cheered so loudly that Ahmed could not help but smile. The previous week, the art group had volunteered him to write the introduction to We Are What We Eat, a booklet on prison food which the group had been working on for months. Ahmed’s pithy yet lyrical writing was the final piece of work needed for the project. With more than 50 artworks completed, a long list of quotes agreed on and the inclusion of candid photographs of their wing’s servery, the group had pulled off what at one point had seemed impossible.
At the end of 2021, the Museum of London asked the group to contribute to London Eats, a year-long programme which aimed to collect material from people across London on the subject of food. The art group agreed to take part but made a series of requests. They would contribute artworks as long as they could give an honest account of the food at Pentonville; the museum would pay for their art materials; the art should ultimately be made public; and members could request research to help with their art, to make up for their lack of digital access.
With the help of the prison’s brilliant education team, the group succeeded in producing a compelling publication, which is now available on the Museum of London website. Determined to highlight conditions to which society rarely pays attention, their work speaks powerfully in both images and words.
In Ahmed G’s Reading a Book, a masterfully-drawn cockroach relaxes on one of the prison’s blue plastic plates. The insect is taking in its copy of the group’s booklet, while furious conversations occur around it about food at Pentonville. Not Fit for Human Consumption foregrounds something similarly germ-ridden: artist Paul’s cell toilet, at times the immediate destination for prison food. On the walls, graffiti offers direct feedback on his time in prison: “I WAZ ERE 2022 #starving”.
At Pentonville, food takes on a heightened level of significance, given the small physical worlds people must inhabit. Most prisoners share a 12ft by 8ft cell between two. For the six weeks of the project spent under a Covid lockdown, they were confined to these cells for more than 23 hours a day. As Ahmed M explains, food is “an essential part of a person’s day. What we eat determines how our day goes and how we feel”. Yet according to the group, prison food is so poor, and serving times so odd, people with enough money give up on the food on offer. They use funds from the outside or from prison jobs to buy ingredients from the prison, which they cook in their cell kettles.
While cooking offers moments of community for some, it also divides the prison population into those who can afford to cook for themselves and those who cannot. For vulnerable prisoners, hunger can easily lead to debt and the risk of violence. To compound matters, the tiny cells are not fit places to cook in: vermin are widespread across the prison’s ageing estate; cell toilets are only screened off with loose curtains, if at all.
At the outset of the project, food seemed a neutral, if not dull, topic for the group to examine. But in different ways, each group member showed it to be central to their experience of prison. With his dreamlike art and poetic turns of phrase, Human’s contributions deftly highlight the emotional significance of food. “The smells from people cooking in their cells make me jealous,” he writes. “When I smell fish, I think of home.”
For his part, MIA brings out how the material world changes in a prison environment. A standard-issue kettle, he observes, becomes a holy object. Meanwhile, in his still life painting, Food for Thought, two more cockroaches make their way towards his food supplies.
Inspections of Pentonville have long made clear the need for more government money to be spent there. A 2022 report described the prison as, “a cramped early Victorian relic, with claustrophobic wings and a crumbling physical infrastructure that require constant repair and refurbishment to meet the most basic standards of decency.” I would argue the group’s booklet makes an even more urgent and unsettling case for change. Through their art and texts, the men demand you feel the physical and emotional consequences of society’s refusal to acknowledge the reality of prison life.
• Guy Atkins is an artist-researcher based in London. In creating the booklet, the group also worked with graphic designer Patrick Fry
