Living Food, Killer Species

Have you ever considered if your food is living or dead? Take, for example, scraps, peels, children’s not-so-favorite meals, stale bread, discarded, misshapen vegetables, and about-to-go-bad fruits. You might call these leftovers, food waste, or surplus. All are correct descriptors. But to my interlocutors, these are key ingredients to an ideal meal. As a recipe for feeding, ingredients must be “living.” The recipe for feeding here does not feed humans. It is rather a recipe for rooftop animals. In Egypt, tarbiyya is a word that translates to raising children, but it also refers to the practice of rearing food animals for sustenance, household consumption, or extra cash. In most cases, tarbiyya is to feed the family, gift friends and extended family, to find something to serve unexpected guests or to save face, and to get some parenting training before becoming an actual parent. In my PhD dissertation research, I explore how animals become meat through the intimate process of tarbiyya in which women care for, nurture, feed, but also kill and eat food animals. Taking place in a town on the Nile Delta in Egypt, my fieldwork included spending time with lower-middle and working-class women farmers who rear animals on their rooftop, observing and participating in their everyday routines of feeding, nurturing, and witnessing how they slaughter their animals. And, of course, my fieldwork entailed feasting on a lot of these rooftop animals too. The view from rooftops is a view of ducks, geese, pigeons, and chickens with scraps of food. It is a view of a ground of fodder, feed, poop, and leftovers interlaced with the pungent smells of waste and feathers mixed with quacks, flapping wings, and hungry chicks. The view from the rooftop is also a view of women working hard to feed their families, and a view of the cycle of feed and food through which humans and nonhumans eat.Um Shahd, a popular YouTuber from Egypt who has a total of 220,000 subscribers on her two YouTube channels, shares content about just one thing: tarbiyya. She rears ducks, geese, pigeons, and chickens on her rooftop in Al-Mansoura governorate on the Nile Delta. In her videos, Um Shahd offers tips, tricks, and hacks on how to rear animals with excellent flavor, quality, and at low costs. Her comprehensive view of tarbiyya is to creatively think about living and dead foods as they inform rooftop tarbiyya. In one of Um Shahd’s videos, she warns her audience about using any rotten food or that which has gone bad, haamid in Arabic, for rooftop animals.1 This causes illness and sometimes immediate death to the animal. One of the followers of her YouTube channel commented on the video: “If we don’t serve rooftop animals rotten food, why are we doing tarbiyya?” Shocked, Um Shahd responds that this is far from what tarbiyya is for. You don’t do tarbiyya to get rid of rotten food. You can use household leftovers, bread, or vegetables, but there are important considerations for doing that. Once your family is done with the meal, place all leftovers in a plastic bag or a bowl and leave it in the fridge until the next rooftop mealtime. Vegetable peels, bread, and other items that won’t go bad can stay out of the fridge. Um Shahd then clarifies that the food you give to rooftop animals must be hayy: living, that is.What makes food alive, though? In this example—tarbiyya—it is not ingredients, cooking (or lack thereof), or a food source. It is time, for one. It is the time elapsed since you declared that food item ready to eat. This could be cooking time, harvest time, or purchase time. On a second level, though, living food is about storage quality. Your decision to leave leftovers at room temperature during summer will cause food to go bad: or go dead, to put it differently. Especially when saliva is involved, if your children left a few bites on their plates for example, the life expectancy of food can really shrink to a few days unless stored in the fridge.In a literal sense, haamid is acid, a descriptor that explains the presence and work of spoilage bacteria. These microorganisms break down food and produce acids and other waste products in the process. If microorganisms work on food, describing that food as dead seems counterintuitive. If anything, adding spoilage bacteria to food gives it more life. But there is another way to think about this. Just as microorganisms rush to a dead human body to do their work, spoilage bacteria announce the death of a body, a food, or a being. To say death here is not to say a final end, but rather to say a transition to another form of life. Rotten food, for example, is happy food for other organisms as compost or to keep the planet thriving. Dead human corpses are happy food for maggots and underground creatures eating away the body into decomposition. Both rotten food and dead bodies mark an end for humans, however. Again, it is a partial end but an end nevertheless. Rotten food isn’t human food, in most cases. Dead human bodies aren’t human (anymore); in the Islamic tradition, souls ascend to the barzakh where they wait until the afterlife. To say haamid, then, is to say dead. To say dead, in turn, is to say unfit for humans.Rotten food isn’t human food, in best and most cases, because of the possible effect it can have on us. As a general rule, spoilage