Erwin James

Journalist Nina Myskow discovers how attitudes to food, shape and affect individual lives.

The bags of oats at one prison, where journalist and lifer Erwin James was an inmate, were all stamped "Canadian pig meal, grade 3". The porridge was made with water. However, as Erwin explains to Nina Myskow, adding full cream milk, honey and pine nuts to his own breakfast recipe, they were an important part of his diet and his rehabilitation, after a chaotic itinerant lifestyle and living rough as a child.

The producer is Tamsin Hughes, and this is a Wise Buddah production for BBC Radio 4.