Smells and Bells

Screenshot from Smells & Bells S'20 virtual banquet FYS F '17 Cooking Together As I was reading Rosie's reflection, especially after reading almost all of the class's reflections, I saw that nearly all  of you noted  the one thing the would change would be to have the banquet in person,. But then  a strange thought occurred to me.  Of all the times I've had classes do this "ritual scorecard" after a banquet, including our FYS, your reflections on this virtual banquet  seemed to come closest to expressing the "educational goals" I had in mind by having us make a ritual banquet together.  For one thing, more people agreed that we achieved the right balance between scriptedness and improvisation, more people felt it was inclusive, and people seemed to have a clearer sense of the closure it provided.  Which suggests that just as there were costs of not being able to cook and eat together, so there may also have been costs fr...

In “Kitchen, Food, and Family”, chapter two of Elizabeth Perez’s, Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions, she talks about the emphasis on feeding the gods in Black Atlantic traditions and that practitioners “use food as a medium of exchange with their deities” (61). Reading this made me think of a similar practice we do in my family, but instead of feeding the gods, we feed our ancestors. My family’s participation in the religion that we’ve been following has diminished over the years, but my mom continues to be an active practitioner. There is an altar (butsudan) in the room upstairs of my house for our ancestors. Most, if not all the families in the church we belong to have an ancestor altar, and the responsibility of each family is to maintain cleanliness of the altar and make daily food offerings, as well as pray to their ancestor spirits. My mom will take small portions of the dinner that we have prepared for the family to eat tha...