Today’s Children, Tomorrow’s Meals: Rooftops as Spaces of Nurturance in Contemporary Egypt

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this research explores rooftops as gendered spaces where women practice what I propose calling “bread-nurturing,” a gendered labor through which women secure and provide nutritious and delicious food for the family. Much of this food is cultivated on rooftops in a long-standing social practice of raising chickens, ducks, goats, and other animals on the roofs of family dwellings. I argue that rooftops are extensions of kitchens in which women practice their intimate knowledge of household food. Rather than simply pushing for an understanding of rooftops as gendered spaces, however, I regard rooftops as a pivotal resource for understanding values and relations of food and taste in Egypt.