Childhood Malnutrition and the Arithmetic of Compassion: An Interview with Sharman Apt Russell
Sharman Apt Russell is a professor emerita in humanities at Western New Mexico University and an associate on the faculty of Antioch University. Her many publications include Diary of a Citizen Scientist (winner of the 2016 John Burroughs Medal), Knocking on Heaven’s Door (winner of the Arizona Authors Association Award), Teresa of the New World (winner of the Arizona Authors Association Award), and Hunger: An Unnatural History, among many others. She lives in New Mexico.
Her new book, Within Our Grasp, brings together stories of scientists and nutrition experts who work on the front lines of the campaign to end malnutrition with memories of her own travels to Malawi, in southeastern Africa, where some of the most advanced research into childhood malnutrition has been taking place in impoverished communities, with fifty percent of the people living below the poverty line and forty-two percent of the children experiencing a lack of food or nutrients. In the following interview (conducted via email in May 2021), Arithmetic of Compassion contributor Scott Slovic and Sharman Apt Russell discuss psychological and communication aspects of potentially overwhelming humanitarian and environmental challenges, such as childhood malnutrition. Russell offers insights derived from her many years of experience as a writer seeking to illuminate such challenges and inspire readers to take action.
Scott Slovic: The issue of childhood malnutrition on a global scale is dauntingly vast and intractable. In some ways, it’s the quintessential example of the kind of problem that results in what psychologists call “psychic numbing” and “pseudoinefficacy,” a deficiency of emotional engagement and a feeling of helplessness in the face of large-scale challenges. You’ve used a variety of communication techniques in your new book, Within Our Grasp: Childhood Malnutrition Worldwide and the Revolution Taking Place to End It (Pantheon Books, 2021), to overcome these intuitively anticipated psychological responses among readers. Could you explain some of the main strategies you’ve relied upon as a writer?
Sharman Apt Russell: I think a main strategy, and one not always mentioned, is voice. My voice as a writer includes figurative and lyrical language, my personal sense of humor, my own connections to the subject—all of that. This doesn’t, necessarily, mean using the first person and certainly doesn’t mean making me more important than the subject. The reverse is always true: the subject is more important than me. But because I find such deep pleasure in the act of writing, I think that quality becomes part of the work. Because I find greater clarity, perspective, and empathy in the act of writing, I think those qualities become part of the work. This relationship to creativity—to art, if you will—is so deeply human. It’s also the opposite of feeling numb or helpless.
Scott Slovic: Obviously, childhood malnutrition is a perennial problem. You begin your book by offering the history of physicians and aid workers, dating back to the early decades of the twentieth century, who devoted their lives and careers to engaging with this particular problem. And yet you telegraph even in the title of your book the possibility of solving this humanitarian crisis. To me, this suggests that there’s something powerful about the act of writing in a spirit of hopefulness and conveying this sense of hope to readers. What is the role of hope—or what I’m tempted to call the “rhetoric of hope”—in your writing about hunger and malnutrition?
Sharman Apt Russell: It's a truism that hope generates action. Without hope, we can reasonably say, “Why bother?” With hope, we can reasonably say, “Let’s try.” In this case, I was actively drawn to the subject of childhood malnutrition—a subject so inherently sad and painful—precisely because I knew there was hope. Just recently, the United Nations started a fund to end hunger by asking corporations for money to match what governments and donors already give. Spending an estimated $33 billion a year for the next ten years could eradicate almost all hunger that is not caused by civil violence and war. This is possible because we have slowly learned what really works in terms of changing food systems, the treatment and prevention of malnutrition, etc. For perspective, Americans spend more than $90 billion a year on their pets. Of course, we should love our pets. The point is that the world has a lot of wealth. We have the resources to do this.
This isn’t wildly idealistic. The effort would still leave people hungry in areas of conflict. And the best appeal to corporations would be economic, their own self-interest. Actually, I don’t think self-interest is a bad thing. The point more is to define that interest. “Why bother?” is such a joyless response. If hope produces action, action produces its own satisfying energy. We humans like to be active. I think we are much happier with “Let’s try.”
Scott Slovic: I am struck by the way you explain some complicated biochemical and physiological aspects of nutrition and malnutrition throughout the book. I wonder if you could say a word about your approach to writing about technical aspects of science with the aim of capturing and holding onto the interest of general readers? What, for you, are some of the do’s and don’t’s of popular science writing?
Sharman Apt Russell: When you start researching something in science or any specialized field, you are often learning a new language—some very precise terms—and you can start feeling proud of that. You are inside this magic circle of knowledge. At the same time, you need to resist using these terms or jargon yourself. Your job is to translate them instead. Also, hold on to your initial confusion and insecurity about this subject because that’s what your readers are likely feeling, too. Your job is to bridge these emotions.
