Prodigy did a three-and-a-half year bid in jail from 2007 to 2011 on weapons charges. On October 11th, he released a cookbook called "Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook" inspired by the meals he cooked up while incarcerated. Prodigy came by the HNHH office recently to tell us about the worst jail food incidents that inspired him to get into cooking.
The first incident occurred on Prodigy's first day -- along with his fellow inmates, he consumed a mixture of crushed ramen noodles, crushed Doritos, and chopped mackerel. "It's really disgusting looking, but it's real popular on Riker's Island," he explains. A couple hours later, he became stricken with food poisoning and started vomiting everywhere before taking a trip to the infirmary.
The second incident occurred somewhere upstate, when he was getting ready to eat dessert. On this particular day, it was bread pudding. "I sit down to eat," he recalls. "And a fucking pube is sitting out the middle of the bread pudding like a birthday candle."
The third incident is one he heard second-hand. There was a cooler filled with juice. After everyone had drank all the juice, they found a dirty rag at the bottom of the cooler. "They be doing foul shit to the food in jail," he says. "There's a bunch of degenerate-ass, crazy, sick motherfuckers in jail. You hear stories like that. Motherfuckers doing weird shit to the food."
Buy Prodigy's jail-inspired cookbook on Amazon.