Paper short abstract:

This paper explores rooftop rearing practices in urban Egypt, where lower-middle class families rear some animals for food. Women, laboring rooftop animals into food, always contrast their rooftop-reared animals with store-bought meat, whose quality and gastronomic history are dubious and unknown.

Paper long abstract:

Rearing animals on urban rooftops in Egypt is a long-standing practice through which people sustain their 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 one year of 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 whose feed is unknown & untrusted. A rooftop animal's essential value, then, is its taste, expressed through knowledge and control of the animal's [gastronomic] past. In light of dwindling rooftops and the proliferation of cheap imported poultry and meat, rooftop rearing practices expose a different mode of multispecies engagement. This intimate multispecies engagement is what grants rooftop animals a special status: They are never sold or exchanged beyond kin networks and immediate families. Imbued with nurturance, care, and countless hours of feeding, cleaning, and rearing, rooftop multispecies relations deviate from market-oriented forms of engagement in industrial poultry farms in which feed is engineered to accelerate the growth of animals and amass largest profits in shortest time spans.