For quite some time in my childhood, I was under the impression that kande batate ki bhaji, blooming with garlic, creamy chawal ki kheer and puris were holy pooja food, because they were made twice a year and my mom would light a lamp before we could eat it. I came to understand that this was my late uncle Pradeep’s favourite meal and was cooked on his birth and death anniversaries. As if in continuity, when my father died, it became a kind of ritual in my family to eat ice cream or dark chocolate cake on his death and birth anniversaries. 

Food is an intimate part of death rituals in most cultures and communities. The foods are metaphors for life—grain, fish and meat—or death as stripping sensory life from the spirit —vegetables without spice, mashed rice. Some feasts are offerings of thanks, because we inherit our very beings from our ancestors, whom we believe partake, for instance, as crows. Others face death squarely, even cheerfully, like sugar candy skulls on Mexico’s Day of the Dead. In Japan, bones are picked from the ashes with chopsticks, and passed on from person to person before being placed in an urn, as if saying we ourselves are food, for the gods, or for nature.