I’m inaugurating a new category with this post: “Jury Duty Food.”

A quick Google search for “jury duty” + “food” produces less than half-a million-hits (very few by Google standards). Most of the hits are on blogs about restaurants in the vicinity of specific local courthouses, such as “Jury Duty is Like ‘The Standard’” (a diner in La La Land).

A few are appropriately cautionary and designed for first-time responders to a jury summons:

• “Facing Jury Duty” (in my favorite courthouse, Cook County Criminal Courthouse), where a wise child brings her own Twinkies, Cheetos, and energy bars
• “Jury Duty FAQ” (Minnesota court ‘handbook,’ and be forewarned, like every government handbook I’ve seen on the subject, it is so brief as to be meaningless)

Most people’s jury-duty stint consists of hours in a stuffy, uncomfortable jury room waiting to be selected for a panel. While enduring this purgatory, you can expect to eat vending-machine food until lunch, when you will be let loose to scour the neighborhood for sanitary kitchen facilities. In the Cook County Courthouse, you are “permitted” to buy lunch in the cafeteria, where courthouse employees dine on barely edible sandwiches and limp salads. This is infinitely better than leaving the courthouse: the neighborhood includes the Cook County Jail next door (with barb-wire topped walls and automatic-rifle-toting guards in towers).

If you’re selected for a jury, your dietary options change. Apparently, in Manhattan you may still be let loose to eat at local restaurants (in James Patterson’s The Jury that’s what happens—and the jury takes advantage of the opportunity to violate their oath not to discuss the case until deliberations begin). In Chicago, though, food is brought in to the jury deliberation room. A friend who was in college when she served on a jury said they brought in carry-out food from local restaurants, and the rest of the jury let her take the leftovers home with her. I wasn’t that lucky—our food was brought in from the cafeteria. I remember the “hot lunch” in particular: it was gray meat patties in a slightly brown goo. The next day I brought my lunch; the rest of the jury thought I was brilliant, because they hadn’t thought of it, too. It was the one moment that caused me to seriously doubt their intelligence.

My favorite food blogger, Mae Sander, tells me she knows of no jury-specific culinary literature, but she does know of many crime and mystery novels in which food plays a big part for the detectives and cops. In fact, her latest blog post is “What do members of the Yiddish Policemen’s Union eat?”

I’ve asked Mae to guest-blog on this topic and she graciously accepted. During the coming week I’ll be posting a series of notes on fictional crime-stoppers’ “tastes.”