Hannah Blacklock asks whether the last meals of death row inmates should be struck off everyone’s menu.
Death Row Dinners is already buried. The propsective pop-up restaurant offering diners the chance to partake of the last supper requested by death row inmates, has been trolled out of existence before a single dead animal could be fried, beheaded or strung up.
This plateful was clearly not to everyone’s taste.
The Hackney venture promised up to five courses in a room wallpapered with the faces of condemned criminals.
At £50 a head, the experience was advertised in October as ‘the idea of a last meal, without the nasty execution bit.’
But it has been given the chop, and its Twitter account closed down, after its organiser encountered ‘serious and threatening behaviour’ across social media platforms.
The would-be restaurateur, who now wishes to remain anonymous, went on to say that ‘the severity of the reaction is not at all surprising in the current world of instant outrage.’
His idea may not have been exactly tasteful. Even if the food itself was well cooked, there was always going to be a large portion of ‘yuk factor’ on the plate.
But it’s one thing to have no appetite for such ghoulish goulash, another to get it banged out of the kitchen outright.
Was Death Row Dinners really such an unwholesome prospect that no one should be allowed to experience it, even if they saw fit to do so? And is this all it takes to send the hipsters of Hackney into a keyboard tizzy?
Seems all that bohemianism and beardiness has turned uptight and censorious – nothing like the languorously loose living it’s cracked up to be.