At the College of Wooster, in Wooster, OH, USA, I had the privilege of looking at a 3,000-year-old pitcher from Pella, Jordan at our museum. It was found in a tomb and at one point had something in it, left and meant for the dead. Across thousands of miles and thousands of years, there is a connection between food and the dead. I consider food to be one of the most important aspects of human connection, of family and companionship and community. The origin of the word companion is, of course, Latin; com meaning together and panis meaning bread. Then the French got hold of it, and it became compaignon, which means one who breaks bread with another. Food is essential to life, and we have, on occasion, made it essential to death as well.
Funeral Potatoes: and other family favorites.
I haven’t been to many funerals in my life. I do know that when someone dies, one of the primary reactions is to load up the bereaved with as much food as they can fit in their fridge. My grandfather didn’t want a funeral, so we didn’t have one. But over six months after he passed, my family decided we had to do something. If only for the excuse to see the family together. At that get-together, we went through old photographs, and some of his things, and someone–– I have no idea if it was my mom, my uncle, my grandmother, whoever–– got a chocolate cake. No one really had much interest in having cake as we were all too busy going over photos, so at the end of the gathering everyone had to load up on as many pieces as they could sandwich between a couple of disposable plastic plates. It wasn’t a bad cake, either. My grandfather, however, did not have cake. He had pecans, dark chocolate, and bananas. Some of his favorite foods had been laid out with other belongings and pictures; things that we think were precious to him in life. Maybe it was a display meant for him, maybe it was more meant for us, but they were his favorites first. As things were winding down, before we got to the cake, but after we’d gone through most of the photos, I think my uncle had the banana, and my mom had some of the pecans. We got those for my grandpa, but what were we going to do, throw them away?
I don’t think chocolate cake is the typical funeral food, but again, it wasn’t meant to be a funeral. I know it’s becoming more common to call this type of thing a celebration of life. That’s probably more accurate. I think in the U.S. the most iconic of funeral foods is funeral potatoes. They’re also known as party potatoes, which is a contrasting title I think you could take a lot from. Both are gatherings meant to accomplish something, even if the tones are wildly different. Another food associated with mourning is Borsok. It’s fried dough that is tied to both celebrations and funerals in Kyrgyzstan, a small country in Central Asia. This tradition caught my eye, as frying the dough is referred to as “releasing the smell,” the scent is meant to feed the dead. This is also the second instance of a food or a dish associated both with celebration and mourning. The good times and the bad, you want to bring good food with you.
A Guide on How to Break Bread:
First off, bread does not have to be bread. It can be leftover candy from an event, I’m talking a hundred dum-dums that I continued to work through for ages. It can also be a leftover jar of pickles that my friend can’t eat anymore because of an allergy. I don’t even like pickles that much, but she really didn’t want to waste food, so I accepted. Something a little closer to breaking bread is my new roommate ordering a pizza on her first night there. In a dorm, there isn’t a dining table; eating at your desk is a very solitary thing and eating on your bed is a disaster waiting to happen, so the common practice is to eat on the floor. I’m of the belief that food is community. The College also has a mutual aid pantry in Babcock. I don’t think many people know about it, and I don’t know if it gets used much. Sharing comes easier when you see the person’s face, but I think both matter in different ways. My first year I didn’t know my roommate then either, but I remember she’d sometimes leave candy on my desk with a little note because she knew how much I liked sweets. When I went home for the summer, she was going to stay on campus for a few more weeks, so I left my fridge there so she could use it and made the 2 hour drive a second time to pick it up when it came time for her to leave.
This kind of community, one built on mutual aid and care beyond typical familial lines, feels like such a rare thing. It’s the kind of community I want to hold onto after graduation. Food is very important to me. I think it is one of the greatest ways to express love. It is incredibly difficult to cook on a college campus, but I have a lot of fond memories in the kitchen of my first-year dorm with my friends. We all lived in the same building then. And we spent most evenings there while our friend made herself dinner. Dining hall food was even more inhospitable to her than it was to the rest of us. We would spend time with her while she ate, even after we’d had our trek to the dining hall. Mealtimes were part of our community, even if we weren’t all participating in the same way or at the same time. I think some of my best memories first year are in that kitchen.
These fond memories of meals spent together are suited for the good times and the bad, as some other unusual foods I associate with mourning include cookies and crème chocolate bars, fruity teas, ice cream, pizza, and popcorn; all things that can be acquired or prepared from a dorm room. So, this sort of community means doing what you can with what you have. Bringing a friend a favorite snack from the c-store, washing their dishes, taking out their trash, drafting an email to their professors for them. Not everyone can go home for a funeral. So we make do with our mourning.
