Surviving Prison Food at San Quentin, California

Interview with Demond Lewis

By Kelton O’Connor, Director, LUCI

For thousands of Californians serving life in prison, liberty is a distant dream that can only come true if a decades-long odyssey of physical and mental survival is first endured.

Demond Lewis is a longtime neighbor and a friend who is on exactly that type of odyssey. And today, he has agreed to speak with me about his recent efforts to keep himself and his dreams of freedom alive.

I meet Demond at his cell on the fifth floor of West Block on this Sunday morning, April 26th. He welcomes me into his cell with an offer of coffee, as is the usual custom between him and I. And as always, I turn down his polite offer of coffee and pull up a five-gallon bucket as a stool. I situate a pad of paper to take notes as he readies his breakfast and his cup of coffee.

Kelton: Please tell me a little bit about yourself and your relationship to food in prison.

Demond: I’m serving over 100 years for the crime of shooting a man in the leg. I’ve served 24 of those years, and it has not always been a healthy 24 years. You look at a big guy like me, and you think I eat a lot of meat and Top Ramens in here like everybody else. Doing push-ups to stay big and tough. But I’ve had to stay alive. I’ve had to become vegetarian. That’s the only reason that I’m healthy right now.

Kelton: What kind of health issues are you dealing with?

Demond: When I came to prison in my 20s, my main health issues were just other dudes that were pissed off about being locked up. Other guys just like me. But I’m in my 50s now, so now I worry about my numbers — meaning my blood pressure and my A1C. During the pandemic, my numbers got really bad. The access to healthy fresh produce in the facility was almost nothing. So during that time, I ballooned up from 227 pounds to 302 pounds. By 2022, the doctors told me I was prediabetic, and I had high blood pressure.

Dr. Pajong called me into his office and told me that as a diabetic, I would be getting pricked by a needle every day, and I would have a higher chance of depression, amputations, blindness, and just straight up being dead.

Kelton: What kind of treatment did Dr. Pajong prescribe to you?

Demond: He put me on blood pressure medication, and he said I had to change what I ate.

Kelton: How can you change what you eat when the state decides what you eat?

Demond: I actually was not eating the food the state serves us at all. I was eating pretty much only food I purchased at the prison store. When Dr. Pajong found out I was living off store food, he got concerned and told me to bring the receipt from my monthly trip to the store with me next time I came to the doctor's office. He wanted to see exactly what kind of food I was buying.

Kelton: Did you actually do that?

Demond: Yep. I brought my receipt to Dr. Pajong at the hospital here at the prison. He took one look at it and said, “Your head is straight for a train wreck. This food you’re eating is like a train that will run you over and kill you dead.” He told me he was going to cross out all the food items on my receipt that were killing me. He said everything he crossed out, I had to stop eating. When he was done, he handed my receipt back to me. And damn near every item on it had been crossed out.

I asked him, “What am I supposed to eat now?” He told me to eat only the state meals served from the dining hall, and he told me to put my hand up. And when I did that, he grabbed my index finger, my middle finger, and my thumb all in one of his fists. And he shook it, and he told me, “If your hand is all the food on your plate, make sure each meal has this much fresh fruits and vegetables.” This much, he said, shaking my three fingers in his hand. Then he grabbed my ring finger — just my ring finger — and he said, “This much is meat. Just one finger is how much meat you eat in each meal.” And then he grabbed my pinky finger, and he said, “You eat only this much starch.”

Kelton: Wow. Just a pinky finger of starch. That’s all?

Demond: He actually said, “Only half my pinky finger worth of starch.”

Kelton: Do you feel that the meals they serve out of the state dining hall allow you to eat the way Dr. Pajong told you to eat? Consuming just half a pinky of starch and three fingers’ worth of fresh fruits and vegetables?

Demond: Absolutely not.

Kelton: So you’re saying that the doctors at the prison want you to eat a diet for your health and for your survival, and that the food served here doesn’t allow you to follow that medical advice?

Demond: Correct.

Kelton: So Dr. Pajong told you to stop shopping at the prison store, and then stop eating most of what they serve on the dining hall tray. How did you react to that?

Demond: I did what he told me to do.

Kelton: How did you do that? Did you start buying fruits and vegetables at the store?

Demond: [Laughs]

Kelton: I got to ask that question, man. I’m sorry. Just for some of the readers who don’t know how things are in here.

Demond: Okay. Look, there ain’t no healthy food in that store. There ain’t no fresh fruits and vegetables sold out of the prison store. Not anywhere in any prison. That’s just not how it is.

Kelton: Why is that?

Demond: The prison always said that all we want is junk food, so that's all they let us have. But obviously, that ain't true. There's plenty of old men in here, and we care about our health. Lots of young guys want to eat healthy too. And we've been telling them for decades, but they refuse to let us buy fresh fruits and vegetables. It's always been like that.

Kelton: So how exactly are you following your doctor's advice today?

Demond: I barter a lot of my food away. It's not easy, but there's some produce served on our state meals, and if you trade away all the cakes and meats and starchy stuff, you can get a decent amount of fresh fruits and vegetables. And now I'm on the kosher diet, which is a little better, but I still have to barter a lot.

Kelton: When you started to follow Dr. Pajong's dietary advice, how did it affect your health?

Demond: I had to fight to get my health back, but when I stopped eating meat, my numbers got better. I really started to get my weight under control. I got my energy back. Today, my A1C is 4.6. And my other numbers are great. They took me off my blood pressure medication. And I feel way better now.

Kelton: What kind of change did you have to make? For example, what did your average monthly shopping list look like before Dr. Pajong told you to stop eating at the canteen?

Demond: A normal list for me was 10 Snickers bars, 10 bags of M&Ms, 10 Reese's peanut butter cups, two ice creams, two boxes of honey buns — which is 12 total, two boxes of Doritos — which is 16 bags total, four cases of Top Ramen — which is 96 Top Ramen total, 10 meatloafs, 10 bags of instant rice, a bunch of artificial squeeze cheese, and a bottle of fake mayonnaise.

Kelton: You ate that much junk food every 30 days?

Demond: Yes. Think about what that does to you. I was living on a pure 100% junk food diet. No wonder I was dying.

Kelton: Why would you eat a diet like that?

Demond: I never really thought about it. I mean, everyone in prison who can afford to eat at the store just eats from the store. It's normal. The option is just eating state food, and no one wants to do that. Anybody that can afford to eat at the store, that's where they eat. And all the store has, for the most part, is junk food.

Kelton: What would it mean to you if Project Avocado were successful in creating a resident-led healing foods market here at San Quentin?

Demond: It would mean I'd have a better shot at living until I get out of prison. And it would mean a lot to this community. Because I believe other people in this situation I'm in also care about their health just like I do.

Kelton: Do you have anything to say to folks in the community who may not understand why it's so important for incarcerated people to run their own market?

Demond: Why is it the prison store will sell us all the candy we want, but they refuse to sell fruits and vegetables? Incarcerated people have been asking the store to sell us fruits and vegetables for decades, and they always tell us no. So it's time prisoners are able to run a market for ourselves. But we ain't trying to take control of wealth. We're trying to take control of our health. We're trying to take back control of our bodies. Just look at how we wrote the operational procedure for the market. It's a profit-neutral project. It makes no money. It cuts out the middlemen. And it gives our community fresh, affordable produce. So we can heal ourselves.