Belly

Belly is a book about food, but it is not a cookbook. NoraBateson invites us into the kitchens, gardens, markets and hospital wards wherethe real politics of everyday life play out. Here, dinners and snacks, hospitaltrays and celebratory cakes all become ways of seeing the interwoven systems offamily, ecology, illness, migration, labour, empire and care. With the same intimate, insurgent voice that shaped SmallArcs of Larger Circles and Combining, Bateson moves between story, essay andreflection. A pot of soup becomes an inquiry into class; a hospital mealreveals the logics of a healthcare system; a family feast opens onto questionsof racism, extraction and climate breakdown. The result is a kind of “warmdata” cookbook – a collection of edible stories that refuse to be “just thatand nothing more”. Belly is for readers who feel that something is missing inboth conventional cookbooks and conventional politics. It is an invitation tonotice how we are being nourished – and starved – by the overlapping processesin which we live, and to imagine other ways of feeding and being fed.