context is queen

As time passes, insight, expands, and even more context comes into view.

Nora Bateson, Combining

The menu is an abstraction of the food. It is about the food—but it is not the food. Eating the menu makes for a flat and papery meal. The meal, by contrast, is interlocked within the vegetable garden, the culture of the chef, the conversation at the table, the nature of the occasion, the farmer's children, and the health of the prior and coming

The way we see things is always affected by what we know or believe. Nietzsche said something else fitting to this: “Ultimately no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows. What one has no access through experience one has no ear for.”

The context opens a spectator’s mind to discover the complexity behind what she is seeing. In the end, the “thing-in-itself” is rarely what is most significant. Rather, it’s the connections and the in-betweens that make it all tangible.

What matters more is how we relate with memory, that is to say how we look back to understand our history and retroactively give meaning and context to our lives

To address a food crisis is to address the relational, recursive density the food is contingent upon. It is to nourish the coming together of intergenerational farming, cooking, healing, holidays, ceremonies, culture, seasons and markets — not to package nutrition bars. 

Words are not the things we are speaking about. 

Nora Bateson, Combining

In the old world of broadcast communication that Naomi Klein wrote about, promotion was limited to a few channels, so multinationals with massive advertising budgets had the power to sell a brand monoculture. Now every night, on Twitter, on Instagram, on TikTok, we scroll and see brands smushed up next to real people in the feed. Branding

it's the totality of those “nodal points” that indicate one’s own unique perspective. It doesn’t matter if you specifically sought out the nodal point or not, it’s the recognition that counts. When you encounter a piece of life-changing information (no matter how large the change part is), you are simultaneously discovering and creating “yourself,”