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Research Essay 
 
Food and the Expressive Culture of Death: Two Perspectives  
By: Isaura Garcia and Sheila Bock 
 

Abstract: This piece offers reflections, from the perspectives of a professor (Sheila 
Bock) and a student (Isaura Garcia), on the role that food played in facilitating 
teaching and learning in an undergraduate seminar on the “Expressive Culture of 
Death.” This was not a course about food or foodways, but rather a class where 
foodways served as a productive entry point into students’ understandings of how 
people create and communicate meaning about not only death, but also life in their 
social and cultural worlds. Highlighting the student perspective in the larger 
consideration of edible pedagogies offered by this special issue, we hope to make 
visible the ways in which student learning and engagement can both draw upon and 
extend beyond the carefully curated plans of the professor in wonderfully 
generative ways. 
 
Keywords: foodways, expressive culture, death, student perspective 

 
This piece offers reflections, from the perspectives of a professor (Sheila Bock) and a 
student (Isaura Garcia), on the role that food played in facilitating teaching and learning in 
an undergraduate seminar on the “Expressive Culture of Death.” This was not a course 
about food or foodways, but rather a class where foodways served as a productive entry 
point into students’ understandings of how people create and communicate meaning about 
not only death, but also life in their social and cultural worlds (in both planned and 
unplanned ways). The piece will begin with the perspective of Sheila Bock, an associate 
professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who will describe her goals for the course 
and the explicit attention she gave to the topic of food in its design. It will then shift to the 
perspective of undergraduate student Isaura Garcia, who shares some of the work she did 
for one of the class assignments and offers her own reflections on why she found the topic 
of food to be so compelling within the context of this course. Highlighting the student 
perspective in the larger consideration of edible pedagogies offered by this special issue, 
we hope to make visible the ways in which student learning and engagement can both 
draw upon and extend beyond the carefully curated plans of the professor in wonderfully 
generative ways. 
 
A Professor’s Perspective 
At the (virtual) American Folklore Society Annual Meeting in the fall of 2020, I (Sheila 
Bock) attended a virtual Death Café organized by Willow Mullins, where several of my 
folklorist colleagues shared their research and personal reflections at the intersections of 
folklore and death. Listening to the insights of my colleagues helped me find useful 
frameworks to make sense of my own heightened attention to the topic of death amidst the 
early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and other events happening in the U.S. and world. 
Very much inspired by that Death Café, I began to put together a syllabus for a class called 
“The Expressive Culture of Death,” which I taught as an Honors Seminar at the University of 



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Nevada, Las Vegas the following year during the Fall 2021 semester, and then again in Fall 
2022.  
  
A foundational premise of this class is that, while death is a topic that is often hidden from 
view and not talked about explicitly in U.S. American contexts (due to a range of historical 
factors including professionalization and medicalization), death is nevertheless a part of 
life and a phenomenon that does capture the attention of the living. Building on this 
foundational premise, I designed the syllabus with these questions in mind: How do we 
create meaning in the face of death? What kinds of expressive culture does death inspire? 
What insights can expressive culture offer into social and cultural understandings of death 
more broadly? How does the expressive culture of death create opportunities for reflection, 
critique, community-building, and political action? 
  
All of the students who have taken this class are unfamiliar with the field of folklore, so 
both times I have taught it, I have spent a good deal of time early on in this 15-week course 
explaining what I mean when I use the term “expressive culture.” Specifically, I explain that 
I am using this term to reference how social and cultural beliefs and perspectives take 
tangible form in the things people say, make, and do. I explain that since I am a folklorist, I 
am most interested in the types of expressive culture that are both informal—outside of 
(though often interacting with) official, institutional culture—and traditional—shared or 
repeated within a social group (indicating that it carries meaning to people in that group). 
  
