Feeding Our Ghosts: How Food Invokes Memories of Ones Loved and Lost

Reese’s Cups. Tteok. Tamales.

You don’t often see this trio together. They hail from entirely different cuisines—can we call candy a cuisine? I think we must—and have completely different flavor profiles. They’d almost never be consumed in concert, and they have little in common in terms of texture, key ingredients, or cultural significance.

Except for one thing. They all bring back the dead.

This is true in my novel, Aftertaste, where a New York City chef opens a restaurant that serves closure, his food a portal that facilitates a reunion between the Living and their Dead.

Food has long been used as a sort of Ferryman’s coin—a way to offer spirits passage between the worlds of the Living and the Dead.

Perhaps even more uncannily, it’s also true around the world, in real-life traditions and festivals, in mourning rituals and rites, and at countless kitchen tables laden with recipes that have been passed down by people who’ve passed on.

Food has long been used as a sort of Ferryman’s coin—a way to offer spirits passage between the worlds of the Living and the Dead. Many of us participate from childhood, without even knowing we’re doing it.

When you trick-or-treat on Halloween, for instance, you’re standing on the shoulders of Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest—and the moment when the veil between the Living and the Dead is thinnest; the Reese’s in your basket evolved from “soul cakes,” which were given to the poor in exchange for prayers for the giver’s departed.

Popular culture (like Pixar’s Coco) has made Mexico’s Día de Muertos—and its tradition of setting out the favorite foods of your family’s departed to invite them home for a visit—common knowledge around the world. (The sugar skulls are so prevalent a symbol now that Trader Joe’s sells seasonal succulents in planters painted to look like them.)

In Korea, a variety of festivals—like Chuseok and Seollal—include ways to honor the spiritual ancestors of a family using—you guessed it—food.

I could go on—from modern Cambodia to ancient Egypt, food is linked, quite often literally, to the spirits of the departed.

And the Hungry Ghost Festival—celebrated in many parts of East and Southeast Asia—devotes an entire month to feeding spirits in the afterlife to keep them satisfied (and out of mischief).

I could go on—from modern Cambodia to ancient Egypt, food is linked, quite often literally, to the spirits of the departed. And it’s not just major celebrations that reveal these connections. Everyday life in Bali includes small offerings left, well, everywhere to honor gods and spirits with food and gifts. Western culture does it, too—most funerals in Europe and the US are followed by a repast luncheon in honor of the departed, a time not only to fortify your own strength in the face of grief, but to gather and remember the person you’ve lost over a meal.

What I find fascinating about these connections and traditions and rituals is the pairing of such a physical experience—eating happens in and to and through the body in a way few other things can—with a decidedly non-corporal existence. Across cultures and mythologies, spirits, while able to communicate and visit and support or, if provoked, yes, haunt and frighten, are still ethereal. There’s no body when you’re dead. You don’t require food. You can’t physically consume it any more. So why this connection to food? Why not music, or writing, or even a place?

I come back to the thing that feels universal about eating, whether you’re alive or Dead: that taste invokes memory.

And why, for that matter, when the idea of a chef becoming a sort of medium first occurred to me as a premise for fiction, did I feel a sort of cosmic alignment, a truth in the fantasy, something in my brain saying yes, food and ghosts, this makes absolute sense?

There are a lot of ways to ponder that question on a personal level—I’ve been obsessed with stories of the afterlife since I was a kid, and food has always been an enormous part of my life, from growing up as an immigrant in the US and eating Ukrainian food at home, to becoming a lifelong foodie and adventurous home cook—but when I think about why this tracks across cultures, across continents, across points of view and opposing perspectives about death and dying and even across generations, I come back to the thing that feels universal about eating, whether you’re alive or Dead: that taste invokes memory. 

Whether it’s the same peanut butter and jelly sandwich your mom (not mine; mine didn’t believe in peanut butter) made you for lunch every day of your elementary school career, or the fancy omakase meal your significant other took you to the night that they proposed (mine was French food, but same idea), everything we’ve ever eaten is tied to a particular moment in time, a particular memory that eating that food can invoke, and the ones that carry the most meaning for us—the ones that linger and stick around and get recalled are, I’ve found, also tied to people.

When we think about someone we’ve lost, it’s often so comforting to remember them in terms of foods they loved, or foods we ate with them. Maybe there’s a particular dish that only they prepared, whether because they originated the recipe, or because it was passed specifically to them by someone that they’d loved and lost.

Perhaps making that dish—like my grandmother’s holodets, which was, in turn, her mother’s—was their own way of remembering, and of resurrecting, and of sharing the past with you. Maybe it’s something you only ate when you were with them. Maybe you only had it once, but it was the happiest memory you ever shared together.

That, I think, is the bond between food and the departed. The memories that food can capture, like a shorthand, not only as a thought, but as a feeling. Food is transportive; it’s one thing to see a photograph of somewhere you’d once been, but something else entirely to taste the crusty bread you had right there on that street corner, the way it scorched the roof of your mouth.

Food is personal and also universal. It’s ephemeral and meant to be consumed. It’s something to share, and to pass down.

Perhaps the food left out for spirits the world over, or consumed with them in mind at your local deli, is less about the flavors than about the memories they leave behind. Perhaps that’s the real currency—the memory captured by food a sort of antidote to the forgetting that the River Lethe (or maybe just the act of dying) forces on a soul? Or maybe it’s our way—the Living’s way—of counteracting our own likelihood to lose not only a person but the memory of them by holding on to something physical, and reproduceable, and, in many ways, ritual, that can help us remember?

Perhaps it’s food that has emerged as this beacon to the Dead because even if you leave a motherland behind, or can’t hold on to documents or papers or notes or even heirlooms, food can and often is inherited, just by virtue of being alive. You can cook a recipe someone once made, a continent away, and in tasting it, feel their presence beside you in the kitchen. Food is personal and also universal. It’s ephemeral and meant to be consumed. It’s something to share, and to pass down.

So this season, while the veil is thinnest, I implore you. Go learn your family’s recipes. Go share yours with your friends. Eat together. Remember. Feel full. It may be the only way, whether you believe in them or not, to actually feed your ghosts.

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Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle is available from Simon and Schuster.