Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Rearing animals on urban rooftops in Egypt is a long-standing social practice through which people sustain their everyday requirements of meat protein. Rooftop animals include ducks, chickens, geese, goats, rabbits, and sheep among various others. It is usually urban lower-middle classes who opt for rooftop rearing, which mainly takes place in four or five-floors extended family homes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores rooftops as gendered spaces in which women practice what I propose calling “bread-nurturing”, a gendered labor by which women secure and provide nutritious and delicious, preferably rooftop-nurtured, food for the family. Broken down into household leftovers and fodder, a rooftop animal feed helps nurture and shape the taste of a rooftop animal as “clean”, that which my interlocutors always casted as superior to any store-bought animal. Through different ethnographic engagements with disciplining rabbits, slaughtering turkeys, feeding chickens, cooking fieldwork meals, and writing poetry in the cooing company of pigeons, I argue that rooftops are extensions of kitchens in which even the most commonly violent pigeon-rearing practice is rendered noncompetitive. I thus take rooftops as an essential resource for understanding food and taste in contemporary Egypt and potentially elsewhere.