BEHIND BARS

Vegetarianism: religion or lifestyle?

By Amrita Narayanan Bruce

Malinda Stuart has subsisted on a diet of bread and corn for two weeks now, and she is showing no signs of changing her lifestyle. The 20-year old, an inmate at the Cumberland County Jail, has been vegetarian since the age of 13 and has responded to the lack of vegetarian options at the jail by, well, eating around the problem. “There’s no way I’m going to eat meat,” says the earnest, petite young woman shaking her head emphatically, “I just eat the sides, mostly I eat a lot of bread.”

Vegetarian meals are available at the CCJ, but only for medical or religious reasons. Stuart has approached different pod-officers on two separate occasions but has received the same answer — her vegetarianism is a choice, not a religious or medical necessity, and her preferences cannot be accommodated.

Explaining her reasons for being vegetarian, Stuart says as a child she stopped eating all meat because she never liked the idea of killing animals for food. “I used to work with some people who lived out in the country and they were always talking about killing and skinning rabbits for food,” she says with distaste. “I’m like, why don’t you pick on something that can fight back?”

While she won’t trade places with her carnivorous counterparts, Stuart is certainly not above trading food. “Usually I get the full meal, then I give some of the others my meat and they give me their bread,” she says. At the time she was interviewed, however, Stuart had been locked down (confined to her room) for a period of 48 hours for the misstep of not wearing her prison-issue bracelet to visiting hours. Since meals are delivered to locked-down inmates who must then eat in their rooms, Stuart has been restricted solely to her own rations for the past two days. “It’d be great to have some mac and cheese or a veggie burger,” she says wistfully.

“As a rule we don’t provide special diets unless it’s for medical or religious reasons,” says Sheriff Dion of the Cumberland Country Jail, who agreed to take a second look at this particular situation to see if the issue could be resolved. Being vegetarian or vegan (a vegetarian who also eschews dairy products) “is not a religious affiliation as far as the correctional department is concerned,” says Dion. “It’s an ethical decision.”

Another reason for this is that the jail is a short-term facility. The jail deals with a transient population and its administration must serve the largest common denominator. The CCJ attempts to do this by providing a wide variety of foods and eliminating pork products from the menu in an effort to accommodate Islamic and Jewish sentiments.

The jail budget is also a significant issue, and Dion says he would have to answer to the taxpayers if he made them pay for the inclusion of vegetarian meals in the regular CCJ menu. “I’ve already been criticized for allowing yoga in the jail by people who thought it was frivolous, although I personally think it’s a tangible outlet for stress,” says Dion. (I teach that program, which is free.) “That criticism was from quite a liberal and sympathetic quarter,” he adds, saying he can only imagine how much worse the backlash might have been if the activity actually cost the jail money (which vegetarian entrées would do).

The issue raises some interesting questions. What about people who belong to religious groups that are not recognized as religions? The CCJ boasts an impressive list of “recognized religions,” including some obscure to Mainers such as Shintoism and Taoism, but Dion admits that certain groups are excluded. “Wiccan beliefs are not considered a religion,” he says.

Another problematic population are people who have been raised, say, Christian, and have chosen to adopt another religion, say, Buddhism. The adoption would not take place through an official conversion (there is none), but rather through the adoption of certain ethics and lifestyle choices mandated by the religion — like being vegetarian or meditating. For such a person, there would exist no official proof of their Buddhism except in their belief system. “If Stuart was Buddhist and needed vegetarian meals for that reason, she would have to take that debate up with the chaplain,” says Dion who defers to the chaplain on matters of religiously mandated meals.

And then there’s the growing population of people whose secular beliefs form the basis of their identity.

As far as Stuart is concerned, if she continues to survive on a diet of bread and corn as she has been doing, this could very likely develop into a medical issue (read: problem of malnutrition).