‘You feel like you’re doing something’: Foodcare as a family practice in the space of the prison visiting room

Prison visits are important opportunities for those incarcerated to see their family members and maintain and strengthen family relationships. However, prison visits can be experienced as a stressful environment where family members lack control. This article advances understandings of the prison visiting room as a space for foodcare – one that presents opportunities for incarcerated women and their family members to ‘re-do’ family by demonstrating care through food choices. Consuming refreshments together and purchasing items that would ‘treat’ incarcerated family members helped to evoke memories of eating together in childhood or prior to incarceration. The qualitative data from incarcerated women in a prison in England and their visiting family members documented how restrictions brought in concerning refreshments in the COVID-19 pandemic temporarily eliminated opportunities for family foodcare. Furthermore, when refreshments were re-introduced in a limited way, they were interpreted negatively due to an assumption that their pre-packaged nature meant they were lacking care, simultaneously demonstrating the social and familial importance of refreshments within the space of the prison visiting room.