WHAT WAS the first thing I ate after my father died? I don’t remember. But I know it was – as must be the case for so many recently bereaved these days – an airline meal. So it was probably something tasteless and unprepossessing. But exactly what was served I cannot tell you. I was on an early Virgin Atlantic flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to London Heathrow. It was Christmas Eve. Perhaps they gave us turkey. Still, I suppose my culinary-recall failure is easy to understand. My feelings that day were of great sadness but also relief – that my father’s long and painful battle with cancer had ended at last. Having watched a man I loved lose his mobility, optimism, sense of humour and eventually life, why would I have been thinking about food?

     Grief affects people in different ways, prompting a range of emotions, expectations, needs and desires. Famously, in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of how people deal with death (whether their own or of loved ones). The stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. She didn’t include hunger, but that could conceivably be one of our reactions to death. Still, would a keen interest in what was on the menu necessarily be at the top of our list of concerns?

     Yes. Food and death are long-standing bedfellows. And the fare served in death’s wake is of the utmost importance in some cultures. Food is at the heart of many traditional funerary rites, memorial services and remembrance ceremonies. Its purpose may be sustenance or symbolism. But just as food sustains us in life, so it does in death – in a surprising number of ways.

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