Take Your Picnic to the Graveyard

Halloween is my holiday. It’s like my Super Bowl and Christmas all rolled into one. Our home is the talk of the neighborhood. We hand out full-sized candy bars and decorate with all manner of ghoulish, spooky things: dead bodies, monsters, whatever animatronic my 3-year-old daughter selects from Spirit Halloween (this year, it’s a pumpkin spewing guts).

I’ve never found any of this particularly scary (I tend to laugh when confronted by costumed actors in haunted houses), least of all the iconography of tombstones and death. It’s almost a source of comfort, a nostalgic callback to my childhood, much of which was spent frockling and socializing in cemeteries with my family.

Every month when I was growing up, my parents, my little sister, and I would make the rounds to local graveyards and temples across Toronto to offer gestures of deference to great-grandparents, second aunties and uncles, and other ancestors who died long before I was born. We’d get up early in the morning and load up the car with a picnic basket full of food and bouquets of carnations. These days would be long and arduous. But eventually we’d arrive at our final stop, Mount Pleasant Cemetery, where we’d visit a number of relatives, including my po po, my grandma on my mom’s side, who died when I was 18.

Then it was time to eat. We’d lay out a lavish spread of dishes around the edge of po po’s grave and find spots to sit among the itchy blades of grass. The meal always started with steamed buns, followed by boiled chicken, pan-fried dumplings, roast barbecue pork, mandarin oranges, sticky rice, and green tea.

These visits were my family’s take on the annual Qingming Festival, or Grave Sweeping Day, when many Chinese families clean loved one’s gravestones, reminiscence about their lives, burn joss paper to fund their afterlife, and eat foods like coiled, crispy sangza (deep-fried noodle snack) and glutinous rice balls (stuffed with sweet coconut and nuts or black sesame paste). But we made our visits far more often, embellished our meals with many of my po po’s own favorite foods, and used the visits as regular check-ins with her, as you might with a living relative. Between bites of roast pork, I would tell po po about my week: my anxiety over an upcoming track meet or the friend’s birthday I attended over the weekend.

A meal with the dead may sound grotesque in some cultures, but visits to po po’s grave were a highlight of my childhood. As my belly filled up in that sacred space, our spiritual exchange was also feeding my soul. These moments were a source of deep comfort and therapy, a way of normalizing death. It’s something that many people could use, if they could get over the cultural awkwardness of dining in a graveyard.

All this wouldn’t have seemed strange to American families at the turn of the 20th century, when graveyards acted as public spaces. As cemeteries spread outside of churchyards and before public parks made the outdoors easily accessible, you’d frequently see relatives in large congregations at the graveyard with meals in tow. This period brought Americans in line with cultures around the world where people bring food to their dead relatives. Proximity to death — and by extension, a visitor’s own inevitable aging and impending doom — was commonplace.

But as medical advances extended people’s lifespans and death became something to challenge and defeat, the living and the dead retreated to their separate spheres. Though some cemeteries continue the tradition, like the popular picnic and movie nights at Los Angeles’s Hollywood Forever Cemetery, others, like the famed Green-Wood in Brooklyn, specifically prohibit picnics. Which is a shame, since food makes such an ideal way to make peace with death.

Before my po po died, I got to experience her vivacious tenacity and talent as a home cook. She always overfed immediate and extended family, luring even the most heated, bickering relatives to her table with an endless parade of supple steamed fish, luscious suckling pig, and bouncy silken tofu. Despite my rickety Cantonese, she could immediately diffuse the awkward tension of a language barrier with a simple greeting — nei sik jor faan mei ah? (“Have you eaten yet?”) — and some of her signature fried rice.

Her role in death wasn’t much different. Even from beyond the grave, she continued to wield this same metaphysical enchantment over us. A meal of her nostalgic foods at the gravesite immediately diffused the otherworldly realm between us. Food offered a connective thread for me to celebrate — and continue to forge — our relationship together.

Now, as a working mother, I admit that I’ve waned on my graveyard picnics of late. So before Halloween and frosty weather descends upon Toronto, I plan to take my daughter to meet her great-grandmother, so she can cultivate a meaningful relationship with her deceased relative too. We’ll head to Mount Pleasant with a picnic basket packed with po po’s cherished foods, along with some of my little one’s choice selections, too. They both love steamed barbecue pork buns. That’s a good start.

Tiffany Leigh is a BIPOC freelance journalist with degrees in communications and business. Additionally, she has a culinary background and is the recipient of the Clay Triplette James Beard Foundation scholarship. She has reported on travel, food and drink, beauty, wellness, and fashion for publications such as VinePair, Wine Enthusiast, Business Insider, Dwell, Fashion Magazine, Elle (US), Departures, Travel + Leisure, Vogue (US), Food & Wine Magazine, Bon Appetit, Shape Magazine, USA TODAY, and many more.