Within Our Grasp Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It

An important, hopeful book that looks at the urgent problem of childhood malnutrition worldwide and the revolutionary progress being made to end it.
 
A healthy Earth requires healthy children. Yet nearly one-fourth of the world’s children are stunted physically and mentally due to a lack of food or nutrients. These children do not die but endure a lifetime of diminished potential.
 
During the past thirty years, says Sharman Russell, we have seen a revolution in how we treat these sick children and in how—with a new understanding of the human body and approach to nutrition, and new ways to reach out to hungry mothers and babies—we have gone from unwittingly killing severely malnourished children to bringing them back to health through the “miracle” of ready-to-eat therapeutic food.
 
Intertwined with stories of scientists and nutrition experts on the front lines of finding ways to end malnutrition for good, Russell writes of her travels to Malawi, one of the poorest and least-developed countries in the world and also the site of pathbreaking, cutting-edge research into childhood malnutrition. (Eighty percent of Malawians are farmers subsisting on less than an acre of land and coping with erratic weather patterns due to global warming; fifty percent live below the poverty line; and forty-two percent of Malawi’s children are affected by a lack of food or nutrients.)
 
As she writes of her personal exploration of new friendships and insights in a country known as “the warm heart of Africa,” Russell describes the programs that are working best to reduce childhood stunting and explores how malnutrition in children is connected to climate change, how vitamins and minerals are preventing these harmful effects, why the empowerment of women is the single most effective factor in eliminating childhood malnutrition, and what the costs of ending childhood malnutrition are.
 
Sharman Russell, much-admired writer of luminous prose and humane heart, whose writing has been called, “elegant” (The Economist) and “extraordinarily well-crafted, far-reaching, and heart-wrenching” (Booklist), winner of the John Burroughs Medal for distinguished natural history writing, has written an illuminating, inspiring book that makes clear the promise of what is today, gratefully, within our grasp.

SHARMAN APT RUSSELL is a professor emeritus in humanities at Western New Mexico University and an associate on the faculty of Antioch University. She is the author of Diary of a Citizen Scientist (winner of the 2016 John Burroughs Medal), Knocking on Heaven's Door (winner of the Arizona Authors Association Award), and Teresa of the New World (winner of the Arizona Authors Association Award). She lives in New Mexico.

Prologue This blue marble spinning in darkness 3
 
1. Humans have been hungry for a long time 9
2. A few a capella angels 27
3. Do no harm 37
4. Our beautiful nutritional revolution 46
5. A modest little factory 59
6. People are ready for a reformed capitalism 70
7. We stare into the periodic table 83
8. A holistic approach 90
9. Tikondane 109
10. The struggle of this existence 120
11. We now define a third of us as malnourished 135
12. Vitamin A helps them see better 142
13. Point, counterpoint 158
14. She has a life all her own 168
15. Chiponde is for the child 176
16. The next-generation RUTF 187
17. Let’s keep talking money 196
18. Elephants 212
19. Success stories 221
20. A time in which men, spirits, and animals lived in harmony 237
21. Who we are 249
 
Acknowledgments 259
Notes 261
Selected Bibliography 297
Index 307