Dying to Eat

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Food, Death, and the Afterlife

Candi K. Cann, Candi K. Cann

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813174716
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Food has played a major role in funerary and memorial practices since the dawn of the human race. In the ancient Roman world, for example, it was common practice to build channels from the tops of graves into the crypts themselves, and mourners would regularly pour offerings of food and drink into these conduits to nourish the dead while they waited for the afterlife. Funeral cookies wrapped with printed prayers and poems meant to comfort mourners became popular in Victorian England; while in China, Japan, and Korea, it is customary to offer food not only to the bereaved, but to the deceased, with ritual dishes prepared and served to the dead.

Dying to Eat is the first interdisciplinary book to examine the role of food in death, bereavement, and the afterlife. The contributors explore the phenomenon across cultures and religions, investigating topics including tombstone rituals in Buddhism, Catholicism, and Shamanism; the role of death in the Moroccan approach to food; and the role of funeral casseroles and church cookbooks in the Southern United States. This innovative collection not only offers food for thought regarding the theories and methods behind these practices but also provides recipes that allow the reader to connect to the argument through material experience. Illuminating how cooking and corpses both transform and construct social rituals, Dying to Eat serves as a fascinating exploration of the foodways of death and bereavement.

Part 1

Dining with the Dead

1

Chinese Ancestral Worship

Food to Sustain, Transform, and Heal the Dead and the Living

Emily S. Wu

Introduction

In a small kitchen the women drip sweat as heat emanates from the stovetop and a noisy exhaust vent goes at full force. Foods that have been offered to the ancestors—a whole boiled chicken (its head and claws intact), a whole deep-fried fish, and a strip of boiled pork belly—are cleared from the ancestral shrine and moved into the kitchen. Foods for the clan ancestors are cooked but minimally processed, barely edible to start with, and especially stale and tasteless after sitting on the ancestral shrine for hours. Rather than disposing of the meat offerings, frugal Han Chinese take them back into the kitchen to make them into dishes to serve at the family gathering that follows. Twice-Cooked Pork is one such dish. By slicing the pork and adding an oil-invigorated bean paste and aromatic vegetables, the pork is given new life as part of a sizzling, rice-downing dish for the living family. Food is shared between the dead and the living, but in different forms—the boiled pork for worship that is bland yet essential to the final dish, and the resulting rich and appetizing dish. This transformation encapsulates how the dead ancestors and living descendants relate to each other in Han Chinese communities.

This chapter explores how in Han Chinese¹ ancestral worship, food is used as an important agent to transcend the boundary between the living and the dead. The postmortem ancestral “body” consists of physical bone remains that need to be properly stored and maintained, wooden tablets with the ancestors’ names inscribed to reinforce their identities, and spirits that can be evoked through proper rituals and, most important, nourished and healed with food. Through the act of offering food by the living, the ancestors are consistently and continually revived and included in the community. Properly worshipped ancestors serve as the living community’s proxy in maintaining a connection with the larger flow of the universe, connecting it not only physically and spatially with the land, but also temporally across generations and through reincarnations.

HUIGUO ROU (TWICE-COOKED PORK)

1 lb. (½ kg) boiled pork belly, cut into ⅛-inch slices

1 pot water

2 tbsp cooking oil

¼ cabbage, cut in large chunks

Seasonings:

1 tbsp spicy fermented bean paste

1 tsp chopped garlic

2 stalks leek, julienned

1 tbsp rice wine

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tsp sugar, or to taste

After worshipping family ancestors, carefully pack the pork from grave offerings to take home, or transport the pork from the offering table in front of the ancestral shrine to the kitchen. (If you are starting from raw pork belly, the pork needs to be boiled until cooked through—but not falling apart—then sliced.)

Boil a pot of water, and add 1 tablespoon of the oil.

Blanch the cabbage in the water for a few minutes, until it is still a little crunchy. Take the cabbage out of the pot and strain. There is no need to squeeze, but try to strain as much water as possible.

