Various countries have various traditions in this regard. According to what Peter Toohey stated in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome, the ancient Greeks buried the executed with food so that a hungry ghost wouldn’t return to haunt the land of the living. That concept lived to pre-modern Europe, where the tradition of the last meal was based on the superstition that granting a condemned prisoner a final meal symbolically means they've made peace with the jailer. Many believed that if the prisoner accepted their last meal, they would not return as a ghost to haunt those responsible for their execution. According to Micheal Lynn-George in "The Writing Lesson: From the Dragon’s Teeth to Tristes Tropiques", a "little glass of rum" is granted to the condemned in historical France in the minutes before execution, but no formal last meal as the condemned learns of their impending execution only on the fatal morning, generally just minutes in advance.