Cooking for the Dead

 While the vast majority of the most intricate rituals described by Perez in the text were the cooking done for the Orisha, a variety of things were practiced by the Lucumi that she spent time with also practiced a form of ancestor worship as part of their religion, which involved offering a part of the food that they cooked to each of the ancestors present, a process with it's own unique and intricate ritual practices and taboos. While this is a very formal way of food being used to connect with the deceased, it's definitely not the only example of it that springs to mind when I think on the concept.

 Personally, the first thing that I think of when it comes to food and to the dead, together, is a friend of the families who passed away when I was in high school. She wasn't someone I was particularly close to, the mother of my mom's best friend who I saw maybe once or twice a year when she came to Massachusetts to visit her daughter and Grandchildren. She was close enough to our family though that she got an invite to my Bar Mitzvah. As is tradition I got a lot of presents for my Bar Mitzvah, a couple of which were particularly memorable. One of those was a box of homemade appetizers, a bit like mini eggrolls, frozen so that they could easily be reheated and fried up. She had brought them to a family barbecue years ago and I had absolutely adored them, so when my Bar Mitzvah rolled around, she whipped a batch up for me and froze them, so I could cook them for myself whenever. I didn't quite have her touch with getting them fried up just right without burning, but they were still delicious anyways. I don't have a lot of clear memories of her, but I will always remember her as being someone kind enough to remember such a small detail of what I liked for a gift. I cooked up the last batch a few months after her funeral and reminisced.

Traditional breads made for the day of the dead called Tantawawas

 

Obviously, that's a pretty personal example, but there are other religious examples of food being used to connect with the dead as well, such as celebrations of Dia de los Meurtos where food is both offered to the dead and eaten by those mourning them. Food as a tradition can also be a way of connecting with our ancestors, both the recently departed or the long forgotten. When you cook a traditional family meal you may think on the people who originally developed those traditions, or the people who passed them down to you. The traditional foods of the Lucumi were influenced by Yoruba traditions and by the choices and traditions of the Afro-Cuban individuals who first began practicing the religion in its earlier forms. The food that the Orisha's eat and the food that the people eat are connected to their ancestors and history as well.