In ancient Egypt, a meal was not thought of as starter-main-dessert but as hetep, the offering placed on a mat or stone table. Bread and beer (the basic pair of every table, from peasant to pharaoh), vegetables from the silt, fruits from the orchard, and fowl from the marshes were arranged side by side. The belly of Geb is the black land (kemet) from which all this comes: people gave back to him in seeds and fruits what he made sprout. Dishes do not follow one another; they accumulate in abundance before the living or the dead.

Geb's cuisine is that of the Nile flood: ancient grains (emmer, barley), onions and leeks, figs and grapes, honey and moringa or safflower oil. No refined sugar or distant spices — flavor comes from toasted grain, sweet onion, date palm, and fertile silt. The sacred goose Qenqenet recalls the waterfowl of the Delta marshes.