JESSICA BARNES, 2022, Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 296pp., ISBN 978-1-4780-1852-0

Keywords: Egypt, bread, wheat, food staple, food security

Researchers familiar with studies of food and society likely have encountered many previous discussions of staple foods, whether rice in Japan, tortillas in Mexico, or fufu in Ghana. Yet few will have stopped to consider what makes a food a staple or the processes that sustain the centrality of staple foods to diets and cultures: dietary staples are often taken to be self-evident. Those same researchers undoubtedly will have met countless mentions of food security, a concept whose more overtly political uses have scrambled its meaning as well as its critical analytical possibilities. In Staple Security, Jessica Barnes examines bread as a staple in twentieth- and twenty-first Egypt, taking neither food staple nor food security for granted as concepts. Grounding her lucid analysis in an impressive range of published sources, archival records, and extensive ethnographic research, Barnes reveals the affective dimensions – that is, the felt experiences of security or insecurity – that studies of food access nearly always neglect. She connects the emotions provoked by fear of losing access to a quality staple to the actions and activities that individuals and institutions undertake to ensure a steady supply. The resulting rich, nuanced study of bread as a staple in Egypt, important and fascinating in its own right, has implications for all studies of food and security, regardless of time or place.

If staples are, as Barnes defines them, “foods that are defining features of meals, that accompany other foods, and that hold symbolic resonance” (19), then there is hardly a better example of a staple than bread in Egypt. Most Egyptians eat wheat bread with every meal, and the government subsidies that ensure the availability of inexpensive loaves are among the country’s most important and expensive state policies. In Egyptian colloquial Arabic, bread is ‘aish or life.

To understand how Egyptians secure access to a food that defines not only eating well but living well, Barnes unpacks the travels of wheat and bread across Egypt. She follows wheat seeds from experiment stations to farm fields (chapter 1), harvested grain from farmers’ fields to state or household supplies (chapter 2), and imported grain from ports to silos (chapter 3). She tracks state-subsidized baladi loaves from urban commercial bakeries to plastic carrier bags to kitchens (chapter 4, co-written with her research assistant Mariam Taher) and homemade loaves from rural home ovens to tables, freezers, or cardboard storage boxes (chapter 5). Barnes leaves few moments in bread’s becoming in Egypt unexamined, and the rewards to paying such close attention across diverse spaces and experiences are many.

Chief among the book’s contributions is its demonstration of security – here, security in a food staple, but potentially applicable to resource security more generally – as a never-ending process rather than a state of being that can be definitively achieved. Barnes characterizes staple security as “a set of practices through which states, households, and individuals seek to secure the continuous supply of a palatable staple so as to address anxieties about staple absence and meet desires for staple quality” (30). In the case of bread in Egypt, those practices include everything from plant breeders developing and promoting disease-resistant varieties to government institutions setting the price for d