Where death is concerned I am with Woody Allen: I’m not afraid of it; I just don’t want to be there when it happens. My desire not to dwell on the subject is regularly undermined, however, by the number of people who ask me what my death row meal would be. My fear is that they are fantasising less about my food choices, and more about me being locked away in a cell contemplating a trip to the gallows, for crimes against self-control.

Personally, I think the interest is misplaced. Yes, there have been a few interesting last meals, especially President François Mitterrand’s humdinger of a blowout before he died of cancer in 1996. The banquet included the song birds ortolan. Mitterrand may once have upheld the laws of the Republic but on the way out he no longer cared. He indulged in the full ritual surrounding the illegal consumption of these birds: drowned in cognac, roasted, then eaten with a napkin over your head so the Lord might not see your sin. Those crazy French.

But that one is the exception. The evidence is that, when genuinely faced with the request, most people suffer a failure of imagination. The website famouslastmeals.com is one long list of boring eating options for serial killers. Velma Barfield, executed in North Carolina in 1984, wanted cheese doodles – think giant Wotsits – and a can of Coke. Teresa Lewis, executed in 2010, asked for fried chicken (as did many others). And then there’s Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma federal building bombing in 1995, who wanted two tubs of mint chocolate chip ice cream. The fact that all three of these represent comfort eating, reaching back towards the certainties of childhood is barely worth pointing out.

The choice that intrigues me is Victor Feguer’s, executed for murder in 1963. He asked for a single olive, complete with stone. I think I’d go for the same, though I would make one change. I’d lose the olive and make do with the empty plate. Here’s the point. The question says one thing – what would your death row meal be? – but is heard as another. Very few of us have the capacity to imagine what it’s like to be on death row, let alone to have committed the crimes that might have got us there. So what we actually hear is: if you were offered the chance to eat anything you like, anything at all, without a thought for consequences of any kind, what would you choose?

And those two questions are not the same. The latter is about fantastic indulgence, and indulgence is about many things including building memories, whether we acknowledge that or not. When we construct a killer dinner party, we talk about cooking a meal to remember. We are all of us capable of becoming nostalgic for the thing we’re eating even as it disappears from the plate in front of us. The problem with death row meals is that all the opportunities for hardcore remembering have gone. Come the morning it will all be over.

So when I’m asked the question, I usually oblige by saying spare ribs, partly because I really like them, but mostly because they demand my attention. While eating them I’ll be able to avoid thinking about what’s to come. But in truth, if I was on death row, I would have completely lost my appetite. It turns out that there are some things that are more important than dinner, even for me.