Best Food Writing 2014 (59 page)

With the American public now excluded from the execution process, much of the larger societal meaning of capital punishment, and last meals, has been lost. The community is no longer involved. In colonial America, executions were opportunities to reinforce publicly the Calvinist belief in the innate depravity of man, and also provided a little entertainment. People thronged to see how someone facing the final mystery of life behaved. On October 20, 1790, a crowd of thousands watched thirty-two-year-old Joseph Mountain, convicted of rape, be hanged on the green in New Haven, Connecticut. Would he confess and repent, as authorities hoped, or would he die “game,” denouncing the sentence?

Over the latter half of the twentieth century, with the notion of deterrence unproven and the promise of rehabilitation mostly forgotten, retribution and general incapacitation became the primary goals of the American criminal-justice system. This was in part due to the changing political climate. The neoconservative movement rose from the ashes of Barry Goldwater's defeat in the presidential election of 1964, tapping into public concerns about the rising crime rate, a growing disaffection for social-welfare programs, and the unrest evident in the opposition to the Vietnam War as well as urban race riots. In response came the Rockefeller drug laws in New York, which launched over thirty years of tough-on-crime policies, and Ronald Reagan's warning of the corrosive effects of the “welfare queen” who cheats the system. “Individual responsibility” became the defining doctrine for everything from America's economic life to its crime-fighting strategies.

In 2007 the U.S. Supreme Court effectively upheld the retributive theory of capital punishment, and the idea of individual responsibility, when it ruled that a mentally ill prisoner could not be executed if he lacked a rational understanding of
why
the state was killing him, even if he was aware of the facts of the state's case. As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court, “It might be said that capital punishment is imposed because it has the potential to make
the offender recognize at last the gravity of his crime and to allow the community as a whole . . . to affirm its own judgment that the culpability of the prisoner is so serious that the ultimate penalty must be sought and imposed.”

In other words, the public's need for retribution requires criminals that are somehow irredeemable monsters who still know right from wrong and freely chose to do horrible things; they are certainly not the profoundly disabled or the unfortunate byproducts of societal or familial breakdowns. But the image of the morally culpable public enemy is difficult to sustain in a criminal-justice system that strips away the prisoner's individuality and free will, reducing him to something seemingly less than human. It's hard for people to experience a satisfying sense of retribution when the state is, in effect, exterminating something aberrant and abstract, much as a surgeon removes a malignant tumor.

In the nineteenth century, when the American government was ending public executions, officials struggled with a similar dilemma. Historian Louis P. Masur explains how, without the official moralizing sermons that had accompanied public hangings, people “were free to construct their own interpretations rather than receive only an official one.” There was concern that executions carried out in private could foster doubts that justice was being done—that the prisoner was in fact guilty and that the proceedings had been fair. In short, whether the convict was indeed an irredeemable monster. In an effort to reclaim control of the narrative of capital punishment, the authorities saw the benefit of the new mass-circulation newspapers to feed the public information about executions. The press accounts made it seem that the public still had some sort of informal oversight of the killing done in its name.

Daniel LaChance, an assistant professor of history at Emory University, has argued that the rituals of a last meal—and of allowing last words—have persisted in this otherwise emotionally denuded process precisely because they restore enough of the condemned's humanity to satisfy the public's desire for the punishment to fit the crime, thereby helping to ensure continued support for the death penalty. As LaChance puts it, “The state, through the media, reinforces a retributive understanding of the individual as an agent who has acted freely in the world, unfettered by circumstance or social condition.
And yet, through myriad other procedures designed to objectify, pacify, and manipulate the offender, the state signals its ability to maintain order and satisfy our retributive urges safely and humanely.” A win-win. The state, after all, has to distinguish the violence of its punishment from the violence it is punishing, and by allowing a last meal and a final statement, a level of dignity and compassion are extended to the condemned that he didn't show his victims. The fact that the taxpayers are picking up the tab for these sometimes gluttonous requests only bolsters the public's righteous indignation.

The final turn of the screw is that prisoners often don't get what they ask for. It is the request, and not what is ultimately served—let alone what's actually consumed, which is often little or nothing—that is released to the press and broadcast to the public. Most states have restrictions on what can be served and how much of it, a monetary limit, for instance, or based on what's in the prison pantry on a given day.

So that filet mignon and lobster tail? It's likely to end up being chopped meat and fish sticks, according to Brian Price, an inmate who cooked final meals for other prisoners in Texas for over a decade before he was paroled in 2003 (and subsequently wrote a book about the experience called
Meals to Die For
). The 2001 book
Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals from Death Row
, includes this teaser: “How's this for a last meal: twenty-four tacos, two cheeseburgers, two whole onions, five jalapeño peppers, six enchiladas, six tostadas, one quart of milk, and one chocolate milkshake? That's what David Castillo, convicted murderer, packed in the night before Texas shot him up with a lethal injection.”

