(Mal)Nutrition and the 'Informal Economy' Bootstrap: The Politics of Poverty, Food Relief, And Self-Help (Essay‪)‬

DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, Newfoundland was a veritable laboratory for the study of nutritional deficiency diseases such as beriberi. Over a half century later, the cod moratorium encouraged academics to study the nutritional implications of economic disaster. (1) These parallel waves of unease over diet led to the creation of several bodies of research and forced the state to address the threats posed by widespread poverty. Much of the concern during these two periods--as expressed in academic, state, and popular discourses--focused on the effect of unemployment and poverty on nutrition. Rather than providing adequate support to the poor, however, both periods of economic turmoil were ones in which the government of the day emphasized a series of self-help solutions in which the impoverished were expected to take responsibility for their own nutrition. This essay examines the ways in which both the self-help movement of the Depression era and the promotion of the "informal economy" in the 1990s were advanced as solutions to malnutrition. INTRODUCTION