Belly

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.