(From the Fall 2003 issue of Kitsch Magazine)

In a particularly memorable scene from the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray’s character, upon realizing that he is destined to relive the same day over and over again and that his activities will therefore have no impact on his life, goes to a restaurant and orders everything on the menu. His dining partner, played by Andie MacDowell, watches in disgust as Murray proceeds to shovel food into his mouth. The audience shares MacDowell’s discomfort, but at the same time one cannot help but be envious of Murray’s ability to eat whatever he wants with no concern for the consequences (aside from, perhaps, a nasty stomach ache). In a life bound by restrictions on how much pleasure it is “prudent” for one to experience, there is bound to be a fascination with what one would do if today’s actions didn’t matter tomorrow. Asking someone what he would do if he learned he had only twenty-four hours left to live brings out the best and the worst of humanity: some say they would gather all of their loved ones together and tell them all how important they are; others say they would rob a convenience store and use the money to pay a sniper to kill the guy who made fun of them in seventh grade. There is one constant: almost everyone knows what he would choose as his last meal, or has at least given it some thought.

Though actual situations in which a doctor tells a patient that he has a terminal illness and has only a handful of hours to live are few and far between, there is one specific situation in which a person knows exactly when he is going to die: execution. Granted, his opportunities to make the most of his final hours are limited; the death-row prisoner can neither gather his loved ones together nor rob a convenience store. Instead, he is given last rites, a chance to atone for his sins, and a final meal.

Why a final meal? Obviously certain foods have unparalleled comforting powers; just ask anyone who has inhaled an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s after a particularly painful breakup. Unlike friends or family — whose affections are capricious at best — food is always there for you, regardless of how long it’s been since you last spoke to it, whether you remembered its birthday, or even what time of day it is (surely college students are well-acquainted with the 2AM bowl of cereal and the 9AM slice of cold pizza). Couple this awesome healing ability with the necessity for survival, and it comes as little surprise that food plays such a central role in our lives. We schedule our lives around meals; we have countless cooking shows and an entire television channel devoted to them; the typical date involves eating a meal together; and often the only time a family spends together is at the dinner table.

Of all the bodily pleasures, food is both the most accessible and the most versatile. Anyone who has a few bucks and the phone number of a delivery place can have food in their possession within an hour. Eating can be a group or solitary activity; there is no need to have another person present, but company does not detract from the enjoyment of food. And, most importantly, one can eat while engaged in another activity, be it watching television, talking to friends, or doing any variety of things, the listing of which is left as an exercise for the reader.

Since food is integral for survival, pleasurable, and easily obtained, it makes sense that if a person knew he had only limited time left on Earth, one of the things he would do is indulge in his favorite foods for the last time. However, it seems strange that, after many years of imprisonment with little regard for his welfare, a prisoner on death row should be granted this final act of benevolence — especially when he’ll only have an hour or so to enjoy it. Perhaps it’s meant to abate the effects of several decades of dehumanization, to give the convict one last chance to experience freedom and individuality before two thousand volts of alternating current are directed through his skull.

I don’t think it’s an act of mercy. I think it’s an act of grotesque fascination, the same grotesque fascination that I felt while browsing through the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s online listing of final meal requests (link). Here, inquiring minds can browse through a database of final meals requested by every Texan prisoner executed since 1982: 310 executions in total. Along with the meal requests you can look at pages scanned from the police dossier, which tell you the name, date of birth, previous criminal record and last crime of the criminal, as well as any known accomplices and the occasional bit of courtroom trivia. Attached to the page is a mug shot of the convict, so you can see what he looked like at the time of arrest and perhaps try to imagine him eating his final meal, looking a bit older and more grizzled as a result of years of incarceration.

Reading what a prisoner chose as his final meal and imagining him eating it lends him a tinge of humanity that he didn’t have before, as we find parallels between his appetite and our own — a humanity that is difficult to reconcile with the horrific crimes whose descriptions await us, a single click away. We waver between pity and disgust, between feeling closer to the person who asked for our favorite food and completely alien when we learn how many people he killed. One cannot help but feel like a voyeur while browsing the website, looking into the lives of these people and examining their innermost desires, in meal form, as though they were specimens in a zoo. We read the plaques, press our faces up against the glass, and try to catch a glimpse of some illicit act being performed by an animal who doesn’t know he’s being watched.

