Rickety Puppies, a Cow called UNICEF, and a Carrot with Healthy Eyes: Rickety Puppies, a Cow called UNICEF, and a Carrot with Healthy Eyes: More-than-human Teachers and the Malnourished Child

As one of the most recognizable icons of humanity and humanitarianism, the malnourished child has long been the focus of debates about representation and dehumanization. What has been less readily acknowledged is how this icon of ‘humanity’ has been codified and animated by an array of inter-species connections. This chapter introduces a multi-species history of the malnourished child by interweaving stories of experiments to induce rickets in dogs, multispecies assemblages in feeding programs and school gardens, and a range of development education programs that employed plants to teach children about growth and vitamin deficiency. While these stories highlight what Bruno Latour calls the hidden work of hybridization, they also highlight how interspecies relations enable and sustain pre-existing hierarchies of species, race and knowledge. Accordingly, they raise difficult questions about how Anthropocene pedagogies may help us grapple with the on-going-ness of child malnutrition both past, present, and into our uncertain future.