“In this detailed ethnography of the daily place of bread in Egypt, Jessica Barnes retheorizes staple foods to advance understandings of food security. Staple Security smartly links the affective condition of feeling cared for, people’s daily actions to ensure household sustenance, and state agricultural and economic policies intended to shore up government support by delivering a sense of security, through daily bread, to its citizenry. Sure to be a new classic in food studies.” - Heather Paxson, author of The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America
“Jessica Barnes’s fine-grained and often mouth-watering description of bread at the Egyptian table as both belly-filling staple and eating implement serves as more than a metaphor for the role bread and wheat have played in Egypt’s geopolitical security. As Barnes so vividly shows, the practices of bread procurement at both national and household levels are so affectively important that conventional and abstract concepts of food security miss the mark. Here it really is about bread and its material qualities.” - Julie Guthman, author of Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry
"The book’s forte lies in the wider use of a range of sources, including ethnography, interviews with various actors in Egypt, participant observation, newspapers and archival materials. . . . Another strength is how the book draws connections with issues of staple security in countries in Africa but also from other continents. Barnes also provides extensive illustrations that are well linked to the content of each chapter. The concept of staple security is of value to anyone interested in the subject of food and politics as well as food histories." - Chama Kaluba Jickson, H-Environment
"Barnes’s Staple Security is an important contribution to the existing literature that unravels the myriad relationships, histories, and politics coalescing around one commodity or staple, similar, for example, to studies of sugar, coffee, and rice. One could imagine scholars and students from agrifood studies, Middle East and North Africa studies, anthropology, and geography finding much value in this text." - Megan A. Carney, American Anthropologist
"A timely contribution to critical food studies, bringing global attention to the vulnerabilities within grain supply chains and their impact on ordinary people’s lives. . . . The evocative writing, along with numerous images, maps, and wonderful full-page photographs between each chapter, transport the reader to the worlds of bread and wheat in Egypt." - Mona Atia, AAG Review of Books
"The contributions of this book go well beyond wheat (or rice or maize) and help us think more effectively about the politics of food writ large." - Annie Shattuck, AAG Review of Books
"Staple Security is a masterpiece of rich ethnographic detail and collaborative research about the cornerstone of the Egyptian diet: bread and wheat. . . . A major strength of this book is methodological: It provides a blueprint of how to study the human experience of a staple, from its cultivation to consumption." - Katie Meehan, AAG Review of Books
"A concise, focused, and illuminating book. Staple Security makes a valuable contribution to the existing literature on food security by exploring the ways in which people actually understand their own sense of security vis-à-vis food, and how they then go about achieving and safeguarding that security. For these reasons, it is necessary reading for all those concerned with issues of food production, policy, and procurement, not just in Egypt or the Middle East, but in the Global South more broadly." - Timothy Gorman, AAG Review of Books
“Barnes deftly weaves together interviews and ethnographic observations with statistics and newspaper headlines to build her case throughout the book . . . An ambitious accounting of complex processes for ensuring security at multiple scales, from the household to the nation.” - Kimberley G. Connor, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"Excellent. . . . Jessica Barnes . . . [has] given us a lot to chew on." - Chantal E. Berman, Middle East Journal
"For many Egyptians, bread is life (?aysh). The anchor of every meal, it is a staple food that is equally woven into household subsistence and geopolitical security. Jessica Barnes’s brilliant book, Staple Security, uses bread along with grain and wheat as a lens to understand this dynamic, revealing how ordinary practices of sustenance in the home are linked to global supply chains and Egyptian politics. . . . I would heartily recommend it to scholars in anthropology, geography, and sociology who are interested in the relationship between society and environment." - Rose Wellman, International Journal of Middle East Studies
"Staple Security is clearly an important book, essential reading across the multiple disciplines engaged in understanding the workings of food systems and the pursuit of food security. It is also a delight to read." - Helen Anne Curry, Anthropology Book Forum
