Last Meals Delivery Service in Toronto will bring you a last meal (but only if you live in Toronto). Not your last meal, but the meal someone on Death Row chose as their last. They all cost $20 and must be ordered a couple of days ahead of delivery. You don't get to pick it out, but when it's delivered it comes with a DVD to watch and a paper mask of the convict who selected it. Frank at BlogTO tried it out and wrote up the experience.
I don't know what I was expecting. Possibly someone dressed as a grim reaper or in a prison guard uniform or something equally dramatic opening up a thermal bag with a puff of yellow sulfur-y smoke and handing me a styrofoam container that was eerily cool to the touch. Ideally, I'd've left my $20 (sorry, cash only folks) in an envelope at my front door and after a brief wait the doorbell would ring and the food would appear without any human agency to puncture the veil.
It wasn't quite like that.
By now i'm sure you're all just frothy with anticipation as to which lucky (or unlucky) dead-guy I drew. His name was James Hudson Bryant (prisoner #924), convicted of killing 3 people in a dispute over a shared driveway. His last meal included a cheeseburger, a tossed salad, large fries with ketchup, a pile of saltines, an apple turnover and for some reason I can't really fathom, a pair of brand-new white tube socks. Everything tasted okay; it wasn't exactly home-made.
Link -Thanks, Jerrold!
i would order from these guys every week if i lived in toronto.
I think this whole concept would seem a lot less tasteless without the face mask and the dvd. At least then it could just be chocked up to the morbid curiosity of what someone who knows they will die soon chooses to eat. The face mask and the dvd seem to mock the deceased. I tend to have a reverence for the dead as a lot of people do.
Read the article next time.
Seems like a dumb idea - not disrespectful, just stupid.
Even the socks?
I'd ask for soemthing exotic that I'd never had before but always fancied the idea of, like Unicorn au Poivre.
Do you get a stay of execution until they can find your meal?
Also, capital punishment is a bad idea, even Chales Ng.
I have no romantic notion about the sanctity of human life, just a realistic understanding of the fallability of human judicial process.
Many in the UK wanted to bring back hanging before the Birmingham Six and The Guildford Four went to trial in the 1970s, so they could be hung when convicted.
Convicted they were.... quite illegally convivted of things none of them did, nd if the more reactionary amongst us had had their way they'd have swung for them too.
Incidentally despite all the convictions having been over turned and the people set free, the govt has yet to pay a single penny of the compensation that was awarded.