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Mal-Nutrition documents how maternal health interventions in Guatemala are complicit in reproducing poverty. Policy makers speak about how a critical window of biological growth around the time of pregnancy—called the "first 1,000 days of life"—determines health and wealth across the life course. They argue that fetal development is the key to global development. In this thought-provoking and timely book, Emily Yates-Doerr shows that the control of mothering is a paradigmatic technique of American violence that serves to control the reproduction of privilege and power. She illustrates the efforts of Guatemalan scientists, midwives, and mothers to counter the harms of such mal-nutrition. Their powerful stories offer a window into a form of nutrition science and policy that encourages collective nourishment and fosters reproductive cycles in which women, children, and their entire communities can flourish.

Emily Yates-Doerr is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University and author of The Weight of Obesity.

"This is a sensitive, wide-ranging, and beautifully written ethnography of US-Guatemalan power relations as mediated by aid programs that ostensibly seek to improve nutrition for children in the first thousand days of life including gestation. It has taught me so much about how the language of biological reproduction works to appropriate women’s rich generative and creative capacities for the reproduction of empire."—Carlota McAllister, author of The Good Road: Conscience and Consciousness in a Post-Revolutionary Mayan Village in Guatemala

"Gripping and intricately layered in its analysis, Emily Yates-Doerr's groundbreaking ethnography of a policy agenda illuminates how interventions purporting to improve women's health and reproduction so often do more to uphold the very structures underlying gender violence and health inequality."—Megan A. Carney, author of The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders

"Guatemala’s pregnant and nursing women have long served as laboratory subjects in nutrition projects. Mal-Nutrition brilliantly reveals a global struggle behind vulnerable women—for land rights and sovereignty and against sexual violence and the displacement of their communities by agricapital. In this timely and urgent book, the role of anthropologists, policy makers, and NGO workers all figure into how hunger is socially produced."—Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America and coauthor of Disability Worlds