Kalofonos Ippolytos. All I eat is medicine: Going hungry in Mozambique's AIDS economy Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2021. 287pp. ISBN 9780520289406.

• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Author: Elias Madzudzo,Gillian Chomutare
• Date: 01 December 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.495

DOI: 10.1002/wmh3.495

BOOK REVIEW

All I eat is medicine: Going hungry in

Mozambique's AIDS economy

Kalofonos Ippolytos

Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2021. 287pp. ISBN 9780520289406.

Ippolytos Kalofonos’All I Eat is Medicine:Going Hungry in Mozambique's AIDS Economy

is a study in the anthropology of health and medicine focusing on the experiences of the

Southern African nation of Mozambique as it dealt with the HIV/AIDS crisis. As a storyline,

the book examines the process and effects of the global scaling up antiretroviral treatment

(ART/ARV) in Mozambique. Kalofonos observes that the scale‐up treatment for HIV/AIDS at

the turn of the 21st century resulted in many seropositive people being treated and having

their conditions improve. However, despite this success in accessing treatment, many

people's lives were saved, yet they were not healed. The HIV treatment regime in Mo-

zambique guided by foreign donors adopted a vertical biomedical silo approach, which

focused solely on HIV and the provision of medication. Any other ancillary horizontal ac-

tivities like spirituality, material support, especially food aid, were considered frivolous. For

Mozambique, the therapeutic economy transformed from the more broad‐based relational

moral economy of affection to the inward‐looking individualistic AIDS economy driven by

donors. In sum, Going Hungry in Mozambique's AIDS Economy is about the soul‐searching

paradox of bodies saved from HIV/AIDS but exposed to a new wave of poverty where ARVs

are the only “food”available.

Kalofonos presents his study against the background of Mozambique's racist colonial

and modernizing past, and the effects of apartheid‐ruled South Africa and racist Rhodesia's

(now Zimbabwe) destabilization of Mozambique in bids to stave off any influences that

would spur the fight for independence in these vestiges of white rule in sub‐Saharan Africa.

At a global level, the book critically analyses the fight against AIDS in the context of neo-

liberal racist humanitarianism as an instrument of western onslaughts on socialism and

communism. This political‐economic context filters down to the individual Mozambican fe-

male and male AIDS patient and attendant institutional actors whereby AIDS treatment

becomes an arena for a biased contest between a professionalized biomedical approach

and relational treatment and caregiving. Kalofonos concludes his study by noting that an

AIDS political economy results in the triumph of the international private nongovernmental

sector and related priorities at the expense of the Mozambican national health system and

its citizenry.

Going Hungry in Mozambique's AIDS Economy comprises six chapters interwoven

around three intersecting central themes:

(a) how new technologies—ARVs; practices—positive living and discourses; and medica-

lization develop an AIDS economy in Mozambique,

(b) how the subjectivities of beneficiaries of HIV treatment are reshaped as they navigate

the AIDS economy, and

World Med. & Health Policy. 2022;14:815–817. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/wmh3 © 2022 Policy Studies Organization

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