What Luigi Mangione Will Be Eating In Jail This Christmas

Christmas, as depicted in the media, is typically a warm and fuzzy time when families happily gather in comfortable, tastefully decorated surroundings to enjoy a lavish feast. This isn't reality for many of us, however — some will be spending the holidays in shelters, others out on the streets, while nearly 2 million people will be behind bars. One such inmate is Luigi Mangione, who is currently being held at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) before his trial for allegedly shooting United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The MDC is a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility, and the BOP usually recognizes holidays with some type of special menu. A few years ago, Christmas dinner at its facilities consisted of a cheese omelet or meatloaf. According to People, however, that location seems to have changed its options considerably for this year.

2025 Christmas breakfast for Mangione and his fellow inmates will be served bright and early at 6 a.m. and consist of "non-breakfast pastry" along with fruit, cereal, and skim milk. Lunch at 11 a.m. will be the main meal of the day, offering a choice of baked Cornish hen or barbecued tofu, with macaroni and cheese or spinach for sides. There will also be cranberry sauce, and either dinner rolls or some type of dessert. Dinner, however, is pretty uninspiring. After the 4 p.m. head count, Mangione and co. will finish their day with two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on whole wheat bread, accompanied by potato chips, fruit, and a drink.

Luigi Mangione may be fortunate to be getting much of a Christmas meal at all. I've worked in the corrections industry, and can testify firsthand that prisons really do need better food. Although I was not on duty on Christmas Day at the now-closed New Mexico facility where I once served as a case manager and taught ESL, the menus posted in the housing pods did not show any deviation from the normal (and dismal) rotation. I did work there one Easter Sunday, however, and was drafted for kitchen duty to help prepare over 1,000 bologna sandwiches.

On holidays, inmates sometimes band together to make their own meals with items purchased from the prison commissary or ingredients taken from the kitchen. Martha Stewart, no fan of prison food, once used the prison microwave in her housing unit to "bake" an apple, and while we can't say for sure, it's possible she worked some kitchen magic for the holidays, too. (Her sentence encompassed Christmas 2004, during which time she was able to put up decorations and send out Christmas cards.) Sean "Diddy" Combs, who was himself incarcerated in MDC for a time, used his funds to ensure his fellow Fort Dix inmates ate roast turkey for Thanksgiving this year. Still, those not fortunate enough to be housed in a prison with a celebrity need not expect too much out of their holiday meal. An inmate who wrote of his 26 Christmases behind bars in an article published by social justice-focused website Truthout said that their not-so-festive dinners usually consisted of shredded chicken, potatoes, and green beans for lunch, followed by peanut butter sandwiches and apples for dinner.