Caring (enough) to Kill: On Making Meat & Eating Well in Contemporary Egypt

Abstract

In many areas of peri-urban & rural Egypt, women farmers rear 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 peri-urban city on the Nile's Delta in Egypt, exploring how animals become meat and how women relate to the animals they rear as they nurture, kill, and eat them. These animals include chickens, goats, and rabbits, and are kept on rooftops, in courtyards, or in shared open enclosures. Alongside men, women typically work agrarian land that they own, or on other people’s land for modest daily wages. Beside agriculture, only women rear animals as food for their household. Care is essential to rearing animals, but it is a caring that begins with the inevitability of killing. In other words, women care 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. I explore the oscillation of women from maternally caring mothers to killers of food animals through a conversation between multispecies literature on care, feminist, and psychoanalytic views of care and good (enough) mothers, a conversation that has largely been absent in multispecies ethnography and more so in the context of the Global South. I argue that care is an effort and a curiosity through which a mother knows an animal, eliminates the distance between herself and the animal, a process that allows various forms of violence such as killing to take place more easily and routinely.