Efficacy of Appetites

In Tanzania, as elsewhere today, appetites are under scrutiny and have become the focus of national and international public health efforts. “Modern” appetites are implicated in rising rates of diabetes, hypertension, and obesity on the continent. Plant(ing) remedies—as well as the large social projects of which they are part—challenge the forms of knowledge that authorize therapeutic efficacy and elevate interventions into the palate as a ground for politics. I account for the ways in which TRMEGA and EdenMark reconceive of appetites as the substance of endurance: animating bodies, compelling them to eat, and driving the dynamic incorporations and excoporations shaping existence. Dawa lishe names their shared effort to invent vocabularies through which to apprehend such a temporally and spatially dispersed body. In so doing, TRMEGA and EdenMark expose the (im)possibilities of a liberal politics of bodily sovereignty that inheres in health development.