Are You a Comfort Food Person or a Status Food Person

Brent Cunningham explores the ritual of the last supper for death-row inmates. Many requested meals are similar, and he suspects class is why: “In America, where the death rows — like the prisons generally — are largely filled with men from the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder, last-meal requests are dominated by the country’s mass-market comfort foods: fries, soda, fried chicken, pie. Sprinkled in this mix is a lot of what social scientists call ‘status foods’ — steak, lobster, shrimp — the kinds of foods that in popular culture conjure up the image of affluence.”
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