How War Shaped Egypt's National Bread Loaf

Maintaining a European style of consumption became one of the most significant markers of social class in Egypt after the First World War.¹ No habit was as fundamental to identity as the daily meal, and no food staple as common as bread. While rural farmers still largely baked coarse flat loaves made from grains they had grown, most typically maize, city dwellers could consume many different styles of bread, depending on the fashion, made by Syrian, Italian, or French bakeries with imported refined white wheat flour.

The Second World War interrupted the laissez-faire economic regime and worldview underpinning such consumption habits. Total war forced political and business elites to revalue their attitudes and expectations about domestic agriculture because of the fractured world market for Egyptian products and limited availability of imports. Disregard of domestic food production had led to a potential famine by 1941, and famine summoned the specter of urban insurrection that had haunted the upper classes since the 1919 revolution.

Suddenly, the Egyptian peasant was not just the symbol but the savior of the nation.² "What issue is alarming the whole world?" the magazine Al-Ithnayn wal-Dunya asked in an essay featuring smiling, hardworking farmers in May 1942 (see fig. 1). "War and peace occur because of a piece of bread … a handful of this yellow gold, 'wheat.' Egypt, thank God, is an agricultural country … in the Pharaonic era it was considered a 'warehouse' of grain. … These pages take a look at the harvest of the new crop, and the farmers who watch over it, to make 'mixed' bread that fills our empty stomachs."³ State wholesalers set a standard size, weight, and price (five millemes, one half piaster) for all bread everywhere based on a mixture of available stocks of wheat, maize, barley, and rice, without regard for regional or class differences—a so-called raghif watani (national loaf). Triumphant coverage in the news media was a positive facade, in fact, for a new, coercive emergency legal administration that required farmers to submit a large portion of their wheat crop to the government at a fixed price. Small-and medium-scale wholesale merchants and bakers dealing subsidized wheat and bread on the black market also became common targets of similar new laws and propaganda demonizing their selfishness.

Figure 1.

The celebration of the farmer was useful propaganda in an era of food shortages and increased government controls. "First Signs of Yellow Gold," Al-Ithnayn wal-Dunya, May 18, 1942

The consolidation of a regime of food security founded on a specific style of bread resulted from a weak coalition of wartime exigency. The managers of the imperial British economy, which was suffering from the strain of total war, found common cause with the Egyptian landed bourgeoisie, which did not wish to abandon its lucrative cash crops, such as cotton, nor lose its political hegemony despite deepening rural inequality and urban unrest. The Egyptian political elite consented to align Egypt's agricultural production temporarily with the British war effort, in exchange for access to limited British shipping opportunities and increasing administrative autonomy.

This food regime lasted after the end of the war, however, because of the national loaf's incorporation as a cornerstone of welfare and public security as Egypt transitioned into a sovereign state. The Ministry of Supply, the institution that managed wheat stocks and supervised bakeries, survived after the war, when it was vital to the prevention of famine, into periods of peace, when the capitalist elite leveraged it as a way of externalizing the social costs of growing cotton instead of food. The key ideological maneuver eliding this contradiction was a political and cultural shift toward the unlimited mass consumption of wheat, formerly a prestige food for urban areas, as a new national right for all Egyptians.

State of the Fields

Egypt had historically been a major center of food production in the eastern Mediterranean. A trend toward growing long-staple cotton under Ottoman governor Muhammad 'Ali and his successors accelerated after the Egyptian state defaulted on loans to several...