Japanese Cafeteria Serves Prison Food To The Masses

Prison food has always been a source of fascination for the general public (see: Yelp reviews of prison food), so one museum in Japan is capitalizing on the mystery.

Kitschy Japanese news site Rocket News 24 ventures out to Abashiri, Hokkaido, where a cafeteria at the Abashiri Prison Museum serves the same recipes as food served in Japanese prisons.

The "Prison Cafeteria" has two lunch sets at 800 yen ($8) and 700 yen ($7), both served with miso soup that is replaced with a coarse tea in the prisons. Everything else, however, is purportedly the same.

So what did Rocket News 24 have for lunch? Set A included rice boiled with barley, fried fish (mackerel pike), Japanese daikon radishes, a noodle salad, and miso soup. The second set swapped out the radishes for fried vegetables and the noodle salad for Chinese yam. All of which sounds heaps better than a sloppy joe, which we expect in kid cafeterias.

Apparently, Rocket News reporters felt the same; the meal was called a "taste bud explosion." And the second set apparently affected the reporter so much, "our reporter couldn't contain his emotion any more, softly muttering 'amazing' as he looked down at his tray of prison food," Andrew Miller writes.

Of course, just because these are the recipes the system supposedly serves in the prison, you would never know unless you were truly incarcerated. (If you remember, fourth-grader Zachary Maxwell snuck a camera into his school and found that a "marinated tomato salad" was just lettuce and carrot).