Devouring Relationalities: Reflections on Food, Intimacies, and Multispecies Ethnography

Abstract Drawing on one year of fieldwork in Egypt, this research explores rooftop rearing practices among lower-middle class families in Egypt. Lacking access to trusted meat proteins, many families raise nonhuman animals, including chickens, goats, and sheep, for nutritional sustenance. Nurtured with love and nourished with household leftovers among other ingredients, rooftop animals are valued for their carefully controlled gastronomic histories. Drawing on zafara as a gastronomic sensibility to differentiate between rooftop-reared animals and store-bought ones, I argue that eating with nonhuman animals – through feeding rooftop animals household leftovers and foods that families eat everyday – provides a methodological opportunity to conduct nuanced participant observation and speak to some of the challenges in multispecies ethnography. Reflecting on fieldwork meals and scholarly discussions in multispecies ethnography, this is an invitation to take eating seriously, as one way through which the human-nonhuman boundary can be revisited and further complicated.