Last week, news of a London pop-up restaurant called Death Row Dinners (tagline: “Eat like it’s your last meal on earth”) went viral. The dinners were presented by anonymous organizers who identified only as Dirty Dishes. A flashy Web site displayed black-and-white mug shots of inmates wearing letter boards around their necks. Instead of booking information, the boards displayed historical last-meal menus: “Wild rabbit, biscuits with rabbit gravy, blackberry pie”; “burger, 2 hard boiled eggs, baked potato, 3 shots Jack Daniels, coffee.” A mission statement read: “If you love food, then at some point in your life you will have discussed the age-old question ‘What would your last meal be?’ and Death Row Dinners goes some way to answering that. Sort of.” “Sort of” because the question really being answered was the plainly voyeuristic, “What have prisoners on death row chosen for their last meals?”
The public response was swift and marked by moral outrage. Some wondered if the project was a joke, or some kind of performance piece.
The offense caused is easy enough to understand: there’s something undeniably stomach-turning about the gimmick of presumably well-off city dwellers forking over eighty dollars to eat fancified versions of the prison-issued food that the mostly poor and otherwise marginalized—criminal or not—denizens of death row pathetically requested before being executed. It commodifies the loss of human life—justifiable or not—and makes light of a grave and controversial issue, marrying the parlor game and its real-life counterpart without acknowledging that one is for fun and the other is an ugly truth.
Source: The New Yorker, Hannah Goldfield, Sept. 26, 2014
Related articles:
- Big picture: Death Row Prisoners' Last Meals, April 2012