Sewer trout
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Sewer trout was the name prisoners at FCI Loretto gave the fish served on Fridays. John Kiriakou uses it as his central illustration of a claim he has made repeatedly in Consortium News and CovertAction Magazine: that prisoners are not normally fed human-grade food but animal-grade food.

The warning

On Kiriakou's very first full day in prison, a Friday, which he notes was air-quotes fish day, he mentioned to one of the Italians across the hall from him that he liked fish. The man's reply was that Kiriakou was not going to like this fish, along with a piece of friendly advice: don't eat it. They called it sewer trout.

The boxes

At lunch Kiriakou went down to the cafeteria and saw the boxes stacked up behind the serving staff in the chow line, stacked there, he says, completely illegally. The boxes were clearly marked Alaskan cod, product of China. His summary is that it was therefore not Alaskan but Chinese, and that the marking continued: not for human consumption, feed use only. The staff were slopping it onto the plates.

Kiriakou went hungry. He ate the slice of white bread that comes with the meal and a spoonful of canned green beans, and says that was his food for the day.

The wider claim

The sewer trout episode sits alongside the dog food memo in Kiriakou's argument about prison catering. In that case the warden circulated an apology explaining that prisoners had been fed dog food on a taco night some months earlier because of a mislabelling error at the meat plant. Kiriakou's point about it is not the mistake but the fact that nobody had noticed, because, he says, the regular food is not for human consumption either.

He describes throwing away a dinner on one taco night in front of the warden, who told him he was supposed to eat everything on his plate. Kiriakou's answer was deliberately obscene, and he dared the warden to put him in solitary confinement for refusing to eat animal-grade food, confident, he says, that the warden knew he would take it straight to CNN or the Washington Post. The warden backed off.

See also

- Dog Food Memo
- FCI Loretto
- The Italians at Loretto
- John Kiriakou
- Solitary confinement
