Originally founded as The Farm to Prison Project in 2018, the Maryland Food and Abolition Project began by connecting Baltimore’s urban and small-scale farms to incarcerated people across Maryland, as to increase access to fresh food in prisons. As the project continued this work, they realized that “simply sourcing food to the inside was one small part of the problem,” as there is a need “to mitigate the violent experience of eating in confinement” and to position food justice within prison abolition movements (in co-founder Kanav Kathuria’s words).

The project has since expanded to explore the intersections between food and education. In addition to hosting book clubs, workshops, and panels to bring together local organizers around food sovereignty/abolition, they released a report in 2021 called “I Refuse to Let Them Kill Me”: Food, Violence, and the Maryland Correctional Food System. In the report, which you can access on our Citations page, formerly and currently incarcerated people share their stories and propose reform to the current food system within prisons. The project stresses that while they “envision a world where prisons, and all forms of carcerality, do not exist...at the same time, [they] recognize the deep and urgent need for better food conditions in correctional facilities.