The Last Supper
A few thoughts on what they'll eat when you die
By Tom Junod
The two biggest meals of your life you don't have to cook and you don't get to eat. The first you don't eat because no man eats — or cares what he eats — at his wedding. The second you don't eat because, well, no man eats at his funeral, either. But the same hungry crowd shows up for both, and it used to be that they were offered the same menu — the cuisine of the banquet hall or the church basement. That's changed, of course. People go to weddings now for the food instead of the drink, and they expect not just a certain quantity of food but also a certain quality. Weddings have become an expression not just of our desires but also our ambitions, and so more and more the food at weddings is like the food everywhere else, with the ingredients parsed for purity and the preparation praised for ingenuity and the sushi chef standing where the carving table used to be. The foodies got to matrimony, as they've gotten to everything else, and the revolution they've fomented — of food not just as nourishment but as social signifier and ultimately as intellectual property — has left no meal untouched, except the last one.
There are no foodies at funerals.
There is only hunger, of an almost existential kind — hunger mixed with desolation and exhaustion and, above all, loneliness — and so people don't eat the food served after funerals so much as they submit to it, just as they submit to the dubious comforts of ritual, just as they submit to the necessarily tenuous consolations of well-wishers, just as the man lying in the box or filling the urn or scattered on the sea submitted to the ministrations of death itself. See, the food served after funerals is atavistic, not just for those who have to eat it but also for the poor bastard who can't. You might think that you've escaped your station; you might think that you're a writer or a lawyer or a financier or a Web designer or what have you; you might think — above all! — that you are the kind of person who prefers microgreens to iceberg lettuce. But the food served in your wake, or at it, knows better. It's got you pegged, taxonomically. Oh, so you think that what you tried to be is what you are? You think that you actuallybecame a writer, or a lawyer, or a titan of finance? Well, the food that comes when you're cold says: Jew. Italian. Irishman. Southerner. Christian. White. Black. Chinese. Mexican. It calls you back to your tribe, man. It continues the process of deindividualization that death starts. It celebrates the death of your ambitions at least as much as it celebrates the life that those ambitions earned. It says nothing about where you've gone in life; it speaks exclusively of where you began. Men spend their lives entertaining certain fancies, the most powerful of which is that they got away with it, but if your death doesn't convince you, then the sheer factuality of Funeral Food should: You got away with nothing, and fooled no one, and somehow they still love you and reach, in your absence, for the codified casseroles and signifying stews — the endless variations of the same old same old — that your life inspired.
"There are certain expectations around a funeral," says Andrea Watman of Zabar's in Manhattan. "And in New York, the expectation is for bagels and nova. I don't know why. It just is. At least 80 percent of the orders we get for funerals are for smoked fish. It must reach some essence in people's souls, because it's what provides comfort." Yes: No matter how you answered expectations in life, you will find, in death, that they are made of iron, and your family will abide by them, expending the energy of their grief by doing things right, or at least according to custom. And so, if you lived as a gentile in the vast "metro areas" of the Northeast, your family will call the local red-sauce joint and put out the trays of baked ziti, lasagna, and sausage-and-peppers that your loss requires. And if you lived as a black man in L. A., your family will call Adolf Dulan of Dulan's Soul Food Kitchen, and he will make sure that the funeral-home repast in your honor is replete with an essential allotment of "fried chicken, collard greens, candied yams, macaroni and cheese, and black-eyed peas," if not the ham, the turkey, and the roast beef that is your due if you made some money. And if you lived in the South, or indeed in any of the endless swaths of the country where the church still holds sway, your family will provide nothing, but rather surrender to charity and the neighborly accumulation of cloying cakes and starchy Crock-Pot soups and casseroles combining the five main food groups of church cooking — marshmallows, canned pineapples, maraschino cherries, cornflakes, and French's onion rings.
Indeed, there is an inevitability about Funeral Food that completes the inevitability of the funeral itself. You can't get away from it, any more than you can get away with it, and if you do, you end up displaced — deracinated — at the very moment you are said to have "come home." There is a cost, in America, to rising above, and it can be seen in the tribes that come here in order to rise above, and so have risen above Funeral Food's cast-iron rule. The Chinese who used to make tables of food in their grief now just as often go to Chinese restaurants like everyone else; the Mexicans who made thick soups and smoky stews now just as often buy foot-long sandwiches at Costco, like convenience-oriented white people; and the Irish whose Funeral Food was as circumscribed as their Catholicism — to the extent that a tribal novelist like Alice McDermott could nail the opening of Charming Billy with a description of a post-funeral feast consisting of "medium-rare roast beef and boiled potatoes and green beans amandine" — now eat from trays of veal parmigiana, just like the Italians they once considered their immigrant rivals.
Of course, lives are fulfilled in the turning away from tradition almost as much as they are in tradition's observance. I've had two experiences with Funeral Food, and if they both perfectly expressed the lives of my father and mother, that's because there was no Funeral Food, and really no funeral, either, just memorial services orchestrated for secular needs rather than religious ones, and no place to go after the services were over. My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to. Born in Brooklyn, he died and was cremated in Atlanta and was buried at a veterans' cemetery on the east end of Long Island. There was no place to go after his memorial service — no place for the claustrophobic cuisine of bereavement — so I invited friends and family to a bar owned by a high school friend in the town where I grew up. We had bar food instead of Funeral Food, and what I ate — a plate of chicken wings, extra spicy — bore no relation either to my tiny tribe or my father's life within and without it. It was the new Funeral Food, home cooking for the homeless. And yet I will always remember the slightly punishing taste, and the hunger behind it, which was the hunger to finish and be finished, the hunger indeed for anything — a hunger almost as strong as the hunger of the grave, although it doesn't last as long.
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