On the heels of the revelation that California prisoners have been subjected to drinking arsenic-laden water for years, I wanted to look back at the history of prison food in the U.S. and UK.

In the coming days, I will feature some excerpts from the first prison cookbook – the Manual of Cooking & Baking for the Use of Prison Officers – published in 1902 in England.

Today though, I want to focus on a particularly terrible time with respect to prison food – the Civil War. Years ago, I picked up a small pamphlet at a used book sale. It was called “Yanks, Rebels, Rats, and Rations: Scratching for Food in Civil War Prison Camps” by Patricia Mitchell. I never imagined that I would have occasion to write about some of what I learned from this work. But alas… one never knows where life’s long and winding roads will lead.

In her pamphlet, Mitchell (2003) describes “Civil War prison life, with an emphasis on food.” The first chapter opens with the following quote from a Confederate prisoner’s diary:

“Sept. 13th (1884). Rats are found to be very good for food, and every night many are captured and slain. So pressing is the want of food that nearly all who can have gone into the rat business, either selling these horrid animals or killing them and eating them.”

Mitchell (2003) writes: “Such was life in a Civil War prison. Men coped with their incarceration to the best of their ability, eating what was available, trying to turn gut-wrenching circumstances into some semblance of normalcy by making a pest plague part of their diet.”

During the Civil War more than 400,000 soldiers were imprisoned for periods ranging from days to years. A soldier who was a prisoner at Johnson’s Island described the food there as follows:

“Bread made of inferior flour, which was occasionally sour, was issued. The meat was rusty bacon or beef-neck. Twice in one year we had good cuts of beef, but it was so far decayed as to be offensive. Occasionally we had a few worm-eaten peas, and twice I saw some small potatoes…Rats were caught in and about the sinks, and sold freely. The slop-barrels were raked, and bread-crusts were fished out, to be dried in the sun and eaten.”

A Virginia Rebel, Luther Hopkins, described the diet at Point Lookout, Maryland:

“The food, while good, was very scant. Breakfast consisted of coffee and a loaf of bread, the latter under ordinary circumstances, with vegetables and other food, would probably suffice for two meals. The loaf was given us at breakfast, and if we ate it all then we went without bread for dinner. If there was any left over we took it to our tents…and saved it for the next meal.

The dinners consisted of a tin cup of soup (generally bean or other vegetable), a small piece of meat…on which a little vinegar was poured to prevent scurvy. My recollection is we had no other meal…[W]e were always hungry, and the chief topic of conversation was the sumptuous meals we had sat down to in other days…”

A Northern soldier in Danville, Virginia, found “rat dung in the rice, pea bugs in the peas and worms in the cabbage soup.” Michigan soldier John Ransom reported on food at Pemberton prison in Richmond, Virginia, “The ham given us to-day was rotten, with those nameless white things crawling around through it.”

To understand what would lead men to eat some of the “food” discussed above, one only needs to read the words of Randolph Abbott Shotwell, a Confederate prisoner of war at Fort Delaware:

“For three weeks I have not been comfortably warm during the day; nor able to sleep over two hours any night; have not tasted warm food; have not been free from the pangs of actual hunger any moment…How strange a thing it is to be hungry! [A]ctually craving something to eat, and constantly thinking about it from morning till night, from day to day, for weeks and months!”

This is the context within which prisoners can happily eat rats, cats, dogs, and rotten food.