bacteria don’t make humans sick, but it all depends on the extent and severity of their work on the rotten food. And the sensitivity of your stomach figures in too. Why risk it, though? In other words, these spoilage bacteria can cause illness, or in very severe cases of food poisoning, death. In her video, Um Shahd explains that feeding rooftop animals haamid food causes diarrhea and stomach problems, which result in a general weakness that might end up causing immediate death to these animals. Isn’t it haram, religiously impermissible, for you to invest that much in your rooftop animals then waste them that easily, she asks her audience. The follower who asked the question about rotten food believed it was okay to feed rooftop animals anything, perhaps because they have stronger stomachs or better digestive systems than humans. For Um Shahd and my interlocutors who rear food animals on rooftops, the answer is a strict no. No, haamid food doesn’t go to rooftop animals. They only eat what you eat, and that’s what makes tarbiyya what it is. While not fully erasing human-animal divides, the insistence on sharing living food is one way through which tarbiyya exposes the fuzziness of that hard line demarcating humans from rooftop ducks, geese, or chickens.This is one reason why haamid food could be described as dead. Thriving with nonhuman (bacterial) life, haamid food is dead for humans and rooftop animals. That is to say, it is non-food. But it is also dead in its capacity to make one sick, wear one down, or to cause death. Living food, for Um Shahd, is that which thickens life. Dead food shortens, sickens, worsens, wears down, and thins out life. One can easily dismiss this as a tale of bacteria, but it is tarbiyya-infused. In tarbiyya, life extends the connection between different species: living food feeds rooftop animals, who later become living food feeding humans. Dead food and unslaughtered dead animals are abridged life. It is a halting, discontinued, and undesired end: it is failed tarbiyya.If tarbiyya is one closed cycle of feeding and eating living food, there are other cycles of living food that extend beyond rooftop animals. Tarbiyya is a process of pre-digestion or an external digestion of some foods that we choose not to eat as humans. To say that tarbiyya is externalizing digestion or nurturing an external stomach or intestine perhaps exaggerates the relationship too much, but it works on a certain level. It’s an external stomach that one nurtures, rears, and cares for quite like one’s own, except that it’s a living, walking, and speaking stomach, until decided otherwise.As Um Shahd instructs, leftovers stay in the fridge until you’re ready to serve them to rooftop animals. As for other food items that require no refrigeration, such as vegetable and fruit peels, cores, or bread, leave all these in a large bin in the kitchen unsurprisingly called the rooftop bin, in Arabic, sallit il-sath. While cooking, after eating, while cleaning, you dump all that is still edible and palatable in the bin for your rooftop animals.Is tarbiyya—rearing food animals—the only way to dispose of one’s “living” leftovers? What if I don’t keep animals? What if I want to do more with leftovers than keep animals? Fermented cheese is always a good answer. Another YouTuber comes to the rescue. Hanaa is a YouTuber from Egypt with a total of 110,000 subscribers. Her content is mostly food-related, specifically rural and heritage food recipes that she shares from the comfort of her house in Upper Egypt. In most of her videos, Hanaa shares recipes that were more common decades ago, attempting to recreate them while also highlighting their nutritional value. In one video, Hanaa features mish, a delectable type of fermented, aged cheese that can live for decades and retain its full zeal.2 Notably, mish is also the Arabic word used for negation.Like tarbiyya, mish-making is a mode of nurturing living food. It’s an effervescent, smelly, bubbly mode. Akin to sourdough, mish begins with a small amount of fresh white cottage cheese or ‘arysh. In her video, Hanaa provides detailed instructions for a delicious mish that you can indulge in with any meal or as a snack with some crispy bread. You begin by sprinkling some coarse salt on the ‘arysh cheese blocks, leaving them somewhere shaded such as a bedroom or an enclosed space of any kind. It takes one or two nights for the salt to harden the cheese a little bit but not too much. Now you move it to your zal’a, a clay container most famous for storing and keeping mish. Hanaa insists that a zal’a will always give the right flavor to the mish, but it needs some initial preparation before you add your cheese. Assuming this to be your first use of the zal’a, Hanaa tells us, you begin by coating it. Just like you coat a baking tray for cake, except it is a little more elaborate: you get some beef fat and melt it down to a rich golden liquid in which the remaining lumps float. You then take the lumps out of the pot and use a small sieve to make sure your golden liquid is as clear as possible. While still hot, you generously spread the golden liquid of fat all around the crevices, nooks, and crannies of the zal’a. Now that your zal’a is ready for the mish, you need to prepare a mix that will help the cheese ferment quickly and deliciously. Hanaa explains