Paper short abstract:

Eating well among families who depended on home-rearing for nutritional sustenance in rural Egypt entails caring for an animal as it grows and killing it as rapidly and painlessly as possible to care for a family through serving the animal as wholesome, trusted, and delicious meat.

Paper long abstract:

In rural Egypt, women farmers reared animals in their household to feed their families or to sell them in markets or through merchants. Beginning in May 2021, I have been conducting ethnographic fieldwork among different families in a village on the Nile's Delta in Egypt, exploring how animals became meat and how women farmers related to the animals they rear as they nurtured, killed, and ate them. These animals include chickens, goats, and rabbits, and are kept on rooftops, in courtyards, or in shared open enclosures. Alongside men, women farmers typically work land that they own, or on agricultural land for modest daily wages. Beside agriculture, only women farmers rear animals as food for their household. Care is essential to rearing animals, but it is a caring that began with the inevitability of killing. In other words, women cared for animals while fully realizing and envisioning the end in mind: killing animals to feed families. In most cases, it is women who rear and kill these animals and home-rearing is how women feed their families and eat “well”, a descriptor that I explore in this essay through paying closer attention to the human-animal relationship through which animals become meat and through comparing home-reared meat to store-bought. In my field-site, eating well always involved home-reared animals, cared-for and well-fed by women without pesticides or antibiotics, an alternative to the otherwise cheap, frozen, and imported subsidized meat.