When I first moved to Cairo, I encountered tomatoes everywhere—in street foods, cookbooks, family recipes, and local markets. In subsequent years, when I returned to conduct research on (and in) Egyptian kitchens, I watched home cooks use them for garnishes and stuffings, in salads, to stew meats and vegetables, and even as a seasoning—grated into a dish for a bright punch of acidity.
Despite tomatoes’ ubiquity today, their popularity in Egypt is a recent phenomenon. Native to the Americas, they were widely cultivated in the Nile Valley by the 19th century and became available year-round to Egyptian consumers in the 20th. Today, Egypt consistently ranks among the world’s top producers of tomatoes, nearly all of which are consumed domestically.
When I first moved to Cairo, I encountered tomatoes everywhere—in street foods, cookbooks, family recipes, and local markets. In subsequent years, when I returned to conduct research on (and in) Egyptian kitchens, I watched home cooks use them for garnishes and stuffings, in salads, to stew meats and vegetables, and even as a seasoning—grated into a dish for a bright punch of acidity.
Despite tomatoes’ ubiquity today, their popularity in Egypt is a recent phenomenon. Native to the Americas, they were widely cultivated in the Nile Valley by the 19th century and became available year-round to Egyptian consumers in the 20th. Today, Egypt consistently ranks among the world’s top producers of tomatoes, nearly all of which are consumed domestically.
Tomatoes’ importance to Egyptian society extends beyond the realm of cuisine. They have long functioned as a “low-tech economic indicator of precarity”: an essential item that frequently strains the household budgets of ordinary people. Since at least the 1950s, Egyptian vendors have advertised tomatoes using the street cry “magnuna ya oota” (“crazy tomatoes”) in a reference to the notorious volatility of their prices. Unsurprisingly, in postrevolutionary Egypt of the 2010s, tomatoes frequently punctuated political and economic discourse. A flurry of memes and cartoons decried their climbing prices, and in 2016, the popular Egyptian singer Saad El Soghayar released a song whose opening verse highlights tomatoes’ propensity to fluctuate wildly in price: “Sometimes they’re a penny, sometimes a hundred.”
Whenever I return to Egypt, I find that the cost of tomatoes is still a common complaint. But I argue that the cry of “crazy tomatoes” is not merely an offhanded grievance; rather, it reflects a popular critique of state power.
The book cover for Nile Nightshade by Anny Gaul
This article is adapted from Nile Nightshade: An Egyptian Culinary History of the Tomato by Anny Gaul (University of California Press, 304 pp., $27.95, October 2025).
A central feature of Egypt’s modern food system is the expectation that the state will ensure its citizens’ access to certain foods—most prominently, subsidized wheat bread, which has been the centerpiece of state food policy since the 1940s. In 1977, thousands of Egyptians took to the streets to protest subsidy cuts in an uprising popularly known as the “bread intifada.” Though the bread subsidy has been affected by the liberalizing reforms initiated since the 1980s, it is arguably the food item that has remained the most shielded from them. “Cheap wheat bread has become an expected part of the state’s social contract with its people,” geographer Jessica Barnes has written.
After a group of Egyptian military officers overthrew the ruling British-backed monarchy in 1952, the Egyptian state expanded existing controls over wheat production to include other major field crops such as wheat, rice, and sugar. But unlike these staple crops, which were regulated through production quotas, subsidies, and rationing systems, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables were excluded from such direct forms of state regulation and intervention, and were also subject to less intensive pricing and distribution mechanisms than subsidized foods.
Several other factors have historically underpinned tomatoes’ price volatility. One is their exceptionally high spoilage rate—stemming from the fruit’s fragility, exacerbated by Egypt’s hot summers and lack of transportation and storage infrastructure. Some estimates suggest that as much as 50 percent of the Egyptian tomato crop is lost between the farm and the consumer. Seasonal fluctuations in production and blights, such as the yellow leaf curl virus, have also contributed to price volatility.
The most notorious problem facing 20th century tomato producers and consumers, however, was the concentration of the vegetable trade in wholesale markets in Cairo and Alexandria.
The Rawd al-Farag market in Cairo had a reputation for profiteering wholesalers as far back as the 1920s. In his 1991 study of Egyptian agriculture, Yahya Sadowski, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution at the time, noted that although hundreds of wholesalers worked at the market, “all but 10 percent of them came originally from the same three villages in Suhag” in Upper Egypt.
Egyptian officials knew that a small group of merchant families controlled vegetable wholesaling, profited from their role as middlemen, and passed costs along to both consumers and producers. Even so, state interventions around vegetable supply never even approached the complexity of the systems put in place to ensure the public’s access to dietary staples such as bread, sugar, or vegetable oil. The appointment of market inspectors and the investment of state resources to support farmers starting in the 1950s had limited effects on tomato prices, which continued to fluctuate “more than any other vegetable,” according to Sa‘id Hamdi, an Egyptian horticultural expert writing in 1958.
Two people sit on the ground with baskets next to them. Before and on either side of them stretch long red rows of drying tomatoes.