To help the students begin identifying some informal, traditional examples of what they 
have seen people say, make, or do in response to death, I turn to foodways for one of my 
introductory examples. Specifically, I ask students what they have observed community 
members do for the surviving family members of an individual who has died, and both 
times I have taught it, more than one of the students has answered, “Bring them food.” This 
opens up a discussion of what functions this act (or custom) serves. For example, students 
note that the act of bringing food is a break from the “ordinary,” marking the family as 
being in a state of grieving. It is also a way for others in the community to show that they 
care for the bereaved family, affirming broader community ties. As part of this discussion, I 
encourage them to think about how we can find meaning not only in the act of sharing food, 
but in the form and content of the food itself.  For example, while the specific dishes differ 
based on regional and cultural traditions, most often the food that is shared is a meal, not 
the chocolates or the elaborately decorated cookies that might be brought as a Christmas 
gift (with holidays being another break from the “ordinary”). The foods shared in the 
immediate aftermath of someone’s death are typically not “fancy,” but rather utilitarian and 
comforting – they are meant to nourish and sustain those who are grieving without the 
expectation of recognition for one’s artistry or skill in the kitchen. These meals are also 
typically created and shared with an explicit mindfulness of the disruption this kind of grief 
can bring to daily schedules. There is no expectation that they will be eaten immediately, 
and ease of preparation is a key component of the meal. And very often these meals are 
homemade rather than ordered from a restaurant, functioning to help community 
members feel that they are contributing something not just tangible but more meaningful 
by putting in both the care and the work to provide a home-cooked meal. 
  



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One key recurring concept in the course is the liminality of death, and we give a great deal 
of attention to how funerary rituals and customs serve as rites of passage that facilitate the 
transition from one status to another. Drawing on ideas introduced in Candi K. Cann’s 
introduction to the edited volume Dying to Eat: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, 
and the Afterlife (2018), we consider how death inspires two such transitions: 1) the 
transition of the people who remain alive, who must transition to a life without the 
deceased, and 2) the transition of the deceased from the realm of the living to the realm of 
the dead. In the process, I turn to foodways to help illustrate people’s engagement with 
these transitions. For example, we consider how the deceased can be kept socially alive 
through the incorporation of specific dishes or recipes clearly associated with them. We 
also talk about how communal meals served and consumed at funerals strengthen the 
social bonds of the living, and how familiar foods reinforce communal identities. An 
example one Filipina student shared from her own experiences is how it is common among 
the Filipino families she knows to have a funeral feast served buffet style, and her own 
grandfather’s funeral was no exception, with “normal Filipino party food” including pancit, 
lumpia, and BBQ chicken and pork skewers. Beyond reinforcing social bonds and 
communal identities, she noted that having a feast and spending money on food is a sign of 
respect for the deceased. 
  
In thinking about the transition of the deceased from the realm of the living to the realm of 
the dead, we also consider the role of food in caring for the dead (an idea that emerges in 
particular in our consideration of Día de los Muertos, which Isaura Garcia addresses in 
more detail below). Drawing from the work of death studies scholar Tony Walker, Candi K. 
Cann describes caring for the dead as “a renegotiation of the status of the deceased person 
while allowing the living to retain an active and participatory relationship with the dead in 
their new state” (2018: 4). The same student who described the feast of “normal Filipino 
party food” served at her grandfather’s funeral also offered an example of the role food 
plays in this renegotiation in her own family’s traditions, noting that in the days following 
or on the anniversaries of someone’s death, sometimes her family would cook and serve a 
plate next to a photograph of the deceased family member. 
  
Finally, as part of our exploration of liminality, we also consider how the ephemeral 
materiality of food offers a useful way to mediate the “betwixt and between-ness” of the 
corpse. I present the students with this excerpt from the work of anthropologist Jung Eun 
Sophia Park: 
  

Food operates as a dialectic revealing the tension that exists between the “clean” 
purity of the organic life-giving force and the “messy” nature of inevitable decay. 
Food provides great pleasure and necessary energy, but it also includes dirt. Food 
forever threatens contamination and bodily impurity, but it is necessary for survival 
and is a source of pleasure. As Deborah Lupton incisively states, “Food is a metonym 
of the mortality of human flesh, the inevitable entropy of living matter.”  (Park 2018: 
47) 

  
Drawing these connections, in turn, opens up productive avenues to think about the ways 
in which the body of the dead straddles the border between the familiar and the 



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threatening, and must be properly “prepared” for culturally sanctioned forms of 
“consumption.”  
  
