“¡BIEN COMIDO, BIEN TRABAJADO!”. EL CONCEPTO DE “BUENA ALIMENTACIÓN” ENTRE LOS POBLADORES DE UNA COMUNIDAD CAMPESINA DE HUANCAVELICA, PERÚ

Abstract

The article that follows is an approximation to the concept of "good food" developed by the inhabitants of Yachaypampa, which is a fictitious name of a peasant community in Huancavelica, in the central Andes of Peru. Through an ethnographic work, it has been possible to know about how the comuneros and the comuneras build categories that oppose the products of the countryside to those that come from the urban market, and how the notions around what they understand by "eating well" and "feeling good" are linked to the work they do every day in the field. Furthermore, it has been possible to investigate about the relationships that they establish between the way of feeding themselves and biomedical pathologies that hit the community, such as malnutrition and anemia. The study shows how the interpretive models adopted by peasants -which health professionals ignore or do not take into due consideration- resemble and diverge from those proposed by international entities that intervene in Peru with nutritional programs. It is considered necessary a perspective that bases its interventions in nutritional health on the dialogue between the autochthonous look and biomedicine.