People work in a tomato-drying field in Luxor, Egypt, on Jan. 11, 2024. Mohamed Elshahed/Anadolu via Getty Images
In the 1960s, as the state turned to more concerted planning mechanisms, it consolidated additional controls, including mandating price ceilings on fruits and vegetables. Although these reined in price fluctuations to some degree, the Ministry of Supply “was never able to completely suppress black market trade in agricultural goods,” Sadowski writes. For decades, merchants operated in secret, making deals that undercut official prices.
Policy documents and statements by officials reveal that the state was well aware of the inner workings of Rawd al-Farag’s racketeering vegetable merchants, and sometimes even coordinated with the families in their efforts to control prices. But the state’s efforts to impose price ceilings failed. As tomatoes were becoming a popular staple in Egypt’s home kitchens, their “crazy” prices became a fixture of Egyptian life.
Although Egyptians have never taken to the streets over tomatoes the way they have over bread, they have not been silent on the matter, either. Cultural references to tomato prices were part of a widespread political orientation in 20th century Egypt that saw citizens across the ideological spectrum looking to the state to address society’s problems.
The tomato crisis at Rawd al-Farag was famously dramatized, for instance, in Salah Abu Seif’s 1957 film The Thug (al-Futuwwa). Now considered an Egyptian classic, The Thug highlights the way the tomato united farmers and workers, Cairenes and southerners, in a shared set of demands upon the state.
An early scene portrays a prominent wholesale vegetable merchant, Abu Zayd, ordering a lackey to restrict the supply of tomatoes to drive up the price—and to send word to other merchants to do the same. When the film’s protagonist, Haridi, first arrives in Cairo from the countryside, he is shocked at the price of tomatoes in the city. (“That’s crazy!” he exclaims, a nod to the street cry that filmgoers would have recognized.) Finding work in the market, Haridi soon learns the inner workings of the vegetable trade, including the merchants’ alliances with powerful government officials who provide cover for their collusion. Shocked and angry, Haridi devises a plan to pool resources, source tomatoes directly from the countryside, and sell them at reasonable prices. But he is thwarted by Abu Zayd’s thugs, who sabotage the trucks carrying his tomatoes. Eventually Haridi’s elaborate ruses to overcome the oligopoly corrupt him, and he becomes the kind of predatory merchant he once rallied the neighborhood against.
At first glance, the film’s central focus seems to be the corruption of the merchants, but a closer reading suggests that it’s really critiquing the political structures that keep the merchants’ corrupt system in place. The film’s opening credits include an epigraph: “The events of this film took place at a time when the few controlled the livelihood and sustenance of the many.” And in its closing scene, a policeman pronounces that the problems of the market are not caused by this or that individual; they are systemic and inevitable. “Abu Zayd and Haridi may go,” he intones, “but a thousand more like them will come.”
In 1957, The Thug was prescient in its assessment of the tomato pricing problem, which persisted even as regimes and their prevailing ideologies changed over the course of the 20th century. Cairo’s wholesale vegetable trade was redistributed in the 1990s, but ongoing complaints about tomato prices remained part of Egyptian life. They have the same refrain now that they did decades ago: magnuna ya oota, crazy tomatoes.
According to food historian Jayeeta Sharma, “food cries” like this one can help us understand the role that both food and its vendors played in shaping the social fabric of modern cities.
I understand the phrase “magnuna ya oota,” at its core, to be both a complaint and a disavowal of an unjust system. With it, a vendor announces he is selling tomatoes while affirming he can make no promises about their price. As a street cry, it also affirms that the seller and the customer are participating in the tomato market anyway—largely because they have little choice.
In the second half of the 20th century, Egyptians could depend on the government to ensure an accessible bread supply, but the state’s failure to control tomato prices was an open secret. Tomatoes were not deemed important enough to merit the kinds of state interventions reserved for bread. Yet as a popular staple of everyday cooking, they were important enough that the most common public reference to them was a refrain of collective, if resigned, complaint.
A child and woman stand next to a table holding tomatoes. A woman in a green headscarf stands farther back amid other stands with produce.
Egyptians buy produce from a market in old Cairo on May 12, 2014. Khaled Desouki/AFP via Getty Images
Political scientist José Ciro Martínez describes a similar phenomenon in Jordan. He observes that outright resistance or rejection of the welfare program that provides state-subsidized bread is generally impossible because of peoples’ dependence on it for basic sustenance and survival. Where rejection and resistance are not possible, he notes, people engage with the system in other ways, like complaining to state-appointed inspectors, to hold the state accountable to its citizens’ expectations.
The complaint about crazy tomatoes in Egypt operates somewhat differently; the state’s hand is far less visible in shaping tomato supply than it is in ensuring the provision of cheap bread. But as a refrain, it names the state’s failures and limitations while affirming, implicitly, a moral economy of welfare that the state is obliged to uphold. As it circulates through Egyptian society, it forges a sense of shared experience across social classes, livelihoods, and geographies.
As a garnish for street foods, a basis for stews and sauces, and a seasoning in home-cooked favorites, the tomato has cemented its place in the modern Egyptian diet. It reminds us that flavor and culinary heritage are every bit as important as calories and other measures of subsistence to the making of a just food system.
