Food as a Medium of Exchange
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...