While kai is a central and vital aspect of tangi, at Pākehā funerals, it can often feel like an afterthought, writes Charlotte Muru-Lanning.
This is an excerpt from our weekly food newsletter, The Boil Up.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been angsting about how to approach the topic of food as part of The Spinoff’s Death Week (happening now on the site). I wanted to explore Pākehā funeral food traditions but, as I mentioned casually to my editors last Thursday, while I’d been to plenty of tangi in recent years, it had been far longer since I’d attended what I suppose you’d call an “English-style funeral”. I wondered, did they still revolve around asparagus rolls?
No sooner had I said that to my editors and my phone started buzzing. It’s never a good sign when both your parents are trying to call you at the same time.
Since then, the world of funerals quickly transformed from a vague and distant memory to an immediate reality. From Friday last week to Monday morning I was camped up with my whānau at the aged care facility where my grandma lived. On Monday, my grandma died. For the past week, in the most personal and confronting of ways, I’ve been immersed in the business of death.
Between grieving a treasured grandparent, who I visited every Sunday, and the logistics of funeral planning, I have to admit that thinking through how to transform the experience into writing hasn’t been an immediate priority. Neither has food, and perhaps that’s a big piece of the puzzle when it comes to talking about food in this context.
I don’t remember much of what we ate during the three days we took turns keeping my grandma company and chatting in the corridor, and that might have been because we didn’t eat a lot. A cookie and flat white from the cafe up the road, a late dinner of a burger and deep-fried mussels, a handful of chips, lollies, vitamins, a banana on the way out of the house and desperate gulps of water when we remembered to hydrate.
While we sat with my grandma on Sunday, the latest episode of The Hui played quietly on the television in her room. A segment on tikanga-based alternatives to funeral homes discussed the way that professionalised funeral care (where a good deal of our funeral homes are owned by two massive Australian companies) has worked to disconnect whānau and communities from being able to administer the care required after death. Without this collective knowledge, we have little other option but to turn to these professionals, and that often comes with a high financial burden.
As I have been forced to discover this week, organising a funeral takes a significant amount of work, in a limited time frame, all the while dealing with grief. It’s easy to see why kai can often feel like an afterthought. This is also where the differences between tangihanga and Pākehā funerals become stark. Perhaps it has to do with the evolution of western attitudes to death into something both shameful and forbidden, as historian Philippe Ariès discusses in his 1974 book Western Attitudes Toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present, that means Pākehā funerals are shrouded in ambiguity and confusion. Who is responsible for planning them? Who foots the bill? What is appropriate and who should be invited? How do we let them know? And, importantly for kai purposes, how many people are coming anyway?
I can’t help but compare this to tangi, where kai is a central and vital aspect. The hākari, or feast, is an important part of tangi where whānau pani, the bereaved relatives, are welcomed back among the living. It is both about remembering those who have passed through kai, but also about being together and looking towards the future. Hākari can be opulent affairs with bountiful kai moana, hāngi, fry bread, puddings and so on. At my grandpa’s tangi, we ate a dish he was renowned for making over the summer holidays: tinned plum pudding. There is time across the three days to prepare this kai and an army of ringawera who make this possible. As for the kai across the three days of the tangi, where an unknown number of groups could arrive and need to be fed, there is an information feedback loop to the kitchen about how many will need to be catered for. Flexibility is built into this manaakitanga.
When it comes to the Pākehā funeral spread, it’s not hard to see why people turn to catering, and a very specific style of catering at that. There is less community involvement in the logistics, and I can see the comfort in sticking to convention with plates of tiny two-bite sandwiches and tarts to be eaten from a napkin while standing. Even if the catering brochure I flicked through seemed to reflect a diversified palate of onion bhajis and individual boxes of pad Thai – there remains a kind of sterility to this type of food.
When I think about my grandma, many of my memories are connected to food – not because she was an especially good cook or even personally interested in food, but because she was an endlessly generous grandmother who recognised kai was something I loved. She was never without a bottle of Rose’s lime cordial in her fridge – and growing up, I was allowed to pour as much into my glass as I liked. After her service, we’ll feast on cheese, cake, wine and of course, glasses of lime cordial. There won’t be any asparagus rolls.