Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World by Lisa Rogak

One evening, as I was trying to research the Internet for a topic for my Cultural Perspectives article, I stumbled upon a book called Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World. The concept intrigued me that it was part cookbook, part history book all surrounding the food consumed and the rituals and customs observed for funeral services among a wide variety of cultures. As a self-proclaimed “history buff,” I knew this had to be the next book I’d review for SevenPonds.

I liked that Lisa Rogak provided variety in her cultures and counted religions as actual cultures rather than just those from certain countries.

When I cracked open a copy that I retrieved at my local library, the initial influx of information I learned about the customs of around 75 cultures — such as Amish, Ethiopiana and Mongolian among many others — greatly intrigued me. I liked that Lisa Rogak provided variety in her cultures and counted religions as actual cultures rather than just those from certain countries. She also included sections like “Olde England” and “Colonial America.”

Lisa Rogak
(Credit: Amazon.com)

To be honest, I pretty much ignored the recipes provided, especially after I learned in the introduction that Rogak just made up some of dishes she thought the cultures would have consumed when in actuality she couldn’t find information for those particular cultures. After having written about the New Orleans Jazz Funeral over a year ago, I mostly skimmed Rogak’s section on it because it didn’t offer much of anything new to me.

Some of Rogak’s choices on what to cover left me either scratching my head or struggling to not snore, especially those moments she mentioned in her blurbs that she couldn’t find any actual food-related facts.

While Rogak’s Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World provides sporadic snippets of humorous jokes, takes on epitaphs, and fascinating historical facts that she gathered during her research along with her page-long blurbs about each culture she chose to write about, I found the book an overall disappointment mostly because I personally would have preferred more than just one page each about the historical facts on the cultures and their funeral customs. Some of Rogak’s choices on what to cover left me either scratching my head or struggling to not snore, especially those moments she mentioned in her blurbs that she couldn’t find any actual food-related facts. In my opinion, she should have just omitted those cultures rather than fantasizing about what might have been the appropriate funeral foods. In some ways, I felt like I would have been better off reading up on the cultures I was most interested in myself.

Overall, Lisa Rogak’s Death Warmed Over: Funeral Food, Rituals, and Customs from Around the World reminded me of a sweet treat you have long been craving for — only for it to leave a lingering unpleasant aftertaste with your craving not fully satisfied.