The Table of the Dead: Food Traditions Beyond Halloween

First published in FNL-Guide in October 2025

Every October, Halloween returns as a celebration of fright, all carved pumpkins and fancy dress. Born of the Celtic festival Samhain and shaped by the Christian All Hallows’ Eve, it ultimately reminds us of something far older and more human: the desire to share a table with the dead.

Where Halloween has evolved into ghost-shaped sweets and horror films, other cultures have kept their connection with death far more sacred.

From Mexico to Japan, and from Greece to India, people still set tables for those who no longer sit at them. In these traditions, food becomes a symbol, a bridge, and at times, an object of unease. Not the cinematic kind of fear, but that quiet, subterranean tremor that stirs when you cook for someone who is no longer alive.

The idea of the “table of the dead” is as old as humanity itself. In truth, all autumn festivals, from Halloween and Día de los Muertos to the Balkan memorial feasts, share the same purpose: to cook in order to keep memory alive.

In Mexico, Día de los Muertos is not a day of mourning but a celebration, a way to make peace with death. Families build altars in their homes or decorate the graves of loved ones with photographs, oranges, candles, rum and food.

The most iconic offering is Pan de Muerto, a sweet bread scented with anise or orange blossom and decorated with pieces of dough shaped like bones. Other traditional dishes include tamales, corn dough parcels wrapped in husks, where the leaves symbolise the coffin and the filling the soul, sugar skulls (calaveras de azúcar), and mole negro, a complex sauce made with cocoa, chillies and more than thirty other ingredients.

Music, too, plays an essential role in this feast. It isn’t sombre but joyful: mariachi bands, rancheras and laughter echo through the night, blending life and death into a single, vibrant harmony, a cultural coexistence as fascinating as it is moving.

In Japan, Obon is the very opposite of Halloween. Instead of pumpkins and costumes, there are lanterns set afloat on water, guiding the spirits of ancestors back toward the light. In family homes, offerings of food, rice, sweet beans and fruit, are placed upon household altars to honour those who came before.

The most beloved sweet of the season is ohagi: sticky rice wrapped in a smooth, sweet paste of red beans, symbolising both remembrance and reunion.

In India, the period of Pitru Paksha is dedicated to honouring one’s ancestors. Families prepare pinda, small rice balls mixed with sesame seeds and honey, which are offered to the departed to ensure their peace in the afterlife.

In the Philippines, the ritual of Atang is a traditional food offering to the dead, observed during the Undas celebrations. Families prepare cakes made with red rice extract and coconut milk, and use raw rice to form small crosses, which are placed before the photograph of the deceased as a sign of devotion and remembrance.

If all this feels distant, think of kollyva, a traditional Greek dish of boiled wheat mixed with pomegranate seeds, cinnamon and raisins. A food that carries centuries of history. The grain of wheat, buried in the earth and reborn, is perhaps the oldest symbol of resurrection.

Greek memorial services are not as sombre as they might seem, and viewed through a culinary lens, kollyva have all the qualities to belong on a menu that bridges tradition and modern gastronomy, something demonstrated when they were once served to Ferran Adrià at Premiere, the restaurant of the Athenaeum InterContinental in Athens, under chef Michalis Nourloglou.

All these rituals share one common thread: the way each culture resists fear, the fear that one day, no one will cook for us anymore. That is why these “tables of souls” are not truly for the departed, but for the living, who need to remember those who have gone, even if that remembrance takes the form of a single dish.