So it turns out that prison food has become so shitty, that ramen noodles are overtaking tobacco as the most popular currency in US prisons.

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A new report by Michael Gibson-Light, a doctoral candidate in the University of Arizona’s school of sociology, found that due to the disgusting slop served as food becoming increasingly worse due to cost-cutting, inmates have turned to trading Super Noodles in place of Super Kings.

Gibson-Light said:

[Ramen] is easy to get and it’s high in calories.

A lot of them, they spend their days working and exercising and they don’t have enough energy to do these things. From there it became more a story, why ramen in particular.

One way or another, everything in prison is about money.

Soup is money in here. It’s sad but true.

Gibson-Light made the discovery after interviewing 60 inmates over a year in a major state prison. He also looked at nationwide investigations where he found an increasing trend of ramen trading.

This just says a lot about the state of food in prison. If it’s that bad that 5p packets of ramen are considered golddust, then you know that whatever they are serving must be pretty bleak. And judging by Andy Roy’s recipe for sweet & sour pork, prison style, I would have to say that this assumption is correct:

For more on prison food, check out these 12 photographs of death row prisoners’ last meals.