The movie version of the last meal is a blank check: steak, truffles, a rare vintage, then the long walk. The real version comes with an auditor. This episode separates the legend from the procedure inside modern American prisons, where most states do not even use the phrase and call it a special meal instead. It is usually served a day or two before the execution so that a heavy dinner cannot disrupt a tightly scripted protocol. Alcohol and tobacco are refused outright, and a request for a famous restaurant’s burger is filled from the institutional freezer.

Money sets the rest of the limits. Florida required food to be bought locally and capped the cost at $40, while Oklahoma allows just $25, figures that protect officials from taxpayer outrage. Against that sterile backdrop, some prisoners turned the meal into a way to reach other people, and one Louisiana tradition puts the warden at the table. The episode builds to September 2011, when a single inmate’s refusal to eat led Texas to abolish the custom altogether, and it asks what the ritual was ever really for.

• The term special meal works as a psychological buffer for staff, turning a grave moral act into one more item on the dietary schedule.
• In 1932 Francis Crowley asked to share his meal with fellow inmate John Resko. In 1951 Raymond Fernandez had his distributed among the men on his cell block.
• At Angola in Louisiana the warden traditionally joins the condemned for the meal, and one warden paid for a lobster dinner out of his own pocket.
• Lawrence Brewer ordered two chicken fried steaks, a triple meat bacon cheeseburger, a pound of barbecue, fajitas, pizza, and more, then refused to eat a single bite.
• Texas responded by ending special requests. The condemned there now receive whatever the general population cafeteria is serving that day.