What Castillo, who was executed in 1998 for stabbing a liquor-store clerk to death, actually got for his last meal was four hard-shell tacos, six enchiladas, two tostadas, two onions, five jalapeños, one quart of milk, and a chocolate milkshake. A hefty spread, but not quite the jaw-dropper he ordered.

And so it came to pass in Texas in 2011 that the state stopped offering special last meals, after Lawrence Russell Brewer ordered two chicken-fried steaks, one pound of barbecued meat, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a meat-lover's pizza, three fajitas, an omelet, a bowl of okra, one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream, some peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts, and three root beers—and ended up not
eating anything. This prompted an outraged state senator to threaten to outlaw the last meal if the department of corrections didn't end the practice.

For his crackdown on taxpayer-funded excess, the senator surely earned hearty handshakes from his tough-on-crime constituents. But it is somehow fitting that the sham of the last meal, in Texas at least, which has executed hundreds more people over the last thirty years than any other state, was allowed to fade into history with its bundle of contradictions intact, buried by the calculated denunciation of a politician seizing on a way to stroke his base. Now in the Lone Star State, the men and women killed by the government get whatever is on the prison menu that day. Justice will be served.

R
ECIPE
I
NDEX

Turkey (from “How to Cook a Turkey”),
119
.

A French-ish Salad to Feed an Expanding Household (from “And Baby Makes Free-for-All”),
127
.

The Utley Family Angel Food Cake with Creamy Lemon Glaze (from “Sense of Self”),
132
.

The Best Chocolate Chip Cookie (from “The Science of the Best Chocolate Chip Cookie”),
164
.

Chicken Cutlets (from “How to Cook Chicken Cutlets”),
166
.

Cauliflower Tomato Tarka (from “The Flavor Man”),
203
.

Homemade Ketchup (from “Because I Can”),
289
.

Laurie Colwin's Tomato Pie (from “Tomato Pie”),
296
.

P
ERMISSIONS
A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Grateful acknowledgement is made to all those who gave permission for written material to appear in this book. Every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders. If an error or omission is brought to our notice, we will be pleased to remedy the situation in subsequent editions of this book. For further information, please contact the publisher.

Rayner, Jay. “Age of Innocence.” Copyright © 2014 by Jay Rayner Limited. This article, first published in
Saveur
, September 2013, draws on material in
A Greedy Man in a Hungry World
(HarperCollins Publishers, 2013). Used by permission of the author.

Krader, Kate. “Are Big Flavors Destroying the American Palate?” Article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of
Food & Wine
magazine.

Gravois, John. “A Toast Story.” Copyright © 2014 by
Pacific Standard
. Used by permission of the publisher.

Estabrook, Barry. “Five Things I Will Not Eat.” Copyright © 2013 by Barry Estabrook. Originally published by
CivilEats.com
. Used by permission of the author.

Sax, David. “Baconomics 101.” From
The Tastemakers: Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue.
Copyright © 2014 by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Used by permission of the publisher.

Torres, JT. “The Right to Eat.” Copyright © 2014 by JT Torres. Originally published by
Alimentum
, April 2014. Used by permission of the author.

Birdsall, John. “America, Your Food Is So Gay.” Copyright © 2013 by John Birdsall. Originally published by
Lucky Peach
, June 2013. Used by permission of the author.

Edge, John T. “Debts of Pleasure.” Copyright © 2013 by John T.
Edge. Originally published by
The Oxford American
, Fall 2013. Used by permission of the author.

Yuh, Eagranie. “The Dignity of Chocolate.” Copyright © 2014 by Eagranie Yuh. Originally published by
Edible Vancouver
, Spring 2014. Used by permission of the author.

House, Silas. “The Indulgence of Pickled Baloney.” Copyright © 2014 by Silas House. Originally appeared in
Gravy
, Issue #51. Used by permission of the author.

Roth, Anna. “Austerity Measures: A Restaurant Critic's Week on Food Stamps.” Copyright © 2013 by
SF Weekly
. Used by permission of the publisher.

Saslow, Eli. “Waiting for the 8th.” From
The Washington Post
, December 15, 2013 © 2013 Washington Post Company. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.

Altman, Elissa. “A Sort of Chicken That We Call Fish.” Copyright © 2013 by Elissa Altman. Originally published by
PoorMansFeast.com
, December 9, 2013. Used by permission of the author.

Yonan, Joe. “Forget the Clock, Remember Your Food.” Excerpts from
Eat Your Vegetables: Bold Recipes for the Single Cook
by Joe Yonan, text copyright © 2013 by Joe Yonan. Used by permission of Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.