A fome em mapas: geografia literária e segurança alimentar e nutricional na mancha dos sertões

Abstract

Hunger is an issue that goes beyond lack of food and is an eminently political problem. This fact, however, is not adequately addressed in Food and Nutrition Education (FNE) programs that often approach eating by a biological perspective, disregarding its social bias. The objective of this work was to propose an educational approach, based on the assumptions of literary geography, that aims to facilitate the reading of the relations that the food plays in a given territory, from the use of maps. The exploratory qualitative research had as its corpus six works of literature that were taken as starting points for the selection of problems that relate the narrative space and its relationship with culinary objects. The six works relate to a specific portion of the Brazilian territory that we call the Sertões culinary spot. In them, there is a strong presence of the denunciation of social injustices linked to hunger and three main causes related to it: (1) the misuse of land, (2) commoditization of food and (3) fatalistic thinking. We have selected maps that can aid in the discussion of these problems, explaining conflicting interests, reconnecting seemingly disconnected phenomena and pointing to the essence of the injustices involved with the issue of food as a policy. Literary geography can thus be an auxiliary tool of an FNE implicated in the promotion of food democracy.