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.

KEYWORDS:

• Culinary care
• health
• kitchens
• Latin America
• medicalization

Acknowledgments

We thank Susan Greenhalgh, Annemarie Mol, Stanley Ulijaszek, Rebeca Ibáñez Martín, and Jenna Grant for their commentary on an earlier version of this article, as well as three anonymous reviewers who were generous and constructive in their feedback. Our deepest gratitude goes to the women who welcomed us into their kitchens.

Funding

Emily Yates-Doerr’s research was funded by fieldwork grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation and Fulbright Hays; Megan Carney’s research was funded by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States, the Institute for Labor and Employment, and the Chicano Studies Institute. The write up of this article was assisted by ERC Advanced Grant, AdG09 Nr. 249397 and support from the Comparative Border Studies Institute at Arizona State University.

Notes

1. Stephen (2009) convincingly argued that Latin America is a cultural and not geopolitically bounded region.

2. Bienestar often translates as well-being, a term that might seem less biomedical in connotation than salud, except that in Latin America Bienestarina is a popular nutrient supplement, with clear biomedical connotations.

3. Cameron and colleagues (2014) and Hunt (2014) provided an excellent summary of the political and intellectual dangers of associating ontological multiplicity with a specific group of people. For an account of how a practice-centered approach to anthropology might depart from an ethnos-centered approach see M’Charek (2013).

4. This is the definition for Complementary Alternative Medicine given by the special interest group for the Society for Medical Anthropology. http://www.medanthro.net/interest-groups/camim/ (accessed May 6, 2014).

5. In her study of cooking in kitchens in Spain, Ibáñez Martín has made a similar observation (2014). Whereas nutritional and dietary advice and recommendations make boundaries between good and bad fats, and good and bad bodies, in the cooking practices she studied, boundaries were not so solid.

Additional information

Funding

Emily Yates-Doerr’s research was funded by fieldwork grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation and Fulbright Hays; Megan Carney’s research was funded by the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States, the Institute for Labor and Employment, and the Chicano Studies Institute. The write up of this article was assisted by ERC Advanced Grant, AdG09 Nr. 249397 and support from the Comparative Border Studies Institute at Arizona State University.

Notes on contributors

Emily Yates-Doerr

Emily Yates-Doerr is assistant professor of Anthropology at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. Her research on cultural politics of nutrition traverses the fields of medical and environmental anthropology and science and technology studies. She is the author of The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala (UC Press).

Megan A. Carney

Megan A. Carney is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on the social, political, and health dimensions of migration across the US–Mexico border as well as in the Mediterranean. She is the author of The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity across Borders (UC Press).