




































Microsoft Word - Review-Graham-Dying to Eat-galley-3-30-20.docx


Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7:1 (2018-2019): 67-68         ©  American Folklore Society 2020 

Review of: 

Dying to Eat: 
Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife  
Candi K. Cann, ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. Pp. 208, 
acknowledgments, index, contributors. 

Review by: Tiff Graham 
____________________________________________________________ 

Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife, edited 
by Candi K. Cann, is a culinary and cultural expedition, where the reader travels to 
China, Taiwan, Korea, Mexico, United States, Morocco, and South Africa to learn 
how the living bury, honor, and remember their dead with food, drink, and ritual. 
The compilation’s eight well-researched contemporary essays are grounded in 
ethnographic fieldwork, historical research, and scholarly insight. Although the 
connective ingredient in each is the study of food and death, the book will appeal to 
diverse scholarly interests in folklore, anthropology, history, culture, religion, 
gender, class, education, age, geography, funerary and mortuary practices, 
psychology, economics, public health, or technology. Individual essays or the entire 
book could be assigned in undergraduate or graduate level courses aimed at 
foodways, food culture, death studies, or religious beliefs and practices. 

In the introduction, Cann explains the book’s interdisciplinary approach and variety 
in themes addressed as they focus on the subject of death and food. A central 
premise, evident in works by several authors, including Cann, is that food serves as a 
conduit for a living community to relate to their dead by preparing, serving, 
consuming, and/or offering food to them, and in their remembrance (4-8). Drawing 
on scholarship of bereavement studies, they invoke “continuing body theory,” which 
holds that people cope better when they renegotiate bonds with the deceased. 

Structurally, each essay includes a funerary cooking recipe, and sometimes a 
photograph of the food, in a familiar cookbook style. Yet the multi-layered analyses 
and explorations of social, cultural, and economic influences shaping beliefs and 
practices suggest anything but cookbook writing. In “Moroccan Funeral Feasts,” for 
example, David Oualaalou first distinguishes Morocco from other Muslim countries 
using couscous, its daily dish and funerary food. He then examines changing 
viewpoints, food, and activities associated with the dead, and explains how 
generational, educational, rural versus urban geography, social class, and 
technological influences shape the Moroccan funeral. In “Eating and Drinking with 
the Dead in South Africa,” Radikobo Ntsimane vividly details funeral stages and 
ancestral homecoming rituals with specific food and drink ranging from pre-funeral 
scones, tea, and coffee for visitors to mogoga (funeral meals) for everyone, and post-
post funeral offerings of meat and sorghum beer to the deceased (174-180). 
Alongside descriptions of food and ritual, Ntsimane addresses modern issues of the 
economically disadvantaged, large payout funeral insurance policies, HIV/AIDS 
pandemic-related deaths, Christianity, and white people’s influence on funerary 
foods and practices (174). 



68     Graham, Review, Dying to Eat Digest: A Journal of Foodways & Culture 7: 1 (2018-2019) 

The theme of religion is embedded in many of the essays. Buddhism, Confucianism, 
Daoism, Judaism, Islam, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, African Spirituality, 
folk Catholicism, and as one author suggested, “religion of no religion” (155), emerge 
as shaping attitudes, beliefs, and practices around food and the dead. In “The Eating 
Ritual in Korean Religiosity: Young San Jae for the Dead and for the Living,” Jun 
Eun Sophia Park focuses on Confucianism, Shamanism, Buddhism, and Catholicism 
in relation to Korean ancestor veneration and food traditions. She builds a multi-
sensory personal account of the Bong Won Temple monks’ “symbolic reenactment of 
the last festival the historical Buddha had with his disciples” and reveals that 
offerings such as the three tower plates of nuts and fruits, oil and honey pastries, and 
rice cakes symbolize “wishes of dedication, blessing, and invocation” (42, 45). 
Joshua Graham’s “Funeral Food as Resurrection in the American South” explores 
Southern Christian “denominational funeral food patterns” and how offerings of 
food and drink vary by an individual’s closeness to the departed, religious 
denomination or congregation, and social class (98). While Episcopalians might 
offer alcohol, Graham explains, Baptists would not; Methodists frequently offer 
“funeral goo” dishes with processed ingredients made for longer shelf life; and 
“Episcopalians prefer aspic, small rolls, cheese straws, and fudge cake” (98). 

Although religion plays a strong role in the book’s essays, plenty of other themes are 
discussed, such as: women’s roles; the ability of the dead to connect and renew 
bonds with the living who prepare and serve them special recipes (95); and the 
conjuring of the body or bringing human remains to life through vivid detail in the 
care and preparation of flesh and bones. This latter topic made a particularly 
memorable impression on me. In “Chinese Ancestral Worship: Food to Sustain, 
Transform, and Heal the Dead and the Living,” for example, Emily Wu conveys 
esoteric knowledge about the ideal body conditions for a bone-picking master, 
among descriptions of other Chinese traditions that relate to worshipping deities and 
ancestor spirits with appropriate food offerings. Similarly, Lacy K. Crocker and 
Gordon Fuller’s essay, “The Circle of Life: Memorializing and Sustaining Faith,” 
details Jewish traditions for preparing the unadorned body and sitting shiva with 
symbolic foods, while also explaining how Judaism shapes attitudes, behaviors, and 
practices related to death and dying bodies. In a surprising historical and macabre 
turn, Christa Shusko’s essay, “Alcohol Consumption, Transgression, and Death,” 
reports on the alcohol-fueled rituals of death-themed activities of the Whitechapel 
Club, a nineteenth century men’s social group in Chicago Illinois. Shusko specifically 
looks into how this group came to burn a deceased body on an outdoor pyre. 

While most of the essays in this collection are focused on one culture’s foodways 
approaches to death, Cann’s “Sweetening Death: Shifting Landscapes of the Role of 
Food in Grief and Mourning,” challenges the reader to compare multiple culture’s 
funerals and holidays of remembrance (such as Day of the Dead, Qing Ming) through 
similarities in funerary food ingredients. 

In sum, Dying to Eat offers a multifaceted study of death in relation to food. In each 
essay, the reader steps into another country, culture, and bittersweet human 
experience that reveals distinctive food histories, cultural rituals, and ways of 
thinking about the dead. This reader found the essays appealing, exhausting, 
saddening, and yet deeply educational.		


