British restaurant reviewer Jay Rayner, researching a book about diners’ preferred final meals, writes for the New York Times about the “highly developed literature” in the U.S. about the death penalty’s culinary aspect. He says, “There are countless accounts of orders for fried chicken and burgers, for tubs of ice cream and chocolate-chip cookies” by men about to be executed. Doctoral candidate Christoper Collins of Southern Illinois University wrote about “Final Meals: The Theatre of Capital Punishment.” Daniel LaChance of the University of Minnesota wrote that the practice of allowing the condemned to choose a last meal helped mark death-row inmates as “self-made monsters who are intrinsically different by choice.” A 2012 paper by Brian Wansink for the journal Appetite analyzed 247 last meals ordered by condemned prisoners from 2002 to 2006. The average meal came in at 2,756 calories, but four requests, from Texas and Oklahoma, were estimated to have gone beyond 7,000.
In 2011, Texas abandoned the last meal for death-row inmates after killer Lawrence Russell Brewer placed a vast order — two chicken-fried steaks, a pound of barbecue and so on — but ate none of it. The fascination with the subject stems partly from a well-established true-crime culture, said Ty Treadwell, author of the 2001 book “Last Suppers: Final Meals From Death Row.” “The line between news and entertainment in the U.S. has become somewhat blurred,” he said. “And people are interested in lives very different from their own, be they the Kardashians or death-row inmates.” Robert Dunham of the the Death Penalty Information Center said the interest in death-row meals is “voyeuristic sensationalism. It has nothing to do with the merits or flaws of capital punishment.”