Food resonated with attitudes and emotions relating to men´s and women´s understandings about self and others and their underlying interactions. A meal is a gift that sates desire, gives pleasure, evokes memory, and creates attachments. This paper is about food in its social and material dimensions as seen through the narratives of Egyptian men. The accounts rest on men’s voices, on how men convey food’s extraordinary ability to historicize, encode, and regulate their close relationship to their spouse and children. It is an attempt to ask questions about the link between men´s struggles to feed their families well and often, their anticipations and everyday practices. Buying and sharing meals have a way of binding and tearing apart morals and economy, households and state, the personal and communal, and the body and psyche. Food moves between laden and empty tables, and the story of food in Egypt is as much about struggle as it is about human attachments. As the title of this paper suggests, this presentation is about the aspirations and fulfillments that food provides, not under established conditions, but rather as struggles to buy and feed. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo the paper explores the ways that food reveals culturally determined family and parenting relationships in Egyptian society. Men’s food struggles reverberate through everyday life in this paper, from economic and political battles to intimate life, to the defense of culture and tradition, religion and hope. The paper considers notions underlying values that are pervasive in men´s individual involvement and relationships with regard to buying food and sharing family meals. In this paper I return to the kind of anticipations that the promise of anthropology holds as an exploration into human social potentialities. It is a turn towards the notion of culture and food as an “art of living” and as a way for men to engage with everyday family living. The return encourages the creation of new vocabularies to analyze the development of new registers for addressing issues of “doing the right thing” and what it means to be a “good family man” in contemporary Egypt. This exploration into what food should and can do in men´s daily practices opens up interesting questions regarding gender and the anthropology of food in the Middle East.