On high heat, pour the other tablespoon of cooking oil into a wok. When the oil starts to smoke slightly, add the spicy fermented bean paste and stir vigorously until the fragrance of the bean paste is released. Add the garlic and leek to the wok, taking care to stir the oil–bean paste mixture so it does not burn and stick to the bottom of the wok. When the leek and garlic are evenly coated by the oil–bean paste mixture, add the rice wine and soy sauce and sauté until the leek is tender. Add sugar to taste. Add cabbage and pork, give everything a quick stir, and transfer to a serving plate to serve.

Three sacrificial meats and fruits for ancestors, offered by a member in Pusa’s temple committee. (Photo by the author)

Relationships with the Ancestors

A twelfth-century Chinese Neo-Confucian scholar Zhu Xi (or Chu Hsi) explains the relationship between living people and their ancestors as the continuation of the same qi, or cosmic force: “By the scale of heaven and earth, there is only one qi. By the scale of one individual [human] body, my qi is my ancestors’ qi, it is also only one qi. Therefore, whenever we are emotionally moved (gan), there is always response (ying) [between us].”²

Qi is the shared substance in the universe, and it is concretely physical even in the states that are not humanly tangible. Contrary to the popular (and especially Western) misunderstanding that qi is an energetic, metaphysical, or even purely theoretical thing, in this classical Chinese worldview, qi is the basic makeup of all things in the world, from things with form (solid, liquid, gas) to things without form (natural phenomena, spirits, and even thoughts). The connection that Zhu describes here transcends two dimensions of human connection through qi—the physical (biological and genetic) blood relationship between the ancestor and the descendants, and the emotional vibration between the two because of the shared qi.

The Book of Burial, a classic that was written sometime around the third century C.E., puts the qi connection in much more “solid” terms: “[We] humans beget our bodies from our parents. When the bones [of the ancestors] are filled with qi, the bodies of the descendants are endowed. The Classics say: When qi is emotionally moved (gan), it responds (ying); the prosperity of the ghosts extends to the people.”³

Notice that the Book of Burial also uses the term ganying, which I have translated separately as “emotionally moved” (gan) and “response” (ying). Robert Sharf appropriately renders ganying as “sympathetic resonance,” which addresses both the emotional and the visceral aspects of the qi connection.⁴ It is crucial to recognize that there is always a physical implication to the ancestor-descendent connection. The description of ancestral bones being “filled with qi” is not meant to be symbolic or poetic; in the Chinese tradition, it is imperative to properly maintain and sustain the bones of the ancestors. The bones, as the physical remains of the ancestors, continue to be connected with the descendants. Furthermore, if they are properly buried (or in the words of the Book of Burial, properly “stored”) in the earth, the vibrancy of the life force in nature “endows” the descendants. Such qi endowments affect all dimensions of human life experiences—physically, emotionally, financially (yes), and even spiritually. This is the foundational reason for the unceasing popularity of geomancy, or fengshui, in Chinese culture. Whereas fengshui is often understood outside the Chinese community as home decluttering or aesthetic interior design, it was at first a set of strategies for finding the best location for burial. The terms feng (wind) and shui (water) indicate the goal of finding sites that have ideal airflow and moisture level for the “storage” of ancestral bones.

Food to Sustain: Bones to Store and Tablets to Call

Proper burial and maintenance of ancestral bones are so important that the practice of reburial is common in Chinese communities. The practice of bone picking and professional bone-picking masters (jiangushi) can be found in southern coastal provinces of China and Taiwan, and in Chinese diasporas in Malaysia and Singapore.⁵ In the North American Chinese diasporic communities, reburial entails shipping the picked bones back to the ancestral hometown of the deceased in China, so that the body of the deceased can be reunited with the rest of the clan ancestors.⁶

In communities where reburial is practiced, the body is exhumed five to ten years after the first burial.⁷ An auspicious day is selected, one whose astrological alignment is suitable for the deceased.⁸ The coffin is reopened, and the bone-picking master inspects the remains. The ideal condition is achieved when the flesh has decomposed completely and cleanly, leaving only bones that can be easily picked up to be placed into a bone urn.

