Pantheon Books | 2021 | 336 pages
One can hardly imagine a book with more gravitas than Sharman Apt Russell’s latest compendium offering her well-researched travels among the communities worldwide—but especially in Malawi, “the warm heart of Africa”—where too many children still suffer and die from hunger. Everything about this subject is complex and dire, and I cannot help but marvel at the writer herself, both for her industry and humanity, and also the diligence of those—and there are more than a few—whose dedication has led to a continuum of possible solutions, ranging from educational support and treatment to the production of therapeutic foodstuffs that contain the balance of nutrients to promote life.
Russell’s Within Our Grasp is a deconstruction of child hunger, an unpacking of this subject, complete with a narrative, with numerous sources; it’s an investigation that is efficient and organized—and frankly amazingly distilled, considering the wealth of information. She begins by defining malnutrition, listing its symptoms, its various manifestations, historicizing it, helping us to see its face so that the numbers don’t deaden us. Later she will discuss going to women’s groups, speaking as well with a number of entrepreneurs who have made this problem the subject of their life’s work, including Steve Collins, a doctor who is responsible for generating the book’s title and much more.
So much of what is now “within our grasp” was once not.
Bringing the private and public sectors together is the hallmark of Dr. Collins’s vision: a merging of interests that reflect the needs of the communities both financially and culturally. Regarding the viability of biofortification and engaging the multinationals, Russell echoes Naomi Klein in advocating for a “reformed capitalism” such that the multinationals are not the only ones benefiting. Russell calls the multinationals to task, to expose the contradictions, such as when “foreign companies like Nestle were convincing poor mothers that sweetened condensed milk was better than breast feeding… [when] in fact the opposite was true.”
She offers a history and the logistics of producing and encouraging the acceptance and widespread use of nutritionally balanced foodstuffs, known as ready-to-use therapeutic foods (RUTF), that utilize local goods in order to “revive the local economy.” She writes of the clashes between environmentalists and philanthropists—and how to best serve those in need, so much of it is trial and error.
That children are starving is not news, but this narrative and data-driven account explodes with little known facts, such as this one: “The most detailed portrait of what happens inside the human body as it starves to death” was the product of research conducted by doctors in the Warsaw ghetto, whose work was “smuggled out” before the doctors themselves were sent to their deaths in Tremblinka.
Reading Russell’s description in the opening pages, one holds tighter onto the hope inspired by her title:
… fatty tissue is gone and the skin hangs lose…. We have begun to cannibalize ourselves, eating parts of muscles and organs to feed other more essential organs, raiding nutrients from the eyes to give to the brain…. Our heart gets smaller… kidneys, liver, spleen, stomach, bowels… we begin to disappear…
Childhood hunger exists in multiple manifestations. Marasmus, described above, is marked by wasting; kwashiorkor concerns the problem of insufficient breastfeeding for a child weaned too early because of a following pregnancy—it was first identified by a female pediatrician in the mid-1900s. Dr. Cicely Williams’s research came from her practice in Ghana—kwashiorkor is a Ga word—but others argued this was pellagra. Rather than focusing on a protein deficiency, Dr. Williams recommended looking at hunger as a function of poverty: “The function of medical department conducted by any government is to raise the standard of living rather than to provide orthodox treatment for the individual.”
Years later Dr. Williams’s work was acknowledged, and kwashiorkor was named as a disease that produced edema in the extremities, a result of the ubiquity of a maize diet (which in itself does not provide the necessary nutrients) and known for being “the disease the deposed baby gets when the next one is born.”
This is a book exploding with information to clarify, to historicize, to contextualize—and yet it zeroes into these small communities with their specific issues of, for example, a time of six months of drought that is followed by six months of terrific rains, communities where maize is the food of preference. Russell speaks of the viability of pigeon peas in this regard, and later of the powerfully nutrient-packed qualities of the moringa plant, native to parts of Africa and Asia.
Within Our Grasp is an exhaustive account regarding the science of malnutrition. She write, for example, that “[w]e come from the Earth. The essential soft metals we need for life are sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium.… We stare into the periodic table. It’s like looking into a mirror.”
Two chapters later we learn how the periodic table functions in human biochemistry. Meanwhile, a chapter titled “Tikondane” (Chichewa for “Love One Another” and the name of a women’s support group) reflects some of Russell’s field work. She witnesses women coming together to share concerns about breastfeeding, patriarchal customs, infrastructure. She interviews individuals, both women and men from the communities who have gone abroad for their education and returned. These stories invite us into their communities, just as she has been invited in.
Russell also confronts grave and controversial issues at the heart of malnutrition, including the need for biofortified crops as “traditional crops decline in nutrients due to greenhouse gas emissions.” Fortunately, smallholder farmers across Africa and Asia are planting more than a hundred crop varieties (“iron-enriched beans, iron-enriched pearl millet, iron-enriched cowpeas, zinc-enriched rice, zinc-enriched wheat, etc.”) with biofortified seeds.
“We come from the earth,” Russell writes, more than once, stressing the links between Earth and its occupants, how caring for one shows itself in the health of the other. In every way, this is a book that inscribes itself upon the inner walls of our conscience, an appeal that can be taken in by anyone who is ready to hear how we have failed to feed one out of every four children in the world—many of whom live in Africa and southern Asia. And yet, there is hope—and this is what keeps us reading about the strategies, postulates, theories, statistics, and heartening stories charting the evolution of a viable solution to save our most vulnerable populations.
In part by sharing her own relationship with illness and motherhood, Russell privileges motherhood, feminism, and environmentalism. Her approach sensitively combines and embraces the notion that all children are our children, rather than dividing up the world into the us and them, with a direct confrontation of her own outsider status and the nature of white saviorism:
As I have struggled to explain my interest in childhood malnutrition to myself and others, I return more and more to the miracle of the body. There are other reasons, of course. There is the hormonal gate that opened more than 30 years ago when I was pregnant with my first child. In the grandiosity of breastfeeding I became the mother of every child. There is the innate sweetness of children, their hand in yours, their belief in you. There are my personal idiosyncrasies: I am drawn to the hopefulness of Steve Collins’s vision because I want to be the bearer of good news. I want to celebrate this blue marble spinning in darkness.
And later:
I tell my writing students: Don’t give up on writing something difficult. But don’t hide from how difficult that writing is.… Writing is about living with failure.
Even as Russell spells out the enormity of the issues, the message is clear: giving up is not an option, and any feeling of helplessness is an illusion. Solving malnutrition is indeed “within our grasp”—if we are willing to reach far enough.
Geri Lipschultz has published in The New York Times, Ms., The Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, The Rumpus, The Rupture, LARB, and others. Her fiction appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She teaches writing at Hunter College and Borough of Manhattan Community College. Her one-woman show Once Upon the Present Time was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. Her most recent story in Orca won a Pushcart nomination. She tweets @alicebluegown1. Find her at www.gerilipschultz.com.
Header photo of child in Uganda by Charles Nambasi, courtesy Pixabay.
