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.