Controversy continues to rise over the living conditions of migrant children living in detention centers in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's custody along the southern U.S. border.
Food writer Corby Kummer joined Boston Public Radio on Tuesday to describe the substandard food and resources being offered at the detention centers.
"The institutional cruelty of the food that's being fed to people in five detention centers, mostly around Texas, is just disgusting. It's everything processed that's easy to buy, cheap to serve and is associated with obesity, bad dental health, chronic disease like diabetes," he said.
Kummer gave insight into the rules surrounding food at the centers, which concern both the quantity and time that migrants are allowed to eat.
"Young mothers are feeding their toddlers formula and potato chips. Their formula allotment is three bottles a day and the detention centers are probably mixing up toddler and infant formula," he said. "A 13-year-old from El Salvador and other detainees said they were given 15 minutes to eat. They're not allowed to take food back to their bunks."
The poor living conditions in these centers breeds contempt for America, Kummer emphasized.
"A whole generation is being trained to despise America and want retaliation for this mostly inhumane treatment. How is this going to come back in 15, 20 years, when these kids grow up — these kids being separated from their parents, being forcibly and cruelly treated in these detention centers?" he said.
Kummer pointed out how the detention centers have little to no inspections from outside entities, since they are privately run.
"So many detention centers, like so many prisons in the United States, are run by private for-profit companies. If they can save on money, they put that in their own pockets," Kummer said. "It's not even operated by the federal government, it's contracted out. There's no oversight of how these places treat their detainees because there's no desire to treat them humanely."
Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic, an award-winning food writer, and a senior lecturer at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition and Policy.
