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Death Row Meal
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Memes are reflective of cultural beliefs. One must understand certain aspects of culture to understand a meme. When memes are for a more general population (Americans, Adults, People who drive a car, etc.) they can accidentally reveal something we all believe that has gone uninterrogated. Those who participate or share the meme can incriminate themselves when branding themselves as believers become the poster child for these beliefs. Very rarely is this revealing of deeply held unquestioned beliefs that are, in the light of day, less progressive than we would like ourselves to be given time to be worked through. We find someone to blame for saying what we all subconsciously believed or accepted and then move on. It is often a period of posting and a period of condemnation. The death row meal trend is the first time I’ve seen people try to work out their own thoughts on something without jumping straight to condemnation.
We’re all familiar with the concept of a Death Row meal. Prisoners who are going to be executed by the state are given the option for a final meal and it can be anything they want, in theory. The first time we hear of this concept, most people are probably young adults. Old enough to understand all the concepts involved; prison, capital punishment, and the morbidity of it all; but young enough to immediately think of themselves. What would my death row meal be if given the option? That’s the basics of this trend: answering,in public, a question you’ve known the answer to for a long time but no one has asked you. I do like that part of the internet, the one where we all answer the hypotheticals we’ve been thinking about for some time.
When we all do it at once, over and over again, it forces us to confront things about the question we may not have considered before. Reading the words “Death Row” immediately followed by a picture of chain restaurant pasta next to it twenty times a day begins to leave a bad taste in my mouth. To make me actually think about the question being asked and consider the horror of the whole deal and the casual acceptance of it all. The phrase “Death Row Meal” is so common that we do not let the words settle in our brain before the slideshow begins.
We should still think about the concept of a last meal in the prison sense but in a way that interrogates the idea, rather than one that tacitly accepts the meal as a part of society. Like most things about our modern life, though it may seem like an unquestioned truth of American Life, it was invented relatively recently and does not have to exist in a functioning society
I’ve yet to see the obvious antidote be posted on TikTok yet. The photography series by James Reynolds of recreated last meal requests of various people. There was a second installment of death row requests by people who were later proven to be innocent. If nothing else it provides an obvious grounding of the hypothetical in real life. You can also read the recorded last meal requests wikipedia page and have whatever reaction you want to the fact the ours is more than four times as long as any other continents.
The root question can still be fun and have the touch of morbidity. Don’t get me wrong, I love morbidity. How would you craft a perfect meal for your final moments? What foods would you need to eat to attempt to leave this life at least somewhat satisfied? I do want to know the answer to that question. Though it may not seem so, It is possible to remove the Prison Industrial complex from at least some parts of your life.