In many countries around the world, the nation-state – the most successful political enterprise of the 20th century, holds the responsibility to guarantee an adequate and continuous food supply for its citizens. In Egypt, where the state runs one of the largest food supply and subsidy operations in the world, debates about food supply are often intertwined in wider social conversations revolving around class, identity, and economy. While many argue that both the institutional and conceptual roots of the Egyptian food subsidy system rest in the British colonial apparatus of WWII, this paper demonstrates how the public debate regarding the role of the state in regulating food supply was integral to the national awakening of the interwar period. Central to this debate was the new Effendiyya: a group of educated, urban, upper-middle-class men and women. From their position as state clerks, journalists, and intellectuals, they helped shape the public discourse regarding the state’s responsibility and create the institutions to carry that role. Their project was all but organic to Egypt, where the local economy was still organized around liberal principles of minimal governmental intervention. It took a global economic crisis and radical political transformation to convince those in power that the state should take an active role in regulating the food markets. Drawing on Egyptian periodicals, magazines, and books, as well as on British official papers, this paper traces the intellectual roots of the Egyptian food discourse of the interwar period. First, it confronts the question of why should the state feed its citizens, demonstrating how the idea was part of a wider conceptual transformation regarding the role of the state in national life – from a vehicle expressing national aspirations to a practical mechanism organizing social life. It then moves to explore the way the new Effendiyya imagined how should the state feed its citizens. Many of their suggestions – boosting production, rearranging distribution, and creating new institutions to carry this task—were highly connected to the way they understood the very structure of Egyptian society.