You are a prisoner in Texas, and about to be put to death. Just about everyone else in your position is allowed a special last meal, and yet you receive a cup of mystery meat, soggy vegetables and various other just-edible foods that make you feel ill. Does it seem fair? Do you want to be just like the criminals you hate, or rise above their level?

Many cultures, as far back as the ancient Egyptians, have associated the giving of food with the dead peacefully passing away. There is even evidence to suggest that the early Greeks gave their prisoners a last meal, and the Romans definitely let gladiators eat a mouthwatering snack. In pre-modern Europe, the giving of a final meal symbolized making peace with the host, and the prisoner forgiving all involved with his death, including the witness and executioner. It supposedly prevented the executed from coming back as a ghost.

Prisoners should be offered a proper last meal. For one, it is simply inhumane not to. Considering that the government can legally kill a convicted murderer by decapitation, hanging, gas chamber, firing squad, electrocution, stoning, or lethal injection, it isn’t too much to ask for a consolation meal before that happens.

Texas stopped dishing out special repasts for the soon-to-be-executed because a Texas Senator, John Whitmire, got angry when convicted murderer Lawrence Russell Brewer requested a frightfully large last meal and ate none of it. Brewer ordered two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions, a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger, a bowl of fried okra with ketchup, a pound of barbecued meat with half of a loaf of white bread, a portion of three fajitas, a meat-lover’s pizza (topped with pepperoni, ham, beef, bacon, and sausage), a pint of Blue Bell, a serving of ice cream, a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts, and a serving equivalent to three root beers. However, it seems rather unfair that because of an individual’s mistake, every inmate on death row in the entire state Texas has to be punished; it’s like penalizing the whole class because a solitary person threw a paper airplane.

There are other ways Texas could go about giving those on death penalty last meals while preventing the same thing from happening again. Some states set a price limit. For example, for the prisoners in Florida, the cost may not exceed $40 and has to be purchased locally; Oklahoma has a limit of $15. Other states have a menu to choose from.

Write a letter to Texas Senators or the prisons themselves and oppose this unjustness by giving alternatives like a price limit on the menu, or simply say that it is just not right to be the only state to participate in such cruelty. If you are unwilling to do that, contact your own Senators or congressional representatives and ask them to encourage the Texans to change this cruel law to a more lenient substitute.