This paper considers the political, temporal, geographical and social trajectories of an utterly mundane yet semiotically rich food product in Egypt over the course of the 20th century, processed, canned beef, also known in colloquial Arabic as “bulu beef.” The name “bulu beef” most likely derives from the English nickname for the boiled, canned corned beef which was a staple of British military rations, “bully beef.” Canned beef was first introduced into Egypt by the British military in the late part of the 19th century, and was seen by the English a quintessential imperial good: a means to ensure the vim and vigor of British troops abroad and provide a ‘taste of home’ in far flung colonial ports. With the advent of mass tourism to Egypt, canned beef became more available in parts of Cairo and Alexandria frequented by foreign communities. By the 1930s and 1940s advertisements for it began appearing in the Arabic popular press and canned products were often described in magazines as increasingly available, if expensive imported goods. With the advent of Arab Socialism, the meanings of bulu beef began to shift as the Nasser regime began promoting the consumption of canned food manufactured by Egyptian factories as a healthy, affordable, nationalist addition to the Egyptian diet. Middle class Egyptian housewives, who the state charged with the particularly important role of ensuring the success of socialist economic planning, were instructed by women’s magazines on how to cook bulu beef, where to find it and assured them that this modern product was as nutritious as fresh meat, often in short supply in the Arab socialist economy. Interestingly, these imperial and national histories appear to have been supplanted in the popular imagination by the meanings canned beef took on in the 1980s and 1990s as a product associated with Infitah and, later, its corruptions. Novels and films relate stories of spoiled canned beef as symbolic of the flood of imported yet substandard goods into the Egyptian marketplace after economic liberalization, depictions which left their residue in popular memory. Oral histories reveal the persistence of such narratives even as they indicate more complicated understandings of bulu beef as a marker of class, gender and generation.