Photograph by Christophe Goussard / Agence VU

In 2007, a photographer named Melanie Dunea published a book called “My Last Supper,” featuring portraits of fifty famous chefs accompanied by their answers to the question, “What would be your last meal on earth?” In the book’s introduction, Anthony Bourdain, who was also interviewed, claimed that “chefs have been playing the ‘My Last Supper’ game, in one version or another, since humans first gathered round the flames to cook.” The meals Bourdain and his contemporaries described are by turns touching, absurd, amusing, mouthwatering, imaginative, and surprisingly uninspired. Ferran Adrià would have a Japanese seafood-tasting menu followed by an Amazonian fruit he’d never tried; Gabrielle Hamilton wanted radishes and buttered toast; Daniel Boulud would take “whatever Alain Ducasse would like to cook.” The best answer, by a landslide, came from Jacques Pépin, who declared that his final meal would last for years. “I cannot conceive of anything better than the greatest baguette, deep golden, nutty, and crunchy, with a block of the sublime butter of Brittany and Bélon oysters,” he said. “I would gobble down tiny fingerling potatoes just out of the ground and sautéed in goose fat, along with a white escarole salad loaded with garlic and sprinkled with cracked pepper, just like my mother used to make.”

As a parlor game, the question of the last meal is an indulgent, lighthearted fantasy—useful, perhaps, as an exercise in nostalgia or a concise statement of identity, but divorced from the macabre implication underlying the hypothetical. It seems unlikely that chefs—and the rest of us—have been playing the “My Last Supper” game since man discovered fire, and more likely that we’ve been playing since man developed orderly systems of putting other men to death. In a fascinating essay in Lapham’s Quarterly in 2013, the editor and writer Brent Cunningham dated the concept of the last meal to gladiators in ancient Rome, who were fed lavish feasts the night before they faced off in the Colosseum. Today, the idea is inextricably tied to and associated with capital punishment. (Even Bourdain, at one point in his introduction, imagines being “strapped to a chair, facing a fatal surge of electricity.”) Google “last meal,” and you will get nearly four million results. The top hits include a Wikipedia page (“part of a series on Capital punishment”) featuring a list of the last-meal requests of “notorious condemned prisoners,” mostly in the U.S. and in the past century; several collections of photographs depicting recreations of some of those meals; and dozens of articles on the subject of what prisoners awaiting execution are fed before they die.

Last week, news of a London pop-up restaurant called Death Row Dinners (tagline: “Eat like it’s your last meal on earth”) went viral. The dinners were presented by anonymous organizers who identified only as Dirty Dishes. A flashy Web site displayed black-and-white mug shots of inmates wearing letter boards around their necks. Instead of booking information, the boards displayed historical last-meal menus: “Wild rabbit, biscuits with rabbit gravy, blackberry pie”; “burger, 2 hard boiled eggs, baked potato, 3 shots Jack Daniels, coffee.” A mission statement read: “If you love food, then at some point in your life you will have discussed the age-old question ‘What would your last meal be?’ and Death Row Dinners goes some way to answering that. Sort of.” “Sort of” because the question really being answered was the plainly voyeuristic, “What have prisoners on death row chosen for their last meals?” The statement continued: “On the night of your incarceration, you will join 80 fellow inmates and experience a night behind the bars of one of London’s toughest high security restaurants where our prison chefs serve up a 5 course feast of their culinary twists on some of death rows most interesting and popular last dinners.” Tickets were listed at fifty pounds each.

The public response was swift and marked by moral outrage. Some wondered if the project was a joke, or some kind of performance piece. But then the organizers (who’ve remained anonymous) issued a tentative apology: “We’re shocked and saddened by the response to Death Row Dinners and are genuinely very sorry for any offence caused,” it read. “In light of the response to the idea we are considering our next steps and will update everyone with our decision.”

The offense caused is easy enough to understand: there’s something undeniably stomach-turning about the gimmick of presumably well-off city dwellers forking over eighty dollars to eat fancified versions of the prison-issued food that the mostly poor and otherwise marginalized—criminal or not—denizens of death row pathetically requested before being executed. It commodifies the loss of human life—justifiable or not—and makes light of a grave and controversial issue, marrying the parlor game and its real-life counterpart without acknowledging that one is for fun and the other is an ugly truth. From another angle, the project glamorizes and memorializes people who have committed horrific crimes. Either way, the restaurant doesn’t seem to have been designed to provoke any serious political or sociological conversation—although, in a follow-up statement defending their decision to move ahead with the dinners, the organizers took credit for having done so: “This time two weeks ago, not a single newspaper carried a story about the morality of the death penalty,” they wrote. “Now the Telegraph, Independent and Guardian newspapers amongst many others have it as a leading story gaining capital punishment invaluable media coverage.”

Whether or not you find Death Row Dinners to be in poor taste, it’s worth examining the impulses that lead to its existence. Why does anyone care about death-row prisoners’ last meals? In part, for the same reason they care about famous chefs’ last meals. As Cunningham explained in his Lapham’s piece: “If, as the French epicure Anthelme Brillat-Savarin suggested, we are what we eat, then a final meal would seem to be the ultimate self-expression. There is added titillation when that expression comes from the likes of Timothy McVeigh (two pints of mint-chocolate-chip ice cream) or Ted Bundy (who declined a special meal and was served steak, eggs, hash browns, toast, milk, coffee, juice, butter, and jelly).” We’re captivated by our most gruesome criminals, and so we want to know everything about them, down to what they most liked to eat. To be reminded, perhaps, of their utter ordinariness and humanity, which makes their unimaginably transgressive acts all the more thrilling.

“Death eludes the living, and we are drawn to anything that offers the possibility of glimpsing the undiscovered country,” Cunningham wrote. Could eating what the dead last ate (or last desired; many death-row prisoners were granted only approximations of their requests) help us to imagine what it would be like to reach the brink ourselves? Maybe, but it also reinforces the ironic futility of the last meal: as the Arkansas death-row inmate Barry Lee Fairchild said, “It’s just like putting gas in a car that don’t have no motor.” We eat to live, so what can eating really teach us about death? What Death Row Dinners illuminates is that we’ve reached a peak cultural moment of living to eat, defining ourselves by our diets and batting away death by gorging in whatever pop-up restaurants we can dream up. A moment in which a restaurant that offers the experience of eating like you’re on death row sounds galling, but not implausible. But if there’s a line, Death Row Dinners seems to have crossed it. By the end of last week, the restaurant’s Web site and Twitter account had disappeared. Due to what the organizers described as “serious threatening behavior,” Death Row Dinners had been cancelled.