One of my key goals as an educator is to help my students build a critical lens for looking at 
the different forms of expressive culture they encounter in their everyday lives. To these 
ends, I aim to create space for students to draw connections to their own experiences and 
observations, both during in-person discussions and through informal written responses to 
our class meetings on the online discussion board. I also design more formal assignments 
with these pedagogical goals in mind. One assignment, for example, asks students to create 
a slidecast (i.e., a recorded slideshow of images accompanied by audio narration) that 
documents and contextualizes their own personal engagement with the expressive culture 
of death. I keep the assignment intentionally open-ended in terms of topics or genres they 
might focus on, though the assignment guidelines ask them to do the following: 
  

·      Describe your own relationship to this form of expressive culture (e.g., as an 
observer, an active participant, an intended audience member, an unintended 
audience member, a creator, a consumer, a guide for others’ engagement) and (if 
applicable) how this has changed over time.  
·      Offer some examples of your specific engagement with this form of expressive 
culture, reflecting on the functions this engagement served for you personally. 
·      Offer background information about this form of expressive culture based on 
course materials and additional research 
·      Articulate how reflecting on your personal engagement with/participation in 
this tradition offers insight into the significance of this form of expressive culture 
more broadly. 

 
Students have chosen to focus on a wide array of topics for this assignment, including, for 
example, their participation in death-related humor, their consumption of true crime 
media, their experiences visiting (and in one case working at) sites of dark tourism, the 
stories they tell about their experiences of hauntings, how their family has used the space 
of a local cemetery over the years, and how they reconfigured traditional rituals of grief 
and remembrance in a virtual format. Isaura Garcia, whose perspective is presented below, 
put together a beautiful presentation focused on the relationship between transformation, 
consumption, death, and food. 
   
Upon seeing the call for submissions for this special issue on “Edible Pedagogies,” I 
immediately thought back to Isaura’s slidecast and her thoughtful personal reflections on 
the intersections between food and death. I recognized it as an important opportunity to 
engage with the theme of this special issue from a student’s perspective. In what follows, 
you will find the written script for Isaura’s slidecast assignment with select images from 
the original presentation.  After that, we turn attention to Isaura’s perspective as she offers 
some valuable insights into how and why food caught her attention as a form of expressive 
culture in the context of this specific course. 
 
Written Script for Isaura Garcia’s Slidecast Presentation 



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Transformative Aspects of Consumption in Relation to Death  
 
As much as we like to avoid thinking about it, death is an integral part of life. One aspect of 
death that we tend to turn a blind eye to is the consumption of the dead. Hearing that, you 
might think I'm referring to cannibalism–which, yes, is a form of consuming the dead–but 
that is not necessarily the focus of this video.  

 
 

 
 
Image 1. Recreation of “The Last Supper” by Leonardo Da Vinci 
painted onto a plate that hangs above the dining table of the home of the Garcia Family. Text reads “give us 
today our daily bread” in Spanish. Photo courtesy of Isaura Garcia. 

 
 

These first few images depict some of my earliest experiences of consuming the dead–the 
Eucharist. The Eucharist, also known as the holy communion, is a religious tradition that I 
practiced during my time as a Roman Catholic. I symbolically consumed the body and blood 
of Jesus Christ. I did this as a way to transform from a sinner into a devout Catholic. 
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, holy communion is a way to strengthen the 
community, strengthen one's relationship with Jesus Christ, and focus on the coming glory 
of heaven (Petruzello: 2021).  
 



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Image 2. Photograph of Isaura Garcia’s first holy communion, taken by Isaura Valerio, October 31, 2015. 
Permission granted November 29, 2021. 

 
While my early experience consuming the dead was symbolic, there are many instances 
where humans literally consumed the dead. One historical example of cultural cannibalism 
can be found with the Aztecs. The Aztecs were an ancient Latin American civilization with a 
cyclical notion of life and death. Mark Cartwright suggests the idea that human sacrifice 
was a method of repayment; it was a necessity to survive and thank the gods for the 
original sacrifice that resulted in the existence of humanity. According to Red from Overly 
Sarcastic Productions, the Earth itself was created from the undead remains of the god 
Cipactli and Quetzalcóatl stole bones from the Underworld to make the first humans, thus 
making sacrifice a necessary apology to the gods (Red 2020). 
 
Moreover, the patterned nature of the sacrificial rituals was what kept the cycle of life and 
death going; the sacrifices nourished the gods, the land, and the community as a whole 
(Maestri 2019). According to Dave Roos, the ritual act of cannibalism in this context was 
the highest honor, a way to commune with the gods, perhaps even becoming more holy 
(Roos 2018). From these two examples, we learn that consumption is part of our 
expressive culture of transformation and socialization.  
 
