Megan A. Carney

Demedicalizing Health: The Kitchen as a Site of Care

ABSTRACT Attention to culinary care can enrich the framing of health within medical anthropology. We focus on care practices in six Latin American kitchens to illuminate forms of health not located within a singular human subject. In these kitchens, women cared not for individuals but for meals, targeting the health of families and landscapes. Many medical anthropologists have critiqued health for its associations with biomedicine/biocapitalism, some even taking a stance ‘against health.’ Although sympathetic to this critique, our focus on women’s practices of caring for health through food highlights dissonances between clinical and nonclinical forms of health. We call for the development of an expanded vocabulary of health that recognizes health care treatment strategies that do not target solely the human body but also social, political, and environmental afflictions.

The Food Sovereignty Prize: Implications for Discourse and Practice

The rhetoric of “food security” has dominated mainstream approaches to global food insecurity while alternative approaches have received less attention. For decades, the World Food Prize has honored work in the tradition of “food security.” More recently, the Food Sovereignty Prize has brought attention to alternative approaches, namely the “food sovereignty” approach. This article explores how the inaugural awarding of the Food Sovereignty Prize represents an attempt to bring broader visibility to and to gain recognition of these approaches by policymakers.

Latino Im/migrants, “Dietary Health” and Social Exclusion: A Critical Examination of Nutrition Interventions in California

Abstract In this article, we highlight findings from ethnographic research on dietary health interventions with low-income Latino im/migrant populations in the Central Coast of California. We discuss the assumptions underpinning different models of nutrition intervention and education, as well as what these assumptions suggest about common perceptions of Latino im/migrant dietary health and knowledge. We demonstrate how interventions contribute to further marginalization of Latino im/migrants by positioning them as either helpless, unknowing subjects or as freeloading dependents of the state. We argue that Latino im/migrants are systematically denied power as they are consistently beseeched to assume more responsibility for their own dietary health problems. We contend that the implications of these interventions reinforce extant structures of social exclusion encountered by Latino im/migrants, while also failing to offer lasting solutions to food insecurity in Latino im/migrant communities.