Grave Robbing (and other dubious dinner plans)
Did you know eating mummies was a part of European medicine for hundreds of years? An unrelated fun fact: Did you know the College of Wooster has a mummy? I am not advocating for College Students to partake in a centuries-old practice of cannibalizing the long dead of another culture. I’m not. I am asking them to consider what it means for us to have a mummy at our college. Apparently, back in the day students would touch the mummy for good luck. No one connected to her remains alive today, but how would we feel, if a loved one’s body is going to be displayed like an attraction in a thousand years? I bring this up because we’ve already been over the lovely connections between food and death in regard to grieving and showing compassion to the bereaved, but it’s not the only way to connect food and death. Our treatment of the dead, and of which dead, says something about us. My concern is in part that it comes across a bit like a spectacle, the way it was advertised this year as a moment of “oh come see the mummy! She isn’t on display often, come marvel at this curiosity!” in our email inboxes, I find that sour. I won’t say displaying the dead is inherently immoral. In some cultures, displaying the dead is just a part of mourning. The distinction in my mind is that it’s the people who loved that person doing so. In Tana Toraja in Eastern Indonesia, until the funeral, which is usually a festive and long party sometimes weeks after the person’s passing, the deceased are kept in the home. They are referred to as a person who is sick or asleep until their funeral rites allow the family to come to an agreement on when they are truly deceased. It is about families staying with their lost loved one until it feels time to move on. There’s something especially kind and rare about giving a family a say when their loved one is considered truly dead.
On Dead Animals (inedible & otherwise)
When we hear about a death in the family while away at school, in my experience the distance fosters a “keep calm & carry on” attitude toward death. There is a certain lack of traditional mourning. If there is a loss in the family, it is common practice in the culture of the College Campus to email professors, to maybe receive a few extensions on assignments, and to be allowed to speak less in class. Still, since often we cannot be with our families, we have things to do to take care of ourselves and our responsibilities, simply who has the time to grieve? I don’t know if it’s healthy, but it’s the practice I’ve seen most often. Not everyone is able to go home for a funeral. We still mourn in little ways. And our friends bring us dinner, they sit with us, grieving is treated in a manner similar to being sick, I think. Someone will do tasks for you and bring you food, and they will linger if they are able to. Thankfully, I’ve found grief is not contagious.
Coming to college, our understanding of death varied depending on the person. I have vegetarian friends who sit and eat with friends who hunt and kill animals for food back home. As a kid who grew up in suburbia, the most death I’ve seen has been roadkill. I’ve had friends who have lost many relatives, and friends who have lost none that they’ve known. I do think we’re living in a society where death is very uncomfortable for us. I know this is not the case everywhere. I think even just through discussion, hearing the way others treat death and dying is healthy for us. Our manners of grieving while at school are a bit more unorthodox, a bit more make-do, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t still a community there to offer understanding.
Back to the Big Pitcher:
This line of thinking began because of a 3,000-year-old pitcher meant to serve wine to the dead. Why do we leave food for the dead? Why do we give food to the living? It all comes from the same place. It is all a matter of care, of expressing love beyond us. The dead seemingly will not see the fruition of our caring, but we find reasons anyway. Those left behind to grieve will take comfort in wine left for their loved ones, just as they will take comfort in the funeral potatoes or the borsok or the chocolate cake given to them for their losses, given to the dead for their absence. These practices matter so much that they persist wherever they are needed. Even in this strange limbo, distant from family and tradition and loss, we still find ways of taking care of one another, of mourning. Regardless of what we can muster up in our circumstances, even if it’s something as simple as soup from the convenience store or sharing a pizza, we still try. We share food with the living, we leave food for the dead, and maybe that act is for the living at its heart, but it’s for the dead too. Rituals for the dead are as old as our species. They vary wildly and not all of them may be understandable to all of us, but at their core they make sense. This legacy follows our species, learning from those who we will one day learn to mourn how to continue caring. We want to take care of each other, even if the dead may no longer be able to feel that care.
Works Cited
“Companion Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/companion.
Dolan, Maria. “The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 6 May 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/.
“Funeral Foods Show How Food and Grief Can Be Closely Linked – Talking Death.” Poppy’s Funerals, https://www.poppysfunerals.co.uk/talking-death/five-funeral-foods-from-around-the-world/.
Kim, Janet. “Funeral Traditions in Tana Toraja.” Anthropological Perspectives on Death, 7 Feb. 2018, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/gravematters/2018/02/07/funeral-traditions-in-tana-toraja/.