These themes began appearing later in my life as I reconnected with my Mexican roots and 
began researching my family's traditions. One of these is the widely known celebration of 
putting up an altar for el Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead), complete with offerings of 
fruit, food, and pan de muerto for my departed loved ones. Food consumption, especially in 
social situations, is thought to produce unity, closeness, and trust within a community, and 
this principle is applied to bringing one closer to the dead.  
 



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Image 3. Día de Los Muertos ofrenda showcasing images and favorite items of deceased Garcia-Valerio family 
members. Ofrenda by Isaura Garcia, November 1, 2019. Photo courtesy Isaura Garcia. 

 

Pan de muerto is a primarily symbolic food for Día de Los Muertos, whose round shape 
symbolizes the circle of life and death (Nabor 2019). The little ball of bread represents a 
skull, a heart, or teardrops (depending on who you ask), and the cross-shaped pieces on the 
bread represent the bones of the dead. In Puebla, my family's home state in Mexico, pan de 
Muerto is infused with orange blossom essence to express the memories of the deceased 
(Martinez 2020). We both eat this bread and leave it for our family; in a way, we consume 
them and their memory. We also create and consume sugar skulls, representative of our 
dead.  
 



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Image 4. Close up of homemade pan de muerto on the ofrenda. Photo courtesy of Isaura Garcia. 
 

When I visited the museo de las momias (Museum of Mummies) in Guanajuato, I was 
greeted by dozens of street vendors selling charamuscas (caramel figurines representing 
the mummies) which were thoroughly enjoyable. In other areas of Mexico, people enjoy 
capirotada, a bread pudding dish eaten around the time of Ash Wednesday and Lent, a time 
of religious penitence and prayer (Marquez 2021). This dish is representative of the corpse 
of Christ and incorporates cinnamon sticks symbolizing the crucifix, cloves as the nails, and 
syrup as the blood of Christ. It is all covered in a layer of cheese, representing the shroud 
that covers the body of  Christ (Marquez 2021). Of course, Mexico is not the only place 
where food is used as an expressive culture to reinforce spiritual connections. 
 
Another example can be found in nineteenth-century Sweden, where mourners were given 
Swedish funeral confections whose color, fringes, and images told them something about 
the deceased (Troop 2017). According to Sarah Troop, long and black meant they lived a 
long life, and if the fringes were white and short, they probably died in childhood (2017). 
The images on the candies were also symbolic: they could be lambs representing innocence 
and were often associated with children, or they could include a variety of images depicting 
or representing death (Troop 2017).  



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In England, during the nineteenth century, corpses would have small bread placed on their 
chest, which was thought to absorb the deceased's sins. The family in mourning would then 
hire a sin eater to eat the bread off of the corpse and cleanse the dead of their sins, leaving 
them renewed for heaven (Doughty 2020; Hensey 2019). Moreover, according to Lisa 
Rogak, some tribes in Bali use the same water used to wash a corpse to craft a rice pudding 
dish shaped to look like a corpse and served to mourners at a funeral, thus increasing the 
physical connection between the mourners and the deceased (Doughty 2020).  
 
All of the previous examples I've given are instances of a recurring theme in the expressive 
culture of death, where we find that the consumption surrounding death, in some way, 
mirrors the transformative cycle of life and death. Life grows out of death, and healing 
comes after grief. The living die, decompose, and nourish the land that will then feed the 
still living. People and the relationships we have with them transform us and our lives. I 
first became interested in the transformative nature of the consumption of death to explain 
my fascination with cannibalism and how I believe it connects to daily life in more ways 
than simply consuming flesh. To me, the idea of cannibalizing people and things stems from 
a need to cope with the overwhelming feelings of grief that come with loss.  
 
Alas, our time and bodies are borrowed in this world. However, like Icarus, humans are 
defiant creatures. We are emotional creatures, and we continuously build connections with 
those around us. When we lose them, we refuse to let them go. Our grief consumes us; our 
memories consume us. We do not exist solely in the current moment, for time is relative. 
We live in fragmented moments. The past, present, and future exist concurrently, so we 
cannot easily comprehend loss. In this act of defiance, we consume them and their 
memories and create memorials or food expressing our grief, sorrow, and love for others to 
consume them too. In this way, we immortalize them and essentially defy death. I am an 
amalgamation of moments and memories of people I love. I keep these people and 
memories alive by consuming and reproducing them–they shape me, and I shape them in 
the transformative circle of life and death. 
 
