It is an overcast morning in the Bulaq neighbourhood of Cairo, three hours after the muezzin's call to prayer. The streets are choked with honking cars, while goats - and a few ragged-looking people - pick at piles of stinking rubbish overflowing from metal wheelie bins.
Tempers flare outside a government bakery as the smell of hot baladi (country) bread wafts out from the ovens. There is pushing and shoving as a worker appears at the window to hand out plastic bags of the rough, round flat loaves - each weighing a standard 160 grams (5.5oz)- to customers.
"I've been here since before six and this is what I get," grumbles Umm Islam, her face contorted in fury. "My husband is retired and I have five children and it's not enough."
Others complain of their pitifully small incomes and shortages. In the last two months 11 people have died in bread queues, either from exhaustion, heart attacks, brawls or accidents.
"We are so badly off now we have to eat dogs and donkeys," shouts another middle-aged woman to raucous laughter from the jostling crowd. It sounds like an outlandish joke, but a butcher was prosecuted recently for selling adulterated spiced mincemeat in nearby Giza.
It looked as if this simmering crisis could trigger wider unrest. Last week, four people were killed and scores more injured and arrested in rioting in Mahalla, an industrial town in the Nile Delta, while a general strike left the normally teeming centre of Cairo eerily quiet. "The strike is against poverty and starvation," demonstrators shouted.
Egypt's problems are part of a global phenomenon, in that the price of the wheat it imports - half the country's needs - has tripled since the summer. But price rises have also cruelly exposed the shortcomings of a stagnant, creaking economy and regime. Prices of cooking oil, rice, pasta and sugar have soared, forcing more to rely on state-subsidised bread - at 5 piastres a loaf (about 0.5p) the main source of calories for the 40% of the population who live on or below the poverty line of £1 a day (about 10 Egyptian pounds).
In Egyptian Arabic the word for bread is aish - life - and getting enough of it is a truly existential issue. "The word is pregnant with meaning," says the left-wing thinker Mohammed Sayyid Said. "It's the basic component of life."
President Hosni Mubarak remembers the bread riots of 1977, when scores were shot during protests against the sudden removal of subsidies, and is unlikely to risk a rerun.
"Phasing out subsidies will generate social unrest unless you can also do something about income and poverty and social services," says John Salevurakis, who teaches economics at Cairo's American University.
"Six months ago Egyptian ministers were hinting at looking at ways of ending or reducing subsidies," says a diplomat. "They were putting their toes in the water. That conversation has now ended."
Instead Mubarak mobilised the army to produce and distribute bread, began to jail bakers who collude with corrupt inspectors to sell their subsidised sacks of flour on the black market for a healthy profit, and dipped into the currency reserves to buy more wheat abroad.
Egypt's economic fundamentals are impressive on paper and its liberalising prime minister, Ahmed Nazif, has won plaudits from the IMF. Last year growth in Egypt was put at 7%, although that was driven by natural gas exports and real estate, sending property prices sky-high. Foreign investment was $11bn (£6.5bn), much of it from Gulf oil revenues. The UN defines Egypt as a middle-income country. But very little of this wealth is trickling down to the poor.
"Poverty in itself does not hurt," says Abdel-Wahhab al-Massiri, of the opposition Kefaya movement. "What hurts is the inequality in a country where 20 million people live in slums and you have some of the best golf courses in the world."
Critics reject the notion that the regime is the helpless victim of uncontrollable forces. "Mubarak went on delaying difficult economic decisions that should have been taken years ago until Egypt was hit by a global crisis that means he can no longer keep the subsidies going," says commentator Hisham Qassem.
"He is so obsessed with the stability of the country that he didn't want to do anything to jeopardise his regime. So now we have a crash landing."
The official line is that the crisis is manageable and that media coverage is exaggerated, especially on al-Jazeera TV. Analysts believe the unrest has rattled the government but can be contained, not least because the opposition is so divided. Its most powerful component, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, which was excluded from this week's local elections, did not back the strike, sitting on the fence for fear of being provocative. "There are plenty of carrots and plenty of sticks," says one diplomat. "It's still early in the game."
It is hard to predict how events will unfold. Fifty Kefaya members were detained without charge by state security officers after the strike, but "Facebook activists" - a new breed of young middle-class Egyptian protesters - have called for a new strike on May 4, Mubarak's 80th birthday, chosen as a reminder of how long he has been in power.
None of that gives much hope to the angry people on the street. "This government is a bunch of criminals," says Imad, a fifty-something driver who retired after 20 years as a civil servant on a paltry state pension. "Now I only eat meat once a month," says al-Haj Abdel-Salam, a salesman. "I'm exhausted, this country is exhausted."
Umm Muhammad, meandering past the shops off Tahrir Square, looks exhausted, too, and sounds desperate. "Things have got to the point where I have to beg," murmurs the 53-year-old widow. "My son is at university, I have a teenage daughter and another one who is sick so now all I can do is sell tissues. There's no other work. If God gives me six or seven pounds a day, I'm doing well. I can't manage any longer."