Content area
Full Text
This essay examines last meal requests by those facing execution. After surveying food and beverage selections, I explore how culinary choices are marked by ethnicity, region, class, and gender, as well as inflected by memories, the longing for certain sensory experiences, and the intent to make a moral, political, or philosophical statement. I also consider which last suppers and comments have inspired movies, TV shows, musical compositions, and advertising; why the public desires information about the food requested by those facing death; how the condemned's meals have become politicized, feeding arguments by both those for and those against the death penalty; what the origin of the last meal ritual is; and why the custom is perpetuated. Possessing varied meanings for different participants in the drama of execution, the ceremonial last meal is one of the most powerful symbolic elements within a larger phenomenon laden with rituals and symbols.
Keywords
AFS Ethnographic Thesaurus: Food preferences, correctional personnel, death row inmates, capital punishment, comfort foods
A fascination with the final meals of condemned inmates pervades American popular culture and consciousness. news articles concerning those just executed often mention final repasts. Several books on the subject have appeared over the past dozen years, such as Last Suppers (treadwell and Vernon 2001), Last Meal (black 2003), Meals to Die For (Price 2004b), and Their Last Suppers (caldwell 2010). For $20, the maximum cost of a final meal permitted by several states, a canadian company called last meals Delivery Service will provide clients in to- ronto "a replica of the 'last meal' consumed by someone executed in the united States" (http://pauljkneale.com/last meals.html; website is no longer accessible). Since 2003, the highly popular weblog Dead Man Eating (http://deadmaneating .blogspot.com/) has posted end-of-life meals in prisons throughout the united States. numerous websites list the more extravagant orders; some bloggers also ask readers to ponder: what would you request as your last meal?
Few scholarly works, though, consider final repasts. They are limited to an article dwelling on theories of penology (lachance 2007), a paper on the internet regarding the meaning of execution that focuses more on last words than last meals (meyer 2008), a student report concerning the media's attention to end-of-life meals (Jeung 2009), an unpublished piece (Gordon 2006) discussing...