From the four large pots of food simmering on Rosa Tapia’s stove, no one would guess that she shares a home only with her son. Every five days, the retired receptionist cooks for her husband, Francisco Robles Valle, who since April 2013 has been incarcerated at the Neza Bordo prison near her home in Nezahualcóyotl, Mexico State. The food, or rancho, served in Mexico’s penitentiary cafeterias, is notorious for meager portions of poor-quality, often spoiled food. The institutions rarely provide potable drinking water, forcing inmates to purchase bottled water, either from the commissary or from other inmates, at several times the normal cost. To ensure their incarcerated relatives eat a sufficient, healthy diet, women like Tapia take it upon themselves to make up the difference.

Cooking is just one way that Tapia supports her husband. Stacks of photocopied legal documents, records and clippings cover every surface of her living room. As she fills a plastic bag with scrambled eggs in a red chile sauce, Tapia recounts the details of her husband’s case: On a Monday morning in July 2013, Francisco was walking home when a fight broke out in a nearby shantytown. After a stray rock hit the then-61-year-old, emergency vehicles arrived to take him to the hospital. After he was treated, the police took him back to the settlement, where a man had been shot while Francisco was in the hospital. There, the police arrested Francisco and seven other men for the homicide, accusing them of being part of a kidnapping gang. Despite the lack of evidence against him, Francisco was sentenced to 43 years and nine months in prison for homicide.

After a string of lawyers failed to exonerate her husband, Tapia gathered the evidence for Francisco’s innocence. Her appeals have been unsuccessful, but she can at least aid her husband by feeding him.

One week’s menu includes spaghetti, beans, pork in red sauce, and a habanero salsa. Tapia delivers the food along with a kilo of tortillas, five pieces of sweet bread, and five bread rolls. She used to bring him a jug of water each week, but after draining her retirement savings on legal fees, she can’t afford it anymore.

Mexico’s prison system subcontracts food services out to companies that are known for skimping on food quality. A 2019 investigation by journalists Laura Sánchez Ley and Karla Casillas revealed the systematic nature of the problem: Corporativo Kosmos, the company that monopolizes contracts for institutional food services, is known for delivering rotten meat crawling with maggots, with 28 percent of the food provided failing to meet minimum hygiene standards. Contaminated meals occasionally cause mass food poisoning events: In 2022, 400 women fell ill after eating rotten food in a federal prison in the state of Morelos. In a prison system that disproportionately punishes people living below the poverty line, and where nearly half of inmates are imprisoned before being sentenced, the diet represents yet another form of dehumanization. Home-cooked meals, in turn, become a lifeline to the outside world.

“Food is an expression of the love that we have, hope, that I’m waiting for you,” says Lucía Alvarado, who became an activist for prisoners’ rights after her brother was incarcerated. “Maybe I don’t have that much money, but I’m going to make you these eggs, these beans, I’ll bring you this stew on your birthday because it’s the way I can show you that I love you.”

On visiting days at Mexico City’s Reclusorio Oriente, a street market catered to inmates’ needs pops up across the street from the prison. Visitors lug shopping bags packed with homemade stews and salsas, and stands, run by civilians, sell a wide array of prepared food packaged according to the prison’s requirements.

Rules for visitors vary from prison to prison, but guards enforce strict regulations on what food can enter. Typically, food must be packaged in clear plastic bags or styrofoam containers. Fruit and vegetables are restricted, as they can be fermented into alcoholic beverages. Meat with bones is prohibited, for fear of prisoners turning bones into weapons. Birthday cakes require a special permit and must come pre-sliced.

Inmates with some economic means can supplement their diet by purchasing food inside the prison, often sold by other prisoners. Flor Martinez Padilla, who works night shifts at a supermarket butcher counter, visits her husband at the Reclusorio Oriente on Tuesdays and Saturdays. She and her husband were childhood friends who reconnected while he was in prison. Before that, Martinez Padilla’s husband ate cafeteria food; now, she supports him by bringing flan and cooked food that he then resells inside, giving him a rare source of income.

“He has eaten the cafeteria food, but they cook it again so it tastes better,” she says. “If they serve hot dogs, it’s with boiled water. What the [prisoners] do is drain [the hot dogs] and fry them with tomatoes.”

In their deliveries of rations, families offer their relatives more than just flavor. They also seek to round out a diet lacking in fresh produce and whole foods. On a weekday in July 2023, Verónica Carmona purchased food in plastic containers to take to her friend Michell, a transgender woman incarcerated in the men’s prison. Carmona is a lawyer, and even before Michell was incarcerated, Carmona saw how the cafeteria provisions took a toll on her clients’ health.

“A lot of people get sick with scary stomach infections when they get here,” she said. The diet’s nutritional deficiencies cause all kinds of health conditions: “You see it in their skin, in their hair, which is what most reflects those deficiencies. [They have problems with] their kidneys, gastritis, colitis.” (The Secretary of Citizen Security and Protection, which oversees the federal prison system, did not respond to a request for comment regarding the food’s impact on prisoners’ health.)

