COVID Kitchen

I open my eyes and see the sun shining through my window. I think, “Viviana must have finally gone back to work because no one called me to come in.” I look at my watch. It is only 7:32pm. “Shit, it is still Monday!” Waking up from a nap and thinking it is tomorrow makes me feel strange. At the same time, it makes me happy because I can go back to sleep for several hours. I close my eyes and do just that.

2:45am Tuesday morning. I hear a voice through my call box. It is Officer Johnson. “Ziegenhagen, they need you to go to work this morning.” I knew this was going to happen. Viviana hasn’t been to work for weeks, so I’ve been covering both shifts. Getting out of bed when it is still dark is no easy task. But I think about the turnovers we’re making for breakfast and that is motivation enough for me. (Fat girl status.) I toss my blanket back and head straight for my coffee.

I’ve been working in the kitchen since early November of last year. If you knew me, you would find that funny because I am not a kitchen working kind of girl. I swore I’d never take this job, but here I am. Truth be told, the reason I applied was so I could be housed with my friends. When the COVID outbreak first hit this compound, it started in the building that all of the kitchen workers lived in: Building 5. During their quarantine, the prison created a “kitchen worker wing” in Building 1, which is where I lived. Anyone who was hired got moved there. They made it simple to live with the people you wanted to live with, but it came with a price: Time. A lot of time.

I started off as a line server. Since we were the only building that hadn’t caught COVID, we were working 7 days a week, 14 hour days. 3:30am until around 5:30pm. It was miserable, and I hated every second of it. Standing still and serving a scoop of vegetables on hundreds of trays just wasn’t something I could get used to. But I stuck with it so I could stay in the wing with my people. But then COVID made its way to Building 1, and I caught it. I was sent to quarantine and stayed there for a little over a month, which was long enough to lose track of where my friends got sent; the same friends I took the job to live with.

Shortly after the New Year, I got out of quarantine and was sent to live in the “workers building.” Building 1 was being turned into an intake building, so everyone who lived there got split up across the compound. Most of us went to Building 5, but some went to Building 6. There are now two buildings who work in the kitchen, so if one is out the other can cover.

When I went back to work, I quickly got promoted to population cook. That just meant I cooked for the entire population minus the people with special diets. I started to love coming to work. It went by fast and I stayed busy. Not only that, I felt like I could make some of the junk they serve actually taste good. Let me tell you, my opinion of prison food has changed drastically. I went from, “I’d rather starve than eat that” to “Wow, this is actually good!” Now, don’t forget I have been locked up for seven years, so my version of ‘good’ may be slightly different than yours. However, it was something that was worth the calories, and it is free. That saved me money on commissary, and that, all by itself, made me happy.

Sometime during our prison COVID outbreak, the news was reporting how poorly this facility was feeding us. The kitchen had been shutdown due to contamination, so they hired outside workers to run a mobile kitchen while all of the kitchen workers on this compound were in quarantine. It was quite literally a clusterfuck, just a trailer in the parking lot. They fed us the equivalent of what I call gas station food: bags of chips, danishes, fruit snacks, and hot dogs. That’s all I can remember having. Of course, they rotated hot dogs out with other things, I just don’t recall what they were. I do recall that it was only a rotation of three or four different items though.

Kyla Ziegenhagen