Is good a synonym for healthy? The relationship between the Arara indigenous people with the non-indigenous society food

Abstract

The Arara – Ugorog'mó are a Karib-speaking group who inhabit the Iriri River basin in Pará. Before contact with the surrounding society in the 1980s, they lived as nomads, hunting and gathering. After contact, their groups were settled and agriculture, promoted by the National Foundation of the Indigenous people as a sedentarization technique, became one of their main subsistence activities. Since then, the Arara have been transforming their eating habits, progressively replacing their traditional diet with food from the city. This process has causing an impact on Arara health, as well as eroding traditional knowledge about the foods consumed by the people before contact. The research from which this article was prepared aimed to analyze the Arara’s understanding of the term healthy and its impact on their diet. Using mixed methods, a survey was conducted with children and young people to capture their perceptions about the school meals they receive and consume in schools in four villages. The research concludes that the Arara do not differentiate between healthy and unhealthy foods, and thus there is a parallel between the situation of participatory exclusion discussed by Chakrabarty (2008) and the change in eating habits that leads to the proliferation of chronic non-communicable diseases among indigenous populations.

Keywords
Ugoro'gmó – Arara people; food culture; public policies; school feeding