We operate under the assumption that what someone would choose as his final meal reveals elements of both his personality and his past. Perusing the final meal requests listed on the TDCJ’s site, I attempted to look for patterns and correlations. There are several dimensions along which the requests vary, the most obvious one being the actual foods chosen. These range from the normal (T-bone steak and fries, execution #1) to the bizarre (one bag of assorted Jolly Ranchers, #253) to the esoteric (chocolate birthday cake with “2/23/90″ written on it, #248). Another huge variation is in the amount of food that the prisoner asks for. Some made relatively small, simple requests (plain cheese sandwich, #11; yogurt, #36), while others requested a veritable smorgasbord of more food than any one person could comfortably eat (twenty-four soft shell tacos, six enchiladas, six tostados, two whole onions, five jalapenos, two cheeseburgers, one chocolate shake, one quart of milk and one package of Marlboro cigarettes; #158). What correlations, if any, exist between meal choice and the personality of the criminal and the nature of his crime? Are meat-eaters more violent, prone to crimes of passion? Are candy aficionados less mature and more likely to kill while committing a petty crime? Are gluttons greedier in life as well as dining, more apt to commit murder while stealing?

As tempting as it is to think that knowing what someone ate right before he was executed acts as a window into his soul, it’s hard to identify any patterns in such a skewed sample. Every single prisoner on death row had murdered, and a vast majority of them murdered in the context of a robbery or mugging. It’s nigh impossible to rate murders on a scale of violence, but one thing is clear: all of these prisoners committed atrocious crimes, and the overall gruesomeness shared by all completely overshadows any individual variations. Billy White (#47), who requested a T-bone steak, french fries and ice cream, shot an elderly woman as she closed her store down for the day. Frank McFarland (#150), who requested a variety of vegetables and cheeses (asking that everything be cleaned prior to serving), sexually assaulted a 26-year-old shoe-shining girl and then stabbed her more than fifty times. Danny Harris (#62), who, rather intangibly, asked for “God’s saving grace, love, truth, peace and freedom,” beat a man to death with a tire iron after the man had stopped to provide roadside assistance to Harris and his three friends.

We may not be able to lend any huge significance to final meal choice on a personal level, but one thing that the final meal request database does is act as a zeitgeist. The most popular food requested, with 118 requests, is french fries. Next on the list comes the hamburger, with ice cream and steak in tow. Non-french-fried potatoes, usually baked or mashed, are also popular, as is fried chicken. The most often requested soft drink, by an impressive margin, is Coke; two people even asked for Coke as their entire meal. Though a few people requested Mexican food, overwhelmingly the most popular foods are those thought of as traditional American fare. Ironic that, while most families dine on pizza and Chinese take-out, it is on death row where culinary patriotism is truly displayed.

Perhaps this is because traditionally American foods, in all their high-fat, high-carbohydrate splendor, are the foods around which one must usually display restraint. Or maybe they’re just more comforting. After all, the food that provided most of us with the greatest amount of comfort throughout the first years of our life, breast milk, is also high in fat and carbohydrates. Even newborn babies prefer the taste of sweet milk over other foodstuffs; we’ve evolved with a strong predilection for fatty, carbohydrate-laden food. Freud theorized that infants form attachments with their primary caregivers, and are subsequently comforted most effectively by these primary attachment figures during times of stress, because they have come to associate the caregiver with the satisfaction of hunger. He called this the secondary drive theory, because it postulated that desire for contact comfort was a “secondary drive” while hunger was the “primary drive” fueling it. It’s not a huge stretch to say that the ultimate importance of food in infancy continues into adulthood, and it would explain why food is one of the most sacred corporeal pleasures.

One of the most sacred — not the most sacred. Nearly a century after Freud proposed the secondary drive theory, in 1969, a psychologist named Harry Harlow effectively disproved it. Using young rhesus monkeys that had been isolated since birth, he showed that, in times of distress, they ran directly to the softest thing in the cage, regardless of where they had obtained their food in the past. As the young monkeys clung to their scraps of terrycloth, they showed immediate relief of stress. Harlow proved that contact comfort is a primary drive in its own right, and that satiety of hunger is not the first thing that one naturally turns to in times of despair.

Granted, hunger is still a primary drive, and there’s no doubt that the association between food and comfort persists into adulthood. It is inevitable that an infant who is coddled by a parent while being fed will be conditioned to find food soothing later in life, especially food that resembles his mother’s milk in nutritional makeup. But if the purpose of a final meal is to allow the death-row prisoner one last foray into a world of pleasure without restrictions, why don’t we skip the middle man and give the prisoner what really provides comfort?

Maybe because the final meal isn’t for the eater’s benefit. If it were, would a list of requests attract such a wealth of attention? The database is a source of fascination for the same reason that traffic inevitably slows down while passing a roadside accident. We’re fueled by a morbid curiosity to know more about these people who died, about who they were and what they loved, about how they are like us and how they are different. It is their desires that we find fascinating, and not what they actually ate. Which is good, because the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s website has a disclaimer on its list of final meal requests: “The final meal requested may not reflect the actual final meal served.”