For many Egyptians, bread is life (ʿaysh). The anchor of every meal, it is a staple food that is equally woven into household subsistence and geopolitical security. Jessica Barnes’s brilliant book, Staple Security, uses bread along with grain and wheat as a lens to understand this dynamic, revealing how ordinary practices of sustenance in the home are linked to global supply chains and Egyptian politics. Her book details the incredibly wide range of actors and practices that ensure bread’s availability and quality, including household farming work and crop decisions, shared baking in homes, grain storage (whether freezers or silos), trips to the bakery and breadlines, government subsidization of national (baladī) bread, use of an electronic smart card and institutional bureaucracy surrounding subsidized bread, the government sourcing of wheat via a global supply chain of grain, types of bread and levels of extraction, pricing, and milling. And it is from this standpoint that she theorizes the concept of staple security, “a set of practices through which states, households, and individuals seek to secure the continuous supply of a staple so as to address anxieties about staple absence and meet desires for staple quality” (p. 30). In Egypt, not having bread, or good-quality bread, for the individual, the household, and the state, is a matter of security.
Barnes’s argument begins with baladī bread, Egypt’s national bread—a dark bread made with a relatively high extraction rate flour (meaning it has a relatively high concentration of nutrition-rich bran), priced at 5 piasters. Available to eligible Egyptians at government-subsidized bakeries through the use of electronic smart cards, this bread is an emblem of government beneficence and a key part of household and state well-being in both urban and rural areas. However, it also requires that government actors secure access to enough wheat for its subsidized bread program, a program by which it shores up public support. The government’s effort to secure this wheat supply also entails developing and breeding wheat seeds for use in domestic farming to be more productive and disease-resistant, work that might prevent the next bread riot. Indeed, as Barnes’s research relates, the government must procure a significant quantity of domestic wheat, and it depends on small-scale Egyptian farmers to do so (about half of the total wheat needed). Yet contrary to popular (and government) assumptions, Barnes argues, these farmers think about wheat as a crop they primarily consume, rather than sell. Their goal is to ensure that their family members have enough (quality) bread to eat. Indeed, this is one of Barnes’s most important contributions in Staple Security: an analysis of the surprising and sometimes contradictory ways in which small acts of household farming and affective assessments of quality bread for the family are entangled with government bread subsidization programs and experiences of security.
In addition, the book explores the Egyptian government’s efforts to procure foreign wheat (approximately the other half of Egypt’s grain supply), assess wheat quality, avoid contamination and disease, and store wheat. Storage, in particular, provides a vivid example of what Barnes means by staple security and its affective dimensions. She writes, “a mass of grain in storage embodies the affective state, albeit transient, of staple security—the knowledge that, at least for the near future, there will be enough grain to make bread” (p. 175). “Subsidized Bread,” coauthored with Mariam Taher, is the most human-centered chapter and furthers our understanding of how bread and access to good quality bread shapes the lives of Egyptians in urban Cairo. Barnes and Taher explore baladī bread bakeries, sharing the story of a woman named Fayza who must go through tremendous lengths to get a new electronic smart card after her initial card was deactivated following a health condition. Taher participates with her in this endeavor through changing requirements, bureaucracy, and lines, a process that takes them four years. Baladī bread bakeries, Barnes and Taher write, reveal the multiplicity and sometimes contradictory nature of practices that shape staple security. This includes the individuals working in the government who make policy decisions, the bakery owners who improve their product to compete for business, the bread customers who carefully carry their bread home, and the institutions that facilitate or deny smart card access.
Finally, Barnes contextualizes the significance of bread in Egypt even further by exploring household bread making and storage practices in rural Warda. Her friends and interlocutors in Warda tell her that homemade bread is better and that bread making in homes is gendered, and we learn that it depends on reciprocal relationships tied to kin relations that are reinforced through shared acts of baking together. Yet because household wheat cultivation, bread making, and storage practices require this intensive shared labor, it is not always convenient or tenable. As a result, the story of household bread making cannot be told without understanding the global supply chains, procurement practices, and subsidization programs that surround it, shape it, or otherwise change it.
Staple security, Barnes argues, therefore captures both the functioning of things like global supply chains and the work of women at home drying homemade loaves so that they last longer. And indeed, this is a central message of the book: that small individual acts and affect are linked to the logic of larger infrastructures, government decisions, and statecraft. Barnes concludes that the theory of staple security can be applied to other staple securities such as energy and water—objects of national concern, energy, and life—that, she contends, must be understood not only through global trade relationships, but also through affect, and everyday labor. Regarding bread in Egypt she writes, “what is ultimately at stake here is the quality and experience of everyday life—arriving at a bakery and finding affordable, freshly baked bread; being able to produce a bread that your household prefers; and sitting down for a family meal with bread that is soft and flavorful” (p. 236).
Staple Security draws from research Barnes conducted in Egypt since 2007, including in Warda, in the western part of Fayoum Governorate, and six short research trips to Egypt between 2015 and 2019. These trips included fieldwork in both Cairo (with Mariam Taher) and Warda, building on the relationships and linguistic skills the author had developed during dissertation fieldwork. The author also conducted archival research on the history of wheat breeding in Egypt and the subsidized bread program. As such, Staple Security is a well-researched book, and I would heartily recommend it to scholars in anthropology, geography, and sociology who are interested in the relationship between society and environment. I also would recommend it to scholars and students of the Middle East and those interested in globalization, supply chains, and food systems. In future research, Barnes might address the complicated ways in which religious actors and values also shape the affective effort to ensure the availability and quality of bread as a staple security. Nevertheless, this book is a refreshing look at food, state security, and the relationship between home life and national politics.
