The Kitchen of Rituals
The enumeration of the different rituals and the intentionality that goes into making each of the food items that accompany it was fascinating for me personally, as I was able to draw tangents to my own experiences, seeing preparation of food be such a foundational aspect of the rituals. The importance of cooking and talking in Afro Caribbean religions reflects the depth of the roots these religions have in the daily movements of the people that practice it. I somehow found comfort in knowing that feeding the gods is viewed as a method to make them a real entity, as this was also something I grew up witnessing. The specificity of the different kinds of food items presented to the Orishas, and the orders in which they are offered beginning with more raw ingredients suggesting a deeper connection to nature, progressively moving towards more cultured ingredients was also something I found interesting, in some way it felt to me like its a way of establishing the connection between th...