Based on my post about Aramark earlier this week, you know that I am not a fan. Regular readers will note that I am trying to educate myself further about prison food throughout history. When I wrote a post about food for prisoners during the Civil War a few months back, I could not have imagined that I would be writing about a prisoner in 2011 having to feast on rodents. Well according to the Lexington Herald-Leader:

An inmate at Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex at West Liberty found a dead mouse in his soup May 1, leading to an investigation by corrections officials, according to state prison incident reports.

In a written grievance, inmate Christopher Branum said that after eating some of his soup, he saw “what appeared to be a mouse leg.”

“I touched it with my spork (a combination spoon and fork), and it was a cooked mouse,” Branum said in the grievance.

Corrections officer Ronald Cantrell wrote in a report that Branum called for him and showed him the mouse 30 to 45 seconds after Cantrell served Branum lunch in his cell.

“The mouse was saturated as though it had been in the soup for some time or cooked in it. The soup was still lukewarm,” Corrections Capt. Paul Fugate wrote in a report.

Who is catering these delicious meals?

State Rep. Brent Yonts, D-Greenville, characterized the incident as the latest problem with Philadelphia-based Aramark Correctional Services, which has a $12 million contract with the state to provide prison food.

“It indicates what I call malpractice of their job,” Yonts said.

But Aramark spokeswoman Sarah Jarvis said the company provides good service to the state.

“We have strong quality-assurance processes that ensure the high quality and safety of the meals we serve, and this has been consistently verified by the high scores we receive on independent county and industry health inspections,” Jarvis said in a statement. Those inspection scores average close to 100 percent, she said.

Well obviously something went drastically wrong with the “quality-assurance” process in this case.