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For decades, NGOs targeting world hunger focused on ensuring that adequate quantities of food were being sent to those in need. In the 1990s, the international food policy community turned its focus to the "hidden hunger" of micronutrient deficiencies, a problem that resulted in two scientific solutions: fortification, the addition of nutrients to processed foods, and biofortification, the modification of crops to produce more nutritious yields. This hidden hunger was presented as a scientific problem to be solved by "experts" and scientifically engineered smart foods rather than through local knowledge, which was deemed unscientific and, hence, irrelevant.In Hidden Hunger, Aya Hirata Kimura explores this recent emphasis on micronutrients and smart foods within the international development community and, in particular, how the voices of women were silenced despite their expertise in food purchasing and preparation. Kimura grounds her analysis in case studies of attempts to enrich and market three basic foods—rice, wheat flour, and baby food—in Indonesia. She shows the power of nutritionism and how its technical focus enhanced the power of corporations as a government partner while restricting public participation in the making of policy for public health and food. She also analyzes the role of advertising to promote fortified foodstuffs and traces the history of Golden Rice, a crop genetically engineered to alleviate vitamin A deficiencies. Situating the recent turn to smart food in Indonesia and elsewhere as part of a long history of technical attempts to solve the Third World food problem, Kimura deftly analyzes the intersection of scientific expertise, market forces, and gendered knowledge to illuminate how hidden hunger ultimately defined women as victims rather than as active agents.
Aya Hirata Kimura is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.
"In Hidden Hunger, Aya Hirata Kimura traces the history of global discourses on nutrition very informatively and clearly, integrating the various scales of conceptualization (from global to the very local, in the slums of Jakarta). Kimura usefully points out and illustrates how government and industry persistently and nonsensically ignore the views and needs of the supposed 'target groups'-women and children."-Carol J. Pierce Colfer, Center for International Forestry Research, author of The Complex Forest: Communities, Uncertainty, and Adaptive Collaborative Management
"In Hidden Hunger, Aya Hirata Kimura brings together insights from agrifood studies, feminist food studies, and science and technology studies to challenge the prevailing wisdom surrounding nutrient deficiencies in poor nations. The result is a careful and insightful critique of the dominance of expert knowledge, neoliberal policies, and antidemocratic practices that are transforming food systems without grappling with hunger and malnutrition as experienced by those who are hungry. Kimura successfully shows how 'charismatic nutrients' draw attention away from the socio-political causes and consequences of hunger, increase concentration in food production and marketing, and promote the rise of industrialized food processing, while reframing the problem as one amenable only to expert intervention. In so doing, she also shows how the poor-especially women-are simultaneously silenced and commodified. Kimura has produced a synthesis that is likely to become a model for future work on food, agriculture, and hunger."-Lawrence Busch, University Distinguished Professor, Center for the Study of Standards in Society, Michigan State University
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