In recent years, studies of the great depression shifted from seeing it as a Western crisis to understanding it as global despair with local implications. Studies concentrating on the middle east have yet paid special attention to the social and political conditions that allowed the depression to happen and that were fostered as a result of it. As for Egypt, studies of the early 1930s often employ the wider frame of "the interwar period" for their discussion. With the economic crisis almost in the background, too little attention has been given to the ways the crisis affected the process of state-building that began after the partial independence granted in 1922. State intervention in food supply operation provides a case study for examining the crisis management strategies implemented by the government and their wider social implications. Official reports and data reveal that the agricultural subsidies and the flour regulations promoted by the government resulted eventually in an increase in state revenues but not in greater social relief. During the great depression, food supply and subsidies were introduced by Ismail Sidqi's government in explicit and implicit ways not only as a measure of social benevolence but also to demonstrate governmentality and increase control over the local population. I discuss not only the actual policies but reveal the social conditions that enabled it. I argue that we need to pay closer attention to the harsh economic reality of the early 1930s, to the global political changes, to local sociological movements, and to Sidqi's personal ambitions. The above resulted in ideological readiness among the Egyptian officials and many of the educated middle class (Effendiya) for deeper state intervention which stood in contrast to the liberal economic mindset of the local society during the 1920s. Changes in the Effendi social perspective are demonstrated by analyzing periodicals and contemporary newspapers which were the main arena for social debates. The paper uses the example of food subsidies to promote a discussion regarding strategies taken by local governments to face the global economic crisis. The Egyptian economic policies represent an active and original attitude to these global problems and add another layer to the narrative of the great depression as a global phenomenon with local and regional implications. Through the example of food subsidy, I call for a better conceptualization of the great depression in Egypt and the middle east.