The powerful have endless choices from a bounty of meats, cheeses, exotic fruits and unpronounceable delicacies.
The powerless are left with the scraps, the expired and the unwanted.
Food is power. The ability to choose what you eat is perhaps the greatest divider between the powerful and the powerless. Choosing what you eat is choosing what feeds your body, what tastes you like and what makes you feel good.
It is within that ethos of choice that prisoners on death row choose their last meals.
Two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream for Timothy McVeigh. Deep-fried shrimp, a bucket of KFC, french fries and a pound of strawberries for John Wayne Gacy. Chicken with red sauce and cake for John Allen Muhammad. These are the final choices for men whose ability to choose was taken away at incarceration.
The last meal dates back to the Middle Ages, when prisoners were given a last meal with the hopes of warding off their ghost after their execution (the effectiveness of this is unclear). Even earlier, Christ’s Last Supper is perhaps the most important last meal in history.
These last meals are extremely telling.
Last meals on death row have been photographed, put into cookbooks and painted on plates. There is a novelty in these meals, which are seen as a window into the minds of killers and a glimpse at evil. These meals are widely publicized as part of the execution.
The average death row last meal has 2,756 calories; 84 percent included meat, 68 percent had fried food, and 66 percent included dessert. Also of note, 16 percent included a Coke (congratulations Coca-Cola).
Recently, there has been pushback against last meals. Texas ended the practice of giving death row inmates the choice of a last meal in 2011 after Lawrence Russell Brewer requested (and then did not eat) two chicken fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger, a large bowl of fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat lover’s pizza, a pint of ice cream and a slab of peanut butter fudge.
Eliminating that final, simple choice before death is another indignity of execution in America.
Yet, it is also part of the story of the power of food, and the divisions between the powerful and the powerless.
Jim Crow divided America not only between the North and the South, but at the dinner table as well. Some of the most powerful acts of civil disobedience occurred not on the National Mall but at sit-ins at diner counters across the south.
It is the choice of food that is most powerful and also the most empowering. Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamed of all peoples sitting at the table of brotherhood, yet today that table still remains empty.
While the powerful have the ability to choose from healthy, diverse food options, the powerless remain eating at the back door.
The power of food fills our lives, and in the case of death row inmates, is a final act of choice before death.
The poet Joy Harjo writes, “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing/and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.”
Unlike those condemned to die, we will never know which meal is our last.
That is the sweetest bite.
Samuel Mendelson is a sophomore in the School of International Service.
edpage@theeagleonline.com
