Malnutrition as more-than-food: understanding failings in the broader infrastructures of nurture

Abstract

This paper considers critical approaches to child malnutrition and its broader causes, which necessarily include, but extend beyond, food. Materialist approaches to food in geography have emphasised how food is only one thing to move through, affect or be incorporated into children’s bodies alongside numerous other social and material relations. Drawing on (the untapped similarities in) wider geographies of infrastructure and care, as well as feminist perspectives on childhood, infant feeding and shame, this paper attempts to develop a broader geography of infrastructures of nurture: the underlying and contested relationships necessary to sustain life; and the consequences attached to their gaps and failings.