Amidst an unstable political environment, Egypt’s bread subsidy has been, historically, a bastion of institutional stability. The program, which has left the price of bread untouched for over 30 years, has often been referred to by scholars as a form of social contract or part of clientelistic relationship between the Egyptian State and society. Nevertheless, claims to bread were an integral part of the 1978 riots, the 2011 Revolution, as well as the lead up to the 2013 Military coup. So in one sense, government subsidized bread is viewed as a concession for establishing or reaffirming political legitimacy, a means of buying citizens’ consent through cheap social provisions. However, throughout Egypt’s history as a republic, bread has also been a source of protest and mass mobilization against the State. Thus, paradoxically, one of the Egyptian State’s biggest strengths, it most reliable form of social welfare, has also been one of its biggest weaknesses. This double-edged property of social welfare in Egypt has been overlooked due to a lack of attention paid to the experience and discourse of welfare policy. My research is based on 7 months of ethnographic observations and interviews between 2013 and 2015 across 5 governorates in Egypt. In this paper, I argue that the same State-sponsored prescriptions and practices that obscure any viable notion of social rights in Egypt also rely on a constructed moral economy. It is this moral economy that has repeatedly been co-opted by its citizens to mobilize and subvert authority. For example, questions such as “Is bread a right?”, “Who deserves to receive subsidized bread?” and “Who is to blame for shortages and inefficiencies in the system?” are officially left unanswered. However, I find that citizens recognize and take advantage of these voids to develop a collective sense of morality (and potentially, indignation) in regards to the bread subsidy. In this paper I show that, in contrast to the connections typically drawn between discourse and control or categorization, Egypt’s bread subsidy imposes a discourse that relies on a sense of ambiguity, a lack of clarification, so as to avoid any concrete commitment by the State. Moving beyond this interpretive endeavor, I show how important this feature of the policy is to understanding bread’s significance to political protest in Egypt and its role as a medium for challenging State legitimacy.