Alzheimer's and the Indian Appetite

Abstract

Activities such as cooking, feeding, and eating speak to the pleasures and difficulties of caring for a person with dementia. In this article, I draw on ethnographic data from Delhi to examine the links between three types of food and caregiving in relation to sweetness and pleasure, drug foods and containment, and the feeding tube and sustaining life. I will illustrate that food offers ways to retain identity, build relations, improve function, and show love. In so doing, I contribute to our understanding of how care is conceived cross-culturally and offer potential insight into how interventions using food can enhance personal relationships in home and institutional settings.

Key Words:

• care
• dementia
• eating
• food
• India

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge Lenore Manderson, Annemarie Mol, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

Although it is beyond the scope of this article to explore, it should be noted that there is an extensive cross-cultural literature on hunger and starvation as religiously, politically, and socially meaningful. For example, see Drèze et al. (1995), Katzman and Lee (1997), and Scheper-Hughes (1992).

Currently nearly half of all Indian children under three years are malnourished, and half of all Indian women are anemic; these figures exceed those reported for Sub-Saharan Africa (where the famines occur more frequently; UNICEF 2009). Endemic hunger, persistent malnutrition, and starvation continue to effect India's populations with the root causes of poverty, corruption, high food prices, and ineffectual storage and distribution mechanisms (Currie 2000; Mooij 1999; Radhakrishna and Subbarao 1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bianca Brijnath

BIANCA BRIJNATH is a research fellow in the Department of General Practice, Monash University, Victoria, Australia. Her interests center on mental health, caregiving, and social inclusion in developed and developing country contexts.