that the mix comes together through melting some murta—solidified brown butter—on low heat. To that, add chili paste, which you can make at home by simply blending chili peppers and salt. Add the chili paste to the murta and turn off the heat. Now in your zal’a, place some basis or starter, which is some old mish that you borrow from any neighbor, family member, or friend. Hanaa takes that starter, the more the merrier, and rubs it in a sieve until it becomes a thick paste. She warns her audience: this smells pungent and intense, so those who don’t like the smell of mish aren’t invited. Once it becomes a thick homogenous mixture, Hanaa adds some shersh (or liquid whey) from the cottage cheese she stored earlier. What we have now is a bright orange liquid, reddish in hue, looser in consistency, moist, bubbly, and pungent in all humanly delectable ways. With the mise-en-scène complete, now we assemble.In the coated zal’a, Hanaa adds a generous layer from the cottage cheese blocks she stored for two nights. On top of that, she adds an equally generous layer of the starter mix. She goes on until the zal’a is almost three quarters full. Now that you have the main layer of the mish, this is when the fun starts, life extends, fermentation begins, and flavor intensifies. After closing the zal’a carefully with plastic bags, cloths, or any other material that keeps moisture and air away, you can get creative with the ingredients you add to the zal’a every few days. These ingredients, usually otherwise discarded or thrown away, wash the whiteness of the cheese away. The favorite ingredient for many people is hot chili peppers, which you can add fresh, washed, and dried of any excess water. Vegetable peels, discarded but living vegetables, lemons, and limes are all excellent flavor add-ins. Another popular add-in is orange peels, which add just the right hint of citrus along with a sweetness that balances the sour notes of mish. Every few days, you open the zal’a carefully, add some leftovers from your rooftop bin, and seal it up again.As time elapses—the more time, the better—the mish ripens and acquires a darker brown color. Inside the container, the anaerobic environment welcomes bacteria that begins fermenting the mish. Over the course of months and years, maggots also begin appearing in your mish. As the saying goes, it’s almost always “mish bi dudu” which literally translates to the mish comes with its maggots. These tiny creatures thrive in the zal’a and specifically in the crevices of the blocks of the cheese. In Egypt, it is common knowledge that one should not worry about these maggots because they grow, thrive, and flourish from within rather than from outside the mish. It’s a good, healthy-for-the-gut, add-on, though most people remove the maggots before they eat the mish. A citrus-infused, maggot-thriving fermented cheese is now ready!Upon opening the mish container, a pungent smell fills the air. During my adolescent years and during fieldwork, whenever mish is around and my mom or one of my interlocutors would open the container, it would smell like something rotten, old, and too haamid for my untrained senses. It indeed smells acidic, not far from the smell that cues you not to serve some leftovers to rooftop animals. Before mealtime, you would pick a few coagulated pieces of cheese and add some brining liquid along with a few citrus peels or hot peppers. Best enjoyed with freshly baked bread for breakfast, as a snack, or as a side dish with lunch, mish is a quintessential Egyptian delicacy. Mish is also an acquired taste. Its smell isn’t particularly inviting. It’s also very salty, an excessive saltiness that needs bread to balance it out. It has a very powerful flavor—too powerful as it hits your head right away—with hints of citrus, peppers, or the specific leftovers used to infuse the cheese. It’s not spreadable, rather lumpy, medium-firm, squeezable with your fingers, and it breaks down into a granulated, oily consistency. If you use your fingers, though, the pungent smell is likely to stick for hours.To return to one of my opening questions: What makes food alive? Maggots and bacteria make mish living food, which thrives and ages for decades. It is living food by virtue of maggots, and by virtue of all the living food ingredients that go into its making: living leftovers and those on the verge of death, discard, or disregard. The insistence on sealing up the zal’a carefully ensures the thriving of life. Bacteria and maggots break down the nutrients of the cheese to help make it easier for humans to digest—yet another instance of pre-digestion. With mish, to say living food is to say thriving (with maggots), effervescent (with bacteria), pungent (with household leftovers), aging (with ripeness), delectable. With rooftop animals, in contrast, to say living food is to say that which hasn’t gone bad or too ripe with bacteria. Both become food: mish enjoyed in its living state with effervescent bacteria, if not maggots too, while rooftop animals are enjoyed only after slaughtering. What brings both mish and rooftop animals together is a shared trajectory of living food, an aliveness that makes food what it is: delectable, trusted, and wholesome

Biology · Computer Science · Identification and Quantification in Food · Zoonotic diseases and public health · Ecology