Although the concept of a "last meal" for death row prisoners who are about to be executed is under attack for being wasteful and unnecessary in places such as Texas and Florida, the practice still seems to be quite common in most jurisdictions. Apparently there is enough information available on what certain notorious executed criminals requested for their last meal to have inspired photographer Henry Hargreaves to do a photo project documenting what these last meals might have looked like. The excellent title of this project? "No Seconds."
The PetaPixel blog discusses and reproduces many of Hargreaves photos in a post today. These last meals include:
- Victor Feguer: a single unpitted olive;
- Ronnie Lee Gardner: lobster tail, steak, apple pie, vanilla ice cream;
- Allen Lee Davis: lobster tail, fried potatoes, 1/2 fried shrimp, 6 oz fried clamps, 1/2 loaf of garlic bread, and 32-ounce A&W root beer;
- Timothy McVeigh: 2 pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream; and several others.
You can check out Hargreaves' interesting photographs here (and be careful about clicking on the "3DD" link once you get there as it is an acronym for a photo project called "Breasts in 3D").
In the comments to the PetaPixel post, readers note that there are at least two other photography projects documenting last meals: this one by James Reynolds and yet another one by Julia Ziegler-Haynes. Wikipedia also has a page dedicated to documented last meal requests.
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