This is why the fengshui of the burial site is so important: if the burial site is too dry, the body can mummify intact rather than decomposing into separate bones. If the site is too damp, the dampness (or sometimes water damage) and mold growth can also affect the decomposition process negatively; the decomposition may be incomplete, or the bones may start to disintegrate as well. Finally, bones can be damaged or lost at sites that are subject to the intrusion of plant roots and animals—and the incomplete skeletal body can have detrimental effects on the rest of the living family.⁹

The bone-picking master assesses the condition of the remains and proceeds accordingly. If the body is ready for positioning in the bone urn for reburial, the master carefully removes the bones from the casket, washes them with wine, dries the bones under the sun, sorts and arranges the bones in anatomical order, then places them in the urn. The urn can be reburied into the same site; more often it is placed in a clan grave with the clan’s other bone urns. This practice of reburial in the clan grave makes worship easier for the descendants, effectively ensuring that no ancestor in the lineage is neglected in regular and proper worship of the ancestors.

If the remains are not in the ideal condition for reburial, then the master takes appropriate remedial measures. Sometimes holes need to be drilled in the sides of the coffin to allow air, moisture, and probably microbes from the soil to enter the coffin. The coffin is then reburied to continue with the decomposition process; other times lime powder or other drying materials are poured into the coffin to regulate the moisture of the remains. Occasionally the master may have to manually remove the remaining flesh from the bones, so that the bones can be placed in the urn and relocated without waiting any further.¹⁰

Properly stored ancestral bones serve as an essential basis for the continuing connection between the deceased and their descendants. The energetic quality of the bones has direct effects on the well-being of the descendants. This connection must be frequently reinforced using proper rituals. Zhu Xi instructs: “Skillfully and solemnly perform the ritual with [animal] fat to worship [ancestral] qi. Offer fragrant wine for libation to call forth the souls [of the ancestors]. That is to become one with the ancestors.”¹¹ The offering of food and wine is essential to the process of conjuring the spirits of the ancestors, for the purpose of their “becoming one” with their descendants.

Grave-site worship, whether it is at an individual grave or at a clan grave for all the ancestral bone urns, entails first the living family’s paying respect to the land protector (there is usually a small shrine built as part of the grave for him), and then food and flowers are offered. Important items in worship—animal fat and alcohol—have not changed much since the days of Confucius (551–479 B.C.E.), whose ritual practices (which he attributes to the old traditions from the Zhou Dynasty before him) Zhu Xi later tried to revise and standardize. The historian Wendy Rouse lists the offering by Cantonese mourners in a San Francisco Chinatown funeral in 1888: “whole roast pigs, chicken, soup, rice, cakes, and other food and drink items remained at the gravesite until evening for the spirits’ delight.”¹² The anthropologist Rubie Watson describes the spread she observed in Hong Kong in 1977: five roast pigs, incense, candles, rice, wine, cakes, and a steamed chicken.¹³ Cooked pork and chicken, preferably whole (sometimes pork is offered in a large uncut piece), are also preferred animal offerings in the Hakka- and Hokkien-speaking community worships I observed in Taiwan. Sometimes a whole pan-fried fish is also offered, so that there are three meats on the offering table, a parallel presentation to the traditional Confucian offering of the three sacrificial meats. There are no strict rules regarding the other food items, although a few cooked dishes, cooked rice, some sweets, and fruits are generally also offered, as they are considered components of a proper family meal.

Food to Transform: The Karmic Economy of Ancestral Worship

Worship of the ancestors can be performed at grave sites, at clan shrines, in temples, and at home. The offerings at the clan shrines are similar to grave-site offerings, for the clan shrine is another location where the ancestral spirits can be conjured to congregate. At the grave site, the ancestral bones serve as the objects of qi connection; in the ancestral shrine, the ancestral tablets are proxy objects for the qi evocation. Properly constructed ancestral tablets are much more than wooden tablets with the names of the ancestors written on them; they are physical objects in which the ancestral souls reside and from which they can be evoked.¹⁴ Some families choose to worship ...