She tries to vary what she brings Michell each week. Sometimes Michell asks Verónica to bring extra food to share with inmates who don’t receive visitors, whether because their loved ones are far away or can’t afford to visit or because they lack family ties. LGBTQ prisoners, Verónica notes, tend to receive fewer visits, from friends rather than relatives and nieces and nephews instead of their children.

Long standard practice, born out of necessity rather than an organized movement, the tradition of bringing meals to prison was jeopardized during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns. As the virus spread through Mexico, prisons across the country closed to outsiders, and families could no longer deliver food to their loved ones. Alvarado, then the director of the Center for Holistic Support for Families of People Deprived of Liberty (CAIFAM by its Spanish initials), part of the human rights organization Documenta, recalls that the shutdown sent families into a panic. Alvarado fielded a barrage of phone calls and text messages from women across the country concerned for their relatives’ well-being.

“A lot of them were desperate,” she says. “They couldn’t go to the prison, they couldn’t take food or money. If out here it was complicated to get medicine or get into a hospital or get oxygen, I didn’t even want to think about what was happening inside.”

The organization sent a poll to families of inmates, asking about their relatives’ situations and their concerns. Food was a recurring theme. Alvarado began calling up the women and asking them what they cooked for their loved ones who are incarcerated. Over the phone, 20 women from across the country narrated step-by-step the process of preparing the dishes they deliver to prison.

In 2022, CAIFAM and Documenta compiled the recipes in a cookbook, titled Con Sabor a Libertad — A Taste of Freedom. The proceeds from the book’s sales support CAIFAM’s work, and each recipe is accompanied by an anecdote from the contributor. Cristina shares the steps for making the strawberries with cream that she prepared for her husband José: “something sweet in a bitter place.” Angélica writes of making hot pancita stew for her husband after he spent a week in solitary confinement eating cold food. She takes care to double-bag the soup so that the broth doesn’t spill, and she adds two limes, oregano, and five pesos worth of tortillas.

Among the recipes is the broad bean soup that Mónica Tirado used to prepare for her husband, Mario Becerril Villegas. Since he was transferred to one of the country’s privately managed federal prisons, which maintains tighter security protocols than its state-level, publicly managed counterparts, she can no longer deliver the home-cooked meals that she once left inside the institution’s walls. When she visited him at the federal penitentiary, he invariably told her he was hungry. “The portions may be enough for an eight-year-old child, but not for an adult,” she says. So Tirado began a personal campaign to keep her husband fed.

It wasn’t the first time the couple pushed back against the institution’s strictures. When Villegas entered the federal prison, he donned a uniform that identified him with a number, which the officials used to refer to him.

“They weren’t people, they were case numbers,” Tirado recounts. “So we fought that, too, that my husband wasn’t a number, he was a person.” Through a legal action known as an amparo, which allows an individual to seek legal protection from official actions that violate their rights, a judge ruled in their favor. “Now we don’t embroider his uniform with his number, it’s embroidered with his initials.”

The culinary dispute began with food allowed for visiting days. After filing complaints and confronting the prison directors, Tirado reached an agreement with the prison management: On days of conjugal visits, she could bring two sandwiches, one for each person.

On the day of a planned visit, she bought the biggest bread roll she could find. She spread it with refried beans and stacked it with a half-pound each of ham, cheese and pork. “[The guards] complained, but I said, you told me one sandwich per person, and my husband will finish this sandwich,” she says. On the way out, she showed off the clean plate.

Even after she started bringing food during conjugal visits, Tirado remained concerned about the health of Villegas, an elderly man with diabetes and hypertension. The small portions and long waits between meals caused his blood sugar to destabilize, and once in the private prison, his condition worsened.

With the help of her daughter, a lawyer, Tirado filed a series of injunctions demanding Villegas’s right to medical care. She first won a claim that allowed to take her husband to outside medical appointments, where a nutritionist prescribed him a special diet to manage his diabetes. The prison initially refused to comply with the diet, but after Tirado filed a complaint, a judge ordered the penitentiary to provide the extra food. Still the institution refused, claiming a lack of resources. After requesting another meeting with the prison director, she received permission to bring Villegas snacks to last until the next visit: 10 almonds, six walnuts, and two pieces of fruit per day.

Though modest, the refreshments represent a rare victory in a prison where the details of everyday life are highly regimented. For Tirado’s husband, they made a difference. After the first week, when she asked Villegas how he was, he answered, “I’m not hungry anymore.”

Madeleine Wattenbarger is an freelance journalist in Mexico City, where she covers human rights and social movements.
Encarni Pindado is an award-winning photographer and multimedia journalist with over 20 years of experience covering Europe, Central America, Mexico, and the U.S.