Surprise: Last Meals Tend To Be Comfort Foods

While there has always been a morbid curiosity as to what people would choose for their last meal, sometimes, the results aren't that surprising.

Cornell University researchers crunched the numbers of 193 last meal orders, finding that more than two-thirds of the prisoners requested fried foods, plus some form of dessert.

The most popular dishes? French fries. More than a third of the meals involved chicken, followed by hamburgers (24 percent) and steak (22 percent). Soda was also five times more popular than milk.

Still, some people were looking for some greens; apparently, more than a quarter of the prisoners asked for a salad as well, while one person (not included in the numbers) asked for one pitted olive.

Overall, however, meals were hefty and fatty. On average, a last meal was around 2,756 calories; an average American should roughly eat around 2,000 calories each day. And of course, some meals had more than 7,200 calories. One request included fried chicken (12 pieces), two rolls, mashed potatoes and gravy, two sodas, and two pints of ice cream (strawberry and vanilla).

"In some ways, this might be a way to bring the level of stress and negative excitement down to something that's something a little bit more manageable," lead researcher Brian Wansink told CBS. "You don't find people going for Neapolitan ice cream or for Chunky Monkey or Chubby Hubby. They go for chocolate; they go for vanilla."

Of course, this also means that classic fast-food chains are popular; researchers found that 4 percent of last meals included requests from fast-food chains like McDonald's, Wendy's, and KFC.