Negotiating nutrition: Sprinkles and the state in the Peruvian Andes

This paper explores the use of sprinkles, or multi-micronutrients, distributed by the Peruvian state to children under three in response to high levels of iron deficiency anemia. Based on ethnographic research carried out in a subsistence farming village in the Ayacucho region, I will show that nutrition activities, other than sprinkles consumption, are taken up despite a problematic relation with the local health services. I will argue that reservations about using sprinkles, and public health services in general, are not to do with a rejection of biomedicine. With reference to Foucault's work on medical surveillance, I will explore a specific area of the medicalization of rural women's everyday life - the introduction of malnutrition - and will use the case of sprinkles to look at women's relationship with the state, as manifest through the local health centre.