Global health practitioners concerned about ecological damage caused by ‘human civilisation’ increasingly promote the concept of planetary health. However, anthropologists and philosophers warn against a universal planetary imaginary that relies on biomedical technologies and overlooks alternatives to colonial plantation practices of feeding humans in the global South. This study followed early nutrition interventions in Bhutan, a ‘pluriversal’ context not directly colonised. Our multi-sited and multimodal ethnographic work contrasts the use of micronutrient powders called Sprinkles, globally promoted for cost-effective sustainability during the First 1000 Days, with recipes for kabchi , a roasted cereal powder fed to infants and land deities. We show how Sprinkles enact a bioeconomic logic of feeding that was often refused by infants and mothers – suggesting misalignment with local socio-ecologies. In contrast, kabchi enacted a tendre l (interdependent) logic embedded in eco-social land relations and clinical guidelines. Framing these frictions within Indigenous and anticolonial feminist science studies, we call for reimagining planetary health interventions – and human growth – through multidisciplinary research, sciences-from-below and reparative action. This article was published open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .
Kaul et al. (Sat,) studied this question.