As the non-expert, as an outsider, you are also free to be more interdisciplinary. To make new connections. To see a bigger or, at least, a different picture. For me, I fell in love with the science of vitamins and minerals. The way half our proteins contain some metal like iron or zinc. The way those proteins open and close and do just what they are supposed to do. The way our bodies are built to take in the world—nutrients and food—and turn the world into who we are. I looked at the terrible sadness of childhood malnutrition and also saw the beauty of nutrition.
Scott Slovic: Throughout Within Our Grasp, you highlight the lives and personalities of scientists and aid workers, telling the “stories” of their work on the problem of childhood malnutrition. In a sense, too, you’ve used the book to tell “the story of malnutrition.” What is the role of story in conveying information to readers and in mobilizing readers’ engagement with an actual problem in the world?
Sharman Apt Russell: I do believe that our brains literally shape and live in the world through the creation of story and narrative. In the prologue, I say “We are the story-telling animal unraveling and restitching every forest and field.”
Today, we are becoming more aware of the power and complexity of stories. As a white woman from a wealthy country, for example, who has never known malnourishment or been the mother of a malnourished child, I had to ask myself—what story could or should I tell? In Within Our Grasp, I talk about that directly, using the fun and somewhat addictive strategy of meta-nonfiction. I outline what drew me to writing about childhood malnutrition. And I confine myself to certain stories. I’m aware of other perspectives, other ways to talk about this subject.
Scott Slovic: I can tell that this issue, childhood malnutrition, is one that you take very personally. In fact, toward the end of the book, when you write about the experience of giving birth to your daughter and the health scare that required you to take her to the hospital as a newborn, you say, “I remembered leaning over her hospital crib and promising her, promising her that I would always love her, that it would always be the two of us always together. I was also scared, never so scared in my live and never so certain. I would always love her. I would always protect her” (186). How do this scene (which is not directly about an instance of childhood malnutrition) and other passages where you present your own life experiences and beliefs contribute to what you hope to accomplish in this book about a “worldwide” problem?
Sharman Apt Russell: Why care about children you will never see, never know, thousands of miles away? You might feel partly responsible for their situation in terms of climate change and the exploitations of capitalism. You might have some religious or moral instinct: we are all brothers and sisters, and these are my children, too. You might love the miracle of the body and be appalled when that body is betrayed by malnourishment. I have all these feelings. I also have that personal entrance of being pregnant with my own children, feeding them from my body, and feeling the grandiosity of that. I feel, still, a visceral and biological response to hungry children. This is pretty personal! I think everyone will have their own different personal response, something deep within them that makes them connect to the rest of the human world, that makes them empathize with the pain of children whose lives and potential are being so diminished. Writing this book, of course, helped me unearth or discover what that was in me. I included this scene as part of that discovery—and I think one intent of the book is to encourage readers to go on with their own discovery and exploration.
Scott Slovic: Finally, you and I know each other because of our common interest in writing about the natural world. Within Our Grasp is, on one level, a book about a humanitarian crisis, a book about poverty and agro-economic systems in the developing world and the more or less effective delivery of medical/nutritional aid to societies that need such help. But there is also a rich undercurrent of environmental philosophy (“We come from the Earth, and we have become the Earth” (221)), evoked quite poetically, throughout this work. I wonder if you could reflect briefly on the intertwining of humanitarian and ecological concerns, which seems to be such a profound dimension of your writing about childhood malnutrition.
Sharman Apt Russell: Yes, this was really important—that this book be about environmental concerns, about how the goals of the environmentalist and the humanitarian are aligned. Partly this is because I am such an old environmentalist, literally so, going to college in the era when books like The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich were influential. And I still have friends who are stuck in the twentieth century. When I first started talking about childhood malnutrition, years ago, one good friend nodded compassionately and then said, “Sharman, I feel sad for these children, too. But isn’t overpopulation the real problem?” I wanted to scream and jump on her head. Today we all understand better that ending child death and extreme poverty is actually the way to stop further population growth. But conversations like this started me on the path to finding more connections between a healthy Earth and healthy children. Agroecology and agroforestry are really directly connected to helping smallholder farmers feed their families. Biodiversity is really directly connected to a literate and flourishing society.
Humans dominate the Earth now in a new way. I think we have to get past our protests about that, our grief and fear. We have to accept that we have become “co-creators” of the world around us, accept that there are 7.8 billion of us, accept our responsibilities, accept our relationships to each other and to plants and animals—accept and even celebrate our interdependence.