Belly is a book about food, but it is not a cookbook. Nora
Bateson invites us into the kitchens, gardens, markets and hospital wards where
the real politics of everyday life play out. Here, dinners and snacks, hospital
trays and celebratory cakes all become ways of seeing the interwoven systems of
family, ecology, illness, migration, labour, empire and care.
With the same intimate, insurgent voice that shaped Small
Arcs of Larger Circles and Combining, Bateson moves between story, essay and
reflection. A pot of soup becomes an inquiry into class; a hospital meal
reveals the logics of a healthcare system; a family feast opens onto questions
of racism, extraction and climate breakdown. The result is a kind of “warm
data” cookbook – a collection of edible stories that refuse to be “just that
and nothing more”.
Belly is for readers who feel that something is missing in
both conventional cookbooks and conventional politics. It is an invitation to
notice how we are being nourished – and starved – by the overlapping processes
in which we live, and to imagine other ways of feeding and being fed.
Table of Contents:
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Glass of Water
Belly of is the Beast
Go Home
Threads
Rules
My Spine is Louder Than The Teleprompter
Matrix
Mattering
Digesting The Grid
Embodiment
Chewing ... Do Not Eat The Compost
How Clean Is Your Kitchen?
Chewing ... Orders
The Belly Holds The World
Sensitizing
Chewing ... Transform
Before Times
Forming
Chewing ... Not All Onion Skins Grow Up To Be Conversations
Waxing and Waning
Morale
Give Everything To Life
Campfire Potato
Chewing ... Not The Change You Are Looking For
Covering For Each Other
Chewing ... Before The Change
Stories From Questions
Rooster
Infinitizing
Chewing ... Paradox of Agency
Unseen
How Much?
Gastronomical Conversations
Chewing ... This Is Not A Pipe
Giving What Was Taken
Rain
All The Life Forms
Meatballs by Stepmother
Lawnmower World
Invisible Ingredients
Labyrinth
Chewing ... Orders of Actions
A Lemon
Extemporaneous Du Jour
Chewing ... Trust
The Eighth Deadly Sin
Communication Is Sacred
Walls
The Backwards Wish
Grief
Eating The Rot
Chewing ... Appetites and Desires
Among-ing
Flags
Trail Angels
Ecology Of Change
Earned Innocence
References
Art Credits
About The Author
About the Author :
Nora Bateson is an independent film-maker, writer, policy adviser and lecturer. She is the daughter of Gregory Bateson, and grand-daughter of William Bateson and is president of the Stockholm-based International Bateson Institute (IBI) - a research group that specializes in transcontextual research into human and other living systems.
Nora made the award-winning film An Ecology of Mind, which explores Gregory Bateson's theoretical work while offering insights into her relationship with her father. Nora's first published work was a cookbook and her interest in food, ecology and the family - as well as systems thinking and symmathesy - are very evident in her beautiful 2016 book Small Arcs of Larger Circles.
Nora's theoretical style combines complex systems theory and analysis with an all-round awareness of, and attention to, the aesthetic. She continues to explore a wide range of disparate topics such as education, communication, and cybernetics through the lens of Warm Data. This aspect of her work is exemplified in her 2023 book Combining.
In 2026 she returned to her roots with Belly: a book with its roots in the family, in the kitchen, in the glorious messy riot of complex systems.
Review :
"Nora Bateson playfully and poetically follows in her father's footsteps in search of complex wisdom for our uncertain world."
Alfonso Montuori, Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies
"In a series of premise-investigations undertaken by way of essays, conference talks, autobiographical story, quotes and poems, ranging through linguistics, biology, semantics, cognitive theory, justice awareness and embrace of paradox, Bateson invites and advocates suppleness of perception, rigor of mind, and depth of feeling. In this book that moves above all by its questions, Bateson embodies that rarity, a truly free thinker also fully engaged with the fates of all."
Jane Hirshfield, Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets
