After I first moved to Cairo, I encountered tomatoes in every single place—in avenue meals, cookbooks, household recipes, and native markets. In subsequent years, after I returned to conduct analysis on (and in) Egyptian kitchens, I watched dwelling cooks use them for garnishes and stuffings, in salads, to stew meats and greens, and at the same time as a seasoning—grated right into a dish for a vibrant punch of acidity.
Regardless of tomatoes’ ubiquity at the moment, their reputation in Egypt is a latest phenomenon. Native to the Americas, they have been broadly cultivated within the Nile Valley by the nineteenth century and have become out there year-round to Egyptian customers within the twentieth. As we speak, Egypt constantly ranks among the many world’s prime producers of tomatoes, practically all of that are consumed domestically.
After I first moved to Cairo, I encountered tomatoes in every single place—in avenue meals, cookbooks, household recipes, and native markets. In subsequent years, after I returned to conduct analysis on (and in) Egyptian kitchens, I watched dwelling cooks use them for garnishes and stuffings, in salads, to stew meats and greens, and at the same time as a seasoning—grated right into a dish for a vibrant punch of acidity.
Regardless of tomatoes’ ubiquity at the moment, their reputation in Egypt is a latest phenomenon. Native to the Americas, they have been broadly cultivated within the Nile Valley by the nineteenth century and have become out there year-round to Egyptian customers within the twentieth. As we speak, Egypt constantly ranks among the many world’s prime producers of tomatoes, practically all of that are consumed domestically.
Tomatoes’ significance to Egyptian society extends past the realm of delicacies. They’ve lengthy functioned as a “low-tech financial indicator of precarity”: an important merchandise that steadily strains the family budgets of bizarre individuals. Since not less than the Nineteen Fifties, Egyptian distributors have marketed tomatoes utilizing the road cry “magnuna ya oota” (“loopy tomatoes”) in a reference to the infamous volatility of their costs. Unsurprisingly, in postrevolutionary Egypt of the 2010s, tomatoes steadily punctuated political and financial discourse. A flurry of memes and cartoons decried their climbing costs, and in 2016, the favored Egyptian singer Saad El Soghayar launched a tune whose opening verse highlights tomatoes’ propensity to fluctuate wildly in worth: “Typically they’re a penny, typically 100.”
At any time when I return to Egypt, I discover that the price of tomatoes remains to be a standard criticism. However I argue that the cry of “loopy tomatoes” is just not merely an offhanded grievance; fairly, it displays a well-liked critique of state energy.
This text is customized from Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary Historical past of the Tomato by Anny Gaul (College of California Press, 304 pp., $27.95, October 2025).
A central function of Egypt’s fashionable meals system is the expectation that the state will guarantee its residents’ entry to sure meals—most prominently, backed wheat bread, which has been the centerpiece of state meals coverage because the Forties. In 1977, 1000’s of Egyptians took to the streets to protest subsidy cuts in an rebellion popularly referred to as the “bread intifada.” Although the bread subsidy has been affected by the liberalizing reforms initiated because the Nineteen Eighties, it’s arguably the meals merchandise that has remained probably the most shielded from them. “Low-cost wheat bread has turn out to be an anticipated a part of the state’s social contract with its individuals,” geographer Jessica Barnes has written.
After a gaggle of Egyptian army officers overthrew the ruling British-backed monarchy in 1952, the Egyptian state expanded present controls over wheat manufacturing to incorporate different main area crops akin to wheat, rice, and sugar. However in contrast to these staple crops, which have been regulated by way of manufacturing quotas, subsidies, and rationing programs, tomatoes and different fruit and veggies have been excluded from such direct types of state regulation and intervention, and have been additionally topic to much less intensive pricing and distribution mechanisms than backed meals.
A number of different elements have traditionally underpinned tomatoes’ worth volatility. One is their exceptionally excessive spoilage charge—stemming from the fruit’s fragility, exacerbated by Egypt’s scorching summers and lack of transportation and storage infrastructure. Some estimates counsel that as a lot as 50 p.c of the Egyptian tomato crop is misplaced between the farm and the patron. Seasonal fluctuations in production and blights, such because the yellow leaf curl virus, have additionally contributed to cost volatility.
Probably the most infamous downside dealing with twentieth century tomato producers and customers, however, was the focus of the vegetable commerce in wholesale markets in Cairo and Alexandria.
The Rawd al-Farag market in Cairo had a popularity for profiteering wholesalers way back to the Nineteen Twenties. In his 1991 research of Egyptian agriculture, Yahya Sadowski, a senior fellow on the Brookings Establishment on the time, famous that though a whole bunch of wholesalers labored on the market, “all however 10 p.c of them got here initially from the identical three villages in Suhag” in Higher Egypt.
Egyptian officers knew {that a} small group of service provider households managed vegetable wholesaling, profited from their function as middlemen, and handed prices alongside to each customers and producers. Even so, state interventions round vegetable provide by no means even approached the complexity of the programs put in place to make sure the general public’s entry to dietary staples akin to bread, sugar, or vegetable oil. The appointment of market inspectors and the funding of state sources to help farmers beginning within the Nineteen Fifties had restricted results on tomato costs, which continued to fluctuate “greater than some other vegetable,” in response to Sa‘id Hamdi, an Egyptian horticultural professional writing in 1958.
Folks work in a tomato-drying area in Luxor, Egypt, on Jan. 11, 2024. Mohamed Elshahed/Anadolu by way of Getty Pictures
Within the Sixties, because the state turned to extra concerted planning mechanisms, it consolidated extra controls, together with mandating worth ceilings on fruit and veggies. Though these reined in worth fluctuations to a point, the Ministry of Provide “was by no means capable of fully suppress black market commerce in agricultural items,” Sadowski writes. For many years, retailers operated in secret, making offers that undercut official costs.
Coverage paperwork and statements by officers reveal that the state was nicely conscious of the internal workings of Rawd al-Farag’s racketeering vegetable retailers, and typically even coordinated with the households of their efforts to manage costs. However the state’s efforts to impose worth ceilings failed. As tomatoes have been turning into a well-liked staple in Egypt’s dwelling kitchens, their “loopy” costs grew to become a fixture of Egyptian life.
Though Egyptians have by no means taken to the streets over tomatoes the way in which they’ve over bread, they haven’t been silent on the matter, both. Cultural references to tomato costs have been a part of a widespread political orientation in twentieth century Egypt that noticed residents throughout the ideological spectrum trying to the state to deal with society’s issues.
The tomato disaster at Rawd al-Farag was famously dramatized, for example, in Salah Abu Seif’s 1957 movie The Thug (al-Futuwwa). Now thought-about an Egyptian traditional, The Thug highlights the way in which the tomato united farmers and employees, Cairenes and southerners, in a shared set of calls for upon the state.
An early scene portrays a distinguished wholesale vegetable service provider, Abu Zayd, ordering a lackey to limit the provision of tomatoes to drive up the worth—and to ship phrase to different retailers to do the identical. When the movie’s protagonist, Haridi, first arrives in Cairo from the countryside, he’s shocked on the worth of tomatoes within the metropolis. (“That’s loopy!” he exclaims, a nod to the road cry that filmgoers would have acknowledged.) Discovering work available in the market, Haridi quickly learns the internal workings of the vegetable commerce, together with the retailers’ alliances with highly effective authorities officers who present cowl for his or her collusion. Shocked and offended, Haridi devises a plan to pool sources, supply tomatoes instantly from the countryside, and promote them at affordable costs. However he’s thwarted by Abu Zayd’s thugs, who sabotage the vehicles carrying his tomatoes. Ultimately Haridi’s elaborate ruses to beat the oligopoly corrupt him, and he turns into the type of predatory service provider he as soon as rallied the neighborhood in opposition to.
At first look, the movie’s central focus appears to be the corruption of the retailers, however a better studying means that it’s actually critiquing the political constructions that preserve the retailers’ corrupt system in place. The movie’s opening credit embrace an epigraph: “The occasions of this movie occurred at a time when the few managed the livelihood and sustenance of the various.” And in its closing scene, a policeman pronounces that the issues of the market will not be attributable to this or that particular person; they’re systemic and inevitable. “Abu Zayd and Haridi could go,” he intones, “however a thousand extra like them will come.”
In 1957, The Thug was prescient in its evaluation of the tomato pricing downside, which continued at the same time as regimes and their prevailing ideologies modified over the course of the twentieth century. Cairo’s wholesale vegetable commerce was redistributed within the Nineteen Nineties, however ongoing complaints about tomato costs remained a part of Egyptian life. They’ve the identical chorus now that they did a long time in the past: magnuna ya oota, loopy tomatoes.
Based on meals historian Jayeeta Sharma, “meals cries” like this one may also help us perceive the function that each meals and its distributors performed in shaping the social material of contemporary cities.
I perceive the phrase “magnuna ya oota,” at its core, to be each a criticism and a disavowal of an unjust system. With it, a vendor proclaims he’s promoting tomatoes whereas affirming he could make no guarantees about their worth. As a avenue cry, it additionally affirms that the vendor and the shopper are collaborating within the tomato market anyway—largely as a result of they’ve little selection.
Within the second half of the twentieth century, Egyptians might rely on the federal government to make sure an accessible bread provide, however the state’s failure to manage tomato costs was an open secret. Tomatoes weren’t deemed essential sufficient to advantage the sorts of state interventions reserved for bread. But as a well-liked staple of on a regular basis cooking, they have been essential sufficient that the most typical public reference to them was a chorus of collective, if resigned, criticism.
Egyptians purchase produce from a market in previous Cairo on Could 12, 2014. Khaled Desouki/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
Political scientist José Ciro Martínez describes an analogous phenomenon in Jordan. He observes that outright resistance or rejection of the welfare program that gives state-subsidized bread is mostly unattainable due to peoples’ dependence on it for fundamental sustenance and survival. The place rejection and resistance will not be potential, he notes, individuals have interaction with the system in different methods, like complaining to state-appointed inspectors, to carry the state accountable to its residents’ expectations.
The criticism about loopy tomatoes in Egypt operates considerably in another way; the state’s hand is much much less seen in shaping tomato provide than it’s in guaranteeing the supply of low-cost bread. However as a chorus, it names the state’s failures and limitations whereas affirming, implicitly, an ethical economic system of welfare that the state is obliged to uphold. Because it circulates by way of Egyptian society, it forges a way of shared expertise throughout social courses, livelihoods, and geographies.
As a garnish for avenue meals, a foundation for stews and sauces, and a seasoning in home-cooked favorites, the tomato has cemented its place within the fashionable Egyptian weight loss program. It reminds us that taste and culinary heritage are each bit as essential as energy and different measures of subsistence to the making of a simply meals system.
