In 2016, people formed a line to buy bread in al-Shaar, a rebel-held neighbourhood of eastern Aleppo during the Syrian civil war. A Reuters photograph caption explicitly records civilians queueing while rebel fighters stood guard nearby. What people were waiting for was not a novelty but one of the most basic foods of everyday life. War destabilises every link between flour and the table: roads, fuel, milling, baking and distribution. The order outside a bakery therefore shows two things at once—daily life continuing, and the extreme fragility of that life. The people in the image should not be reduced to an anonymous 'wartime crowd.' Each person was spending time in the hope of carrying food back to a household.