It was here that the gringos came to eat a grotesque amount of meat and pay some caraminguás. I was a stomach witness of this phase of Brazilian history, the 1990s, the height of the rodízio steakhouses.
I worked as a police editor for the deceased Notícias Populares, edited by the same group as leaf. Every Monday night, after closing the second cliché – the final edition of the newspaper, corrected and updated – we would leave in groups to eat barbecue until we felt sick.
The delegation was led by the sports team, which accommodated legends such as Paulão Martin, Eduardo Tironi and Arnaldo Ribeiro.
The huge halls of the rodízios were occupied with long tables of suits from every corner. Executives did not miss the opportunity to flatter customers, suppliers or headquarters delegations with an orgy of rump steak, fried polenta and clandestine juçara hearts of palm.
The Japanese were the most dazzled. André Barcinski, who edited culture at the NP, took a bunch of American and British rock stars to stuff himself with meat and caipirinha – then he had to roll the gringos back to the hotel.
I won’t say that everything was beautiful. There were only men at the tables (including ours) and conversations that, well, let it go. The endless feast of meat, seen through the lens of 2021, is considered inappropriate even by softcore carnivores.
Beautiful or ugly, Brazil was the country of abundant and cheap meat.
Jump to the present. The prognosis is not bright for Brazilian beef.
Europe boycotts our product for the right reason: the environmental vandalism of Caligula da Barra da Tijuca. Here, meat consumption is the lowest in 16 years.
Each Brazilian, on average, stopped buying 8.6 kilos of meat this year. If we exaggerately estimate that an individual eats half a kilo of beef, chicken and sausage on a Saturday afternoon, there were 17 fewer barbecues since January. Compared to 2020, which was no longer that wonderful.
In conversations with vegetarians and vegans, I hear optimistic comments about Brazilians’ adherence to a diet with less animal protein. It’s a half naive, half cynical, totally short-sighted interpretation.
In fact, the plant-based market (is this still that marketing nickname for soy sausage?) grows in the rich, educated and progressive strata.
Myopia lies in not realizing that this olympus of illustrated people is irrelevant to economic and behavioral statistics for Brazil as a whole.
The naivety lies in thinking that vegetarian preaching generates a trend that radiates, consciously or not, to all strata of the population.
Cynicism lies in the consequentialist jubilation of those who are not naive: there are evils that come to the good. Something virtuous, after all, emerges from misery and hunger.
Brazil stops eating meat thanks to the perverse combination of inflation and the flattening of workers’ income. Barbecue country leans toward vegetarianism for the wrong reasons.
Wrong is wrong. There is nothing to celebrate.
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