Staple Security

“In this detailed ethnography of the daily place of bread in Egypt, Jessica Barnes retheorizes staple foods to advance understandings of food security. Staple Security smartly links the affective condition of feeling cared-for; people’s daily actions to ensure household sustenance; and state agricultural and economic policies intended to shore up government support by delivering a sense of security, through daily bread, to its citizenry. Sure to be a new classic in food studies.” — Heather Paxson, author of The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America

“Jessica Barnes’s fine-grained and often mouth-watering description of bread at the Egyptian table as both belly-filling staple and eating implement serves as more than a metaphor for the role bread and wheat have played in Egypt’s geopolitical security. As Barnes so vividly shows, the practices of bread procurement at both national and household levels are so affectively important that conventional and abstract concepts of food security miss the mark. Here it really is about bread and its material qualities.” — Julie Guthman, author of Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry