Aya Hirata Kimura, 2013, Hidden Hunger. Gender and the Politics of Smarter Foods
International audience ; In this book, Aya Kimura, associate professor of Women's Studies, University of Hawai'i at Manoa (USA), examines how nutrition structures the meanings of, and prescriptions for, the "world food problem". She underlines the domination of the technical framing of problems and solutions about hunger that shadowed more complex political points of view and agency of women.The book is written in a pedagogical and didactic way including many examples from a 1-year field research in Indonesia in 2004 and a long list of references. It is divided into eight chapters. The first three concern the central thesis of the book: micronutrient deficiency is claimed, by a complex collusion between scientists, government, donors and corporations, to be the actual major form of "hunger". The same pervasive and powerful network of stakeholders advocates for simple technical fixes such as fortification. The voice of victims (women, children, mothers) are eventually absent in both the definition of the hunger problem and its solution. The next four chapters provide illustrative case studies in Indonesia. In the whole book, she develops her arguments, zooming from global to local ideas and policies and vice versa, changing from academic to corporate realms, questioning international development funding agencies to the Indonesian kitchens. Her central area of interest is the developing world, but her analysis remains stimulating for the rest of the world and is certainly complementary to those of other scholars such as Marion Nestle (2013) for the USA.