Care and Conveyance: Buying Baladi Bread in Cairo

Abstract

The streets are already busy, despite the early hour. Minibuses jostle for space alongside bicycles, cars, and motorbikes, the fumes of idling vehicles filling the air. Honking horns punctuate a background noise of Quranic recitations playing from radios, pop music broadcasting from a store, and a babble of animated conversation. Vendors are setting up their stands for the day, peeling layers of decay off cabbages and lettuce, stacking oranges one atop another. A small hut stands by the side of the road, its window open at the front. The booth is nondescript, unmarked by any sign, with no produce on display or smells emanating from it. Within the darkened space, a woman sits behind a counter. A customer approaches. "I'll have a pound's worth, please," he says, placing several coins on the counter and handing over a plastic card. 1 The woman puts the card into a small handheld machine and then reaches toward the shelves that line both sides of the booth. She starts pulling down loaves of round, flat bread, placing twenty on the bran-covered counter, and handing back the card. The customer picks up the bread, feeling the loaves and glancing briefly at each one in turn. He sets aside four loaves, which the woman exchanges for four new ones. He then moves to one side CARE AND CONVEYANCE: Buying Baladi Bread in Cairo CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGYCULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 34:3 418and spreads out his bread on the hood of a car that is parked nearby. After a few minutes, he stacks the now-cooled bread into neat piles and places it in the plastic bag he has brought with him. He departs, the bulging bag of bread in one hand, smaller bags of beans, greens, and tomatoes in the other.This simple transaction in a Cairo neighborhood in the winter of 2015 might appear to hold little significance. Underlying the transaction, though, is a set of social, material, political, and economic relationships that reaches far beyond those of a man buying bread. The moment of card-money-bread exchange marks an interface between a government subsidy system, private business, staple food, and the millions of people who eat this food every day. The bread the customer is purchasing is a particular kind of bread, known as baladi bread, which is subsidized by the government and eaten by the majority of Egyptians (according to the government's statistics, around 85 percent) on a daily basis (see figure 1). 2 The card the customer hands over is a ration card, which entitles him to five loaves of baladi bread a day for each member of his family. The money he pays covers the cost of twenty loaves at the subsidized price of 5 piasters a loaf, a tenth of the price of other kinds of bread (less than half a U.S. cent per loaf). 3 The bakery he is buying from is private, but the content and size of the baladi bread it produces are regulated by the government. The way he is handling the bread, checking it for defects, Figure 1. Baladi bread with beans and mulokhiya (jute mallow). Photo by Mariam Taher. CARE AND CONVEYANCE

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