A Student’s Perspective 
In the fall of 2019, I (Isaura Garcia) was a bright and curious incoming Honors College 
freshman at UNLV (University of Nevada at Las Vegas), eager to learn and apply whatever 
knowledge I could gather to make the world a better place. The people around me would 
describe me as cheery and optimistic, a ray of sunshine. I generally agree with this 
assessment from an etic perspective, but until this point, I had experienced my fair share of 
hardships. Like other high-achieving students, I struggled to cope with the stress of 
balancing school with extracurriculars, sports, and maintaining a social life. In myself, this 
stress manifested itself in the form of depression, suicidal ideation, and eating disorders.  
 
Due to my struggles with mental illness, I have a complicated relationship with death and 
all things morbid. I never made a hard-stop attempt, but the idea of “flirting with death” 
stuck with me well into my formative years, especially as a way to give meaning to life. I 
never wanted to die necessarily, but instead, I came to view death as a tool or framework 
that contextualizes life and thus gives it meaning. Since then, I’ve been fascinated with 
everything related to death, though it was an interest I viewed as more of an unfortunate 



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inconvenience that I tried to hide away. I felt the uncomfortable ugliness of morbidity 
creeping out of my peripherals at the start of 2020. This paralyzing turmoil culminated 
during the lockdown period in March 2020, in which isolation forced me to stew in my 
thoughts and the COVID-19 news cycle and come to terms with my troubles and mortality. 
A year later, I was still grappling with this revelatory experience when I came across the 
class titled “The Expressive Culture of Death.”  
 
My interest in the class was piqued partly because I was becoming more open to the idea of 
engaging with taboo subjects. I imagine many other honors students felt the same way. 
However, I am also an anthropology student, fascinated by different and diverse cultures, 
largely thanks to my experiences growing up in a Mexican-American household. Though 
death in America is primarily spoken about through whispers, Americans often tend to 
culturally appropriate the Mexican cultural holiday, Día de Los Muertos, the Day of the 
Dead, a vibrant celebration of life, death, and remembrance. The contrast between the 
vivacity of Día de Los Muertos and the overall eerie and hushed attitude toward death in 
the United States raised questions about how death is conceptualized and approached in 
different cultures. I love expressing and exploring my Mexican heritage, and part of that is 
participating in Día de Los Muertos celebrations. My cultural background and personal 
history combined to incite a general curiosity about cultures and death. This course was 
the perfect opportunity to study both of my interests in an incorporated manner, so I 
jumped at the chance to take it. 
 
Like my interest in death, my interest in food is deeply rooted in my personal and cultural 
background. As I previously mentioned, I’ve had a sour relationship with food that 
culminated in a continuous struggle with various eating disorders. Though eating disorders 
are not always about food (often being more about control than anything else), they still 
kickstarted my obsession with food. During the Fall 2021 semester (the semester in which I 
took the course), I was severely struggling with my eating disorders but was aware of it 
and making a conscious effort to improve my relationship with food. Part of my personal 
healing effort was to engage with my cultural foods. The idea was to turn my focus away 
from calories and macros and emphasize tradition, history, and meaning associated with 
tasty cultural dishes. And our explorations of the different forms of expressive culture in 
this class helped me think about food in more nuanced ways. Sustenance, at the most basic 
level, is a way of warding off death. But food is not simply a way to provide sustenance and 
keep us alive; instead, it is a tradition. Food can be artistic; it can be historical; it can be 
expressive. It is often a material form of communication. Cultural dishes, in particular, go 
beyond nutrition. They are not merely functional aspects of human societies; they are 
cultural and behavioral phenomena that should be studied to understand and contextualize 
a culture.  
 
Luckily for me, the course was flexible and encouraged discussion among the students, 
often veering toward whatever topic the students felt inclined to explore that week. In 
these discussions, my mind often wandered to food, and I thought that I could understand 
larger concepts when I viewed them through the lens of food or vice versa. At first, I 
thought it was strange, but as I shared my connections and gauged my peers’ responses, I 
grew more interested in utilizing food to explore and understand various forms of the 



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expressive culture of death. I found that most of the concepts discussed in class could be 
connected to food in one way or another, and once I figured it out, it was all I could see. Of 
course, one prime example is pan de muerto (a staple food for Día de Los Muertos 
celebrations), but other rituals or traditions are associated with food. Like all of the 
charamuscas (caramel mummies) sold by street vendors in Guanajuato, home of the Museo 
de las Momias (museum of mummies). Or the tradition of holding a kermés, a type of 
fundraising event where the families of a deceased loved one sell food to raise money to 
pay for funeral costs. With this context in mind, my connections to food in a class 
examining the expressive culture of death make more sense. Already armed with a 
heightened interest in food and culture, I constantly looked for ways to tie the expressive 
culture of death to cultural traditions surrounding death rituals and food. 
 
Incidentally, during one of the discussion posts for the course, where we talked about 
funeral foods and cemeteries, I mentioned the idea of cannibalism. Cannibalism is one of 
the biggest taboos in cultures worldwide. Still, I began to notice that many cultural foods 
and food-related rituals related to death focused on the symbolic consumption of people or 
memories of people. There are some cultures where food is made to look like corpses or 
shaped like bones to represent the dead, like pan de muerto. Bringing up the notion of 
cannibalism understandably shocked a few of my classmates, but others engaged with my 
ideas and provided examples of food rituals that could be viewed as symbolic cannibalism. 
From this point on, I began to think of cannibalism as a way of mourning—a type of 
consumption of the person and everything they represented. 
 
When it came time to pick a topic for the slidecast presentation, I immediately knew I 
wanted to do something related to food or symbolic cannibalism. By this point in the 
semester, I had regularly been making connections between whatever topics we were 
discussing that week and something related to cannibalism or food. It was almost like a 
personal challenge to see how often I could make connections between food and death, 
especially since, at the time, the two concepts seemed completely distant. Through my 
discussions of food and death in this course, I was interested not only in exploring my 
thoughts on how food and death are related but also in how others conceptualized and 
interacted with this connection.  
 
The slidecast presentation was not simply about presenting a topic related to death; it was 
also about exploring how you personally engage with a form of expressive culture related 
to death. Since I already knew I wanted to incorporate the idea of cannibalism into my 
project, I found it difficult to connect to the topic. However, when I looked at expressive 
culture regarding food, I realized that symbolic cannibalism has always been a part of my 
life and culture. Growing up in a Catholic household, I was accustomed to regularly going to 
church and taking the holy communion, a symbolic representation of the body and blood of 
Jesus Christ. For Día de Los Muertos, I regularly made and consumed sugar skulls and pan 
de muerto, which I made in memory of my deceased family members. Without ever really 
thinking about it, I had been engaging in a dimorphic expression of grief and 
commemoration by consuming these religiously and culturally significant foods. Eating 
cultural foods symbolic of life and death is a form of reincorporation, of reinforcing social 



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bonds through communal meals, asserting collective identity, and keeping the deceased 
socially alive by maintaining their memory through the dishes we consume.  
 
With this revelation in mind, I set out to create a slidecast that explained my interactions 
with food and death and challenged my peers to explore the roles that food may play in 
their lifelong experiences with death. Instead of focusing on cannibalism, I opted to focus 
on the transformative aspects of consumption. The concept of consumption is mainly about 
physical foods, but it also refers to how people engage with and “consume” the memories 
and lives of their loved ones through the consumption of specific foods. Food is thought to 
produce unity, closeness, and trust within a community–all of which holds true when the 
food in question is related to death. The widespread expressive culture of consumption 
surrounding death mirrors the transformative cycle of life and death. 
 
Since taking the class in Fall 2021, I’ve found that it has contributed to the ways in which I 
observe and interact with my day-to-day life. The course taught me how to identify and 
analyze different forms of expressive culture, which are not necessarily related to death but 
I find most vivid when in the context of food. After all, food is one of the biggest dividers 
between life and death, so it makes sense why it is so culturally prominent concerning both 
realms. Historically, food is a significant way to build and reinforce community through its 
preparation, how it’s served, and how it’s eaten. Incidentally, I got a job as a baker in a well-
respected Italian bakery, where I became responsible for preparing, presenting, and 
distributing food. Finding myself in an environment focused on preserving Italian food 
experiences and traditions has allowed me to continue engaging with and exploring the 
importance of food as a form of expressive culture.  
 
