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Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt

Middle Eastern and North African Colloquium Series Jessica Barnes’s work examines the cultural, political, and material dimensions of resource use and environmental change in the Middle East and beyond. She has published several books, including Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2014), Climate Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives on Climate Change (coedited with Michael Dove, Yale University Press, 2015), and Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Duke University Press, 2022), as well as a number of journal articles. Her research has been supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and National Science Foundation. Jessica received her PhD in sustainable development from Columbia University and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina. Egyptians often say that bread is life; most eat this staple multiple times a day, many relying on the cheap bread subsidized by the government. In this talk, I explore the anxiety that pervades Egyptian society surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out of wheat or that people might not have enough good bread to eat. Linking global flows of grain and a national bread subsidy program with everyday household practices, I examine the daily efforts to ensure that this does not happen. I offer a novel conceptualization of the nexus between food and security, focusing attention on staple foods specifically and bringing security – as an affectively-charged state of being and a form of action – to the fore. This talk was co-sponsored by the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, the School of Global Studies and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.