ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author analyses cultural meanings attributed to food and eating in Ifugao; biomedical conceptions of forms of malnutrition; how social class and gender influenced malnutrition within Ifugao; and women’s ideas, perceptions, and practices surrounding malnutrition. She explores poor Ifugao people’s everyday practices geared toward coping with their lack of access to adequate food resources for their families and how they coped with their poverty. Using biomedical constructions of inadequate nutrient, food, and calorie intake, malnutrition in Ifugao was manifested mainly as protein energy, or calorie, deficiency, primarily found among children under six years old in Ifugao, and with lesser frequency among school age children. Biomedical health personnel and Ifugao Christian proselytizers often blamed the local Ifugao religion for poverty and malnutrition. The importation of the western biomedical concept of malnutrition aided in the identification of children who had nutritional deficiencies.
