Did inmates stop liking bacon, or something?
Did pork products spike in price so much that the pork-laden government had to cut back.
Why in the world would the federal prison system eliminate all pork products?
Lisa Rein of the Washington Post reports:
Finally, the government has decided to eliminate pork — from the menu in federal prisonsThe nation’s pork producers are in an uproar after the federal government abruptly removed bacon, pork chops, pork links, ham and all other pig products from the national menu for 206,000 federal inmates.The ban started with the new fiscal year last week.The Bureau of Prisons, which is responsible for running 122 federal penitentiaries and feeding their inmates three meals a day, said the decision was based on a survey of prisoners’ food preferences:They just don’t like the taste of pork.“Why keep pushing food that people don’t want to eat?” asked Edmond Ross, a spokesman for the prison bureau. “Pork has been the lowest-rated food by inmates for several years,” It also apparently got more expensive for the government to buy, although he did not provide specifics.
Ann Althouse asks the obvious question:
Why don’t they just admit they’re doing it to accommodate religion and it’s easier to have one rule that works for everyone than to bother with the complexity of alternative meals for the minority who must avoid pig products?
Sure enough, if you drill down to the bottom of the Post article, you find this:
“In general we welcome the change because it’s facilitating the accommodation of Muslim inmates,” said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights advocacy group. “We hope it’s not an indication of an increasing number of Muslims in the prison system.”Hooper predicted that anti-Islam groups would spin the decision into a case of the federal government acting under pressure from Muslims.“This is just the kind of thing that drives them crazy,” he said. “It will stoke the fires of Islamophobia based on the usual conspiracy theories.”
If religious accommodation were the issue, that’s presumably something that’s been an issue for a long time, and inmates have non-pork meals available already.
It’s beyond strange. We’re not buying the “inmates hate bacon” story.
Featured image via YouTube.
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