I never intended to pursue a career in the culinary sector. I simply took the bakery job to 
help pay for my education. As I mentioned, I am studying anthropology with a focus on 
cultural anthropology. With this background and the analytical skills I gained in this class, I 
became more aware of the ties between food and expressive forms of culture. I recognize 
how a specific cultural group’s relationship with food parallels a culture's ideals. For 
instance, the Italian bakery I work at strives to preserve the cultural ambiance of Italy, in 
which the meal period is valued and cherished as a time for refreshment and strengthening 
social bonds. This is in contrast to my observations of typical American ideals surrounding 
food in which meals are often seen as a chore that must be done as quickly and efficiently 
as possible.  
 
Previously, I’d planned to move to Mexico for a year to study different cultural practices. 
However, after taking the course and working in a culinary environment, I’ve begun to look 
into food anthropology and death studies. Compared to the United States, Mexico has a 
more vibrant and open cultural dialogue surrounding death. Death is present in everything 
from popular corridos (stories being told in song form) and jaripeos (Mexican events 
involving bull riding and dances) to the globally iconic Día de Los Muertos. I am interested 
in studying the function of food in perpetuating cultural norms and ways of conceptualizing 
death. For instance, pan de muerto is a cultural icon representative of Día de Los Muertos. It 
helps emphasize the cyclical nature of life and death as well as the duality of the body and 
soul through its symbolic shape. Additionally, there is an entire genre of songs in Mexico, 



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typically in the style of corridos, which revolve around death and parties, and typically 
discuss alcohol as a tool for transcending liminal spaces to connect with the dead. Songs 
like “Mi Ultima Caravana” (“My last Caravan”), for example, discuss the singer’s desire to be 
celebrated in his death and have his loved ones share one last drink with him to remember 
him by, while other songs like “A Traves Del Vaso” (Through the Glass”) discuss the darker 
sides of alcoholism, in which it acts as a way for a grieving person to enter the liminal space 
and “see” their deceased loved one.  
 
Coincidentally, shortly after beginning to write this piece in January of 2023, I had a last 
minute-opportunity to travel to Puebla, Mexico, to visit my dad’s family and explore some 
of the local universities that I am considering attending. During my ten-day visit there, I 
worked with a distant relative of mine who runs a small artisanal bakery near the heart of 
Chiautla de Tapia, Puebla. There, I learned how to make a variety of local bread from 
scratch, including my all-time favorite bread, a puffed-up round sweet bread with melted 
red sugar on top known as a colorada (colored) for its bright red tint. I knew of these from 
my first trip to my dad’s hometown and immediately became obsessed, but they are not 
well known outside of the area. Even within local Mexican stores and swap meets in the 
United States, not many people know of the coloradas, so I was ecstatic to have the chance 
to learn how to make them in the traditional way. Working in the bakery, I discovered that 
coloradas do not always have to take the form of a circle, but they can be made in the 
relative shape of a person. In this form, they are called muertitos (little dead people). They 
are made to order for those that maintain their familial ofrendas year round, each muertito 
a physical representation of a deceased loved one. It is worth noting that people tend to 
ascribe human qualities to foods, another substance that withers away like the individuals 
they symbolize. 
 

         
 
Images 5 and 6. Photos of freshly baked coloradas and muertitos taken by Isaura Garcia, January 12, 2023. 



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In conclusion, I find that looking back, death and food have been integral to my life and 
culture. Even something as simple as my favorite childhood bread holds a significant 
connection to life and death. Yet, until taking the class on “The Expressive Culture of 
Death,” these concepts existed in the periphery of my mind. Learning how to identify and 
analyze expressive cultures in this class allowed me to view food as a tool for learning 
about and examining how we make and communicate meaning in our lives. Perhaps I could 
have had a similar revelation without the aid of this class but without it, I doubt that the 
connections I made between food and death would be nearly as strong and clear in my 
mind as they are now. From this revelatory learning experience, I’ve shifted my goals to 
focus on studying the powerful link of food as a way to create and perpetuate meaning, 
particularly (though certainly not exclusively) in the context of death. 
  



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