Invite chaos in, trust complexity and boost the possibilities

Nora Bateson is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and educator, as well as President of the International Bateson Institute, based in Sweden. Bateson will also be a keynote speaker at the Foodvalley Partner event on December 4th, 2024, where she will share inspiring and thought-provoking insights. Her work asks the question “How we can improve our perception of the complexity we live within, so we may improve our interaction with the world?”. In conversation with Marjolein Brasz – CEO of Foodvalley, she considers this question in relation to the food transition.

No bees, no food

“Food is our relationship with the seasons, the soil. It is our relationship with our ancestors, what was fed to us as children? The smells that were in our households. Food is very emotional. It’s nutrition, health, and big business.” For Nora, food is about relationships with the world in which we live, connecting us to everything, from our microbiome to global petroleum processes and huge corporations and issues like genetically modified seeds. In fact, Nora says, “food is a very primary experience of life that we engage in every single day. The taste, the crunch, the texture, the smell – all our sensory systems in our organism are activated with food. It’s a whole cognition process of what it is to be alive.” She goes further, and this is perhaps the essence of her message, food goes beyond the product that keeps us alive. Food is personal, cultural, ecological, corporate, political.  If you provoke people’s culture at the level of food, bad things can happen. People can actually revolt. And governments can lose credibility. Everything is interconnected and we have to trust the complexity. It’s a multitude of systems operating simultaneously within multiple contexts of systemic relationships. It’s at the centre of our social hub, from the kitchen to the marketplace and the livestock to waterways, seasons and pollinators. No bees, no food. So how do we, and nature, respond?

Mother and child

“Nature never does one thing at a time,” Nora explains. “When the pollinators land on the blossoms, it’s good for the blossoms. It’s good for the pollinators, for the other organisms, for the soil, the butterflies, the birds, mice, lizards. One action that generates vitality in totally different forms. The bee does not pollinate the lizards but generates the possibility of the meadow and the environment in which the lizard can live. So when a mother nurses her child, there’s a lot of emotional care going on, there’s physical nourishment from the milk, but it’s also intellectual. It’s tactile, cultural, it’s communication, it’s health. But If the mother is starving, she can’t nurse her baby. If the mother’s milk is full of chemicals, the chemicals will go through the milk to the baby. The continuation of our species is contingent upon being able to feed the babies. Case closed.”

A different perspective

It’s important to know what nutrients are needed, how to grow food, how to make those relationships between groups of people that are in the exchange of food. When you go into the broader question of what is food? It’s more than nutrients. Nora cites an example of a US government project for group of people who were having a really bad reaction to a particular medicine whereby their nutritional levels were in sharp decline and no matter what they did – supplements, pills, injections – they could not seem to get the nutritional levels up. But their hair was falling out, which made them hesitant to socialise. They were basically living on canned food and frozen pizza and things that were not nutritious. Then they purchased wigs and they started to interact socially, which activates your microbiome, your sleep in a new way, activates your wellbeing in 10,000 ways. And their nutritional levels started to rise. “But here’s the thing,” says Nora, “The problem and the solution were not where anyone was looking.” This is at the crux of Nora’s question: how can we improve our perception of the complexity we live within. And it’s a clear example of her conjecture that if you invite chaos in, surprising solutions may emerge.

Shaping the future of food together

At some point we have to make a choice, decide where and when to move, and how to do that simultaneously is something that a lot of people actually struggle with. Foodvalley is focused on making those choices and getting people moving, simultaneously and jointly. ‘shaping the future of food together’. To which Nora suggests adding that “we have no idea what will happen’. Because if we think we know, then we’re in big trouble. But if we’re improvising together, if we’re building and nourishing and tending the kind of relationships where there is the possibility of us being lost together, then something interesting can happen.” In many respects, this is the journey on which Foodvalley has embarked. Together with innovators, starters and scalers and producers of new foods and ingredients. A community of people on a journey and no one really knows where they might end up. But, with our guiding role and the right tools, figuring it out together, possibilities abound.