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  • This video was made possible by Hover. Get 10% off your first purchase of a custom domain or email address by going to hover.com/hai.

  • This is Joe Arpaio, or Sheriff Joe, or Uncle Joe, or America's toughest sheriff, or Twitler,

  • depending on where you get your news, and what your opinion is on whether or not immigrants deserve rights.

  • For our purposes though, just think of him as a sort of reincarnated Voldemort, but instead of half a nose, he now has a nose-and-a-half.

  • This is Joe Arpaio's reaction to eating the godless culinary creation called Nutraloafwhich is, quite possibly, one of only a few things in the world more gross than Joe Arpaio.

  • Here comes the airplane and oh no, seems he doesn't like it.

  • If a big tough guy without a soul can barely gag down a baby bite of this loaf, then it must be bad.

  • So bad, in fact, that recently some have argued nutraloaf is so disgusting that serving it in prison violates American's constitutional rights.

  • Now in order to understand such legal claims, we need to take a closer look as to what Nutraloaf actually is.

  • Let's start with the name.

  • You can learn a lot from a name; look at Half As Interestingin just three words, I'm telling you right off the bat that you should probably be doing something else.

  • The name Nutraloaf is also quite telling.

  • Now I know you're thinking, "Well hey, anything that starts with Nutra must be good to eat right?"

  • Well, tell that to all the people who have died swallowing their NutriBullet blenders.

  • In this case, Nutraloafor as some call it, food loaf, meal loaf, or the loafdoes technically count as edible, and technically it does have the nutrients to sustain life,

  • but whether or not that really makes it food is another question.

  • So, what exactly is inside of a Nutraloaf you ask?

  • Well, that depends on your local correctional facility's home recipe, but as a general rule, there's a lot of foods in a food loaf.

  • In Ohio, the recipe calls for salad, spaghetti with tomato sauce, green beans, white bread, a chocolate chip cookie, and a cup of coffee, milk, or Kool-Aid to bind it.

  • But like flags, educational achievement, and opinions on the Civil War, Nutraloaf recipes vary from state to state.

  • In Illinois, correctional facility cooks replaced Ohio's cookies with a milder sweetener of apple sauce mixed with breadcrumbs and garlic powder.

  • No matter what the combination, you just throw it all in a bowl, then blend, shape, and bake it into loaf form, and boom, you've got a Nutraloaf.

  • This isn't your mom's meatloaf, your grandma's malt loaf, or your dad's MeatLoaf.

  • This is Nutraloaf, a hunk of compressed kitchen trash that looks like it was cooked by a rat, and not a talking, Pixar-animated rat, just like… a rat.

  • Now, considering how cheap and easy a food like the loaf is to make, you're probably thinking that prisons started dishing loaf to keep food costs down, but good news:

  • you'll be relieved to know that, in fact, the nutraloaf was designed in correctional test kitchens as a form of punishment.

  • Oh wait, that's not good news at all.

  • You see, if a prisoner were to break the rulesbecome hostile, throw a lunch tray, take part in a pillow fight, start gossiping, reveal Downton Abbey spoilers, etc

  • they might be punished with the loaf, served without silverware, at room temperature, tasting like the food version of a tsunami,

  • which supposedly would help deter future incidents and serve as punishment without causing bodily harmwell, bodily harm beyond one's taste-buds or ego, or sense of identity and self worth that is

  • and it is this purpose, as punishment, that got the room temperature loaf into hot water.

  • The thing is, in the USA we're having a kind of hard time figuring out where to draw the line with punishment—I mean some of us are watching The Masked Dancer by choice

  • and the taste-bud busting nutraloaf has got caught up in the middle of this reckoning.

  • In the past few decades, a host of legal cases have questioned if the loaf represents a violation of the eighth amendment, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment.

  • These court cases, usually at the state level, have gone both ways.

  • Courts in some states like Arizona, Illinois, and Nebraska have ruled that the loaf is all good since it meets the nutritional needs of prisoners,

  • while courts in Vermont and Washington, DC have ruled that if used as a punishment, then the prisoners at least deserve a hearing prior to being subjected to the loaf.

  • These mixed results from state to state all stem from the simple fact that it's pretty hard to define what exactly is "cruel and unusual."

  • You see, unlike the fan-favorite fifth amendment, which set in stone that each and every American has a right to Double Jeopardy! at 4pm eastern before the local news, the eighth amendment is far less cut and dry.

  • If something is cruel and unusual largely boils down to a few questions: is it degrading to human dignity?

  • Is it rejected by society?

  • Is it patently unnecessary?

  • But those questions are still so wishy washy it's hard to pin down.

  • So while it might seem to many of us that a blended loaf of household leftovers at room temperature might not fit the larger purpose of correcting criminal habits,

  • the law folks have had a hard time ridding the world of the loaf through legal means.

  • But legal confusion hasn't stopped some states from losing the loaf.

  • Massachusetts, Minnesota, and most recently New York have banned Nutraloaf outright, and pressure from activist groups have led to a decreasing use of the loaf in prisons across the US.

  • So, while lawyers continue the uphill battle to display how gross, mean, and dumb equates to cruel and unusual,

  • public activists backed by woke Twitterers, and now, semi-successful YouTubers, I guess, have started to turn the tide in the war against the loathed loaf.

  • If you too have strong feelings about the Nutraloaf and want to make a difference in banning it in your home state, you should probably start a website with Hover.

  • Right now, domains like weloaththeloaf.com and makeloavestastyagain.com are currently available as I speak.

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This video was made possible by Hover. Get 10% off your first purchase of a custom domain or email address by going to hover.com/hai.

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