Opinion – Cozinha Bruta: The shrimp, the squid and the inedible puffer fish

Former President Lula offered to teach the current occupant of the chair, Jair Bolsonaro, how to eat shrimp.

Bolsonaro, earlier this month, was hospitalized with occlusion of the intestines – caused by a shrimp he swallowed without chewing.

“This country has a president who spends BRL 600,000 to bring a doctor from the Bahamas and say he doesn’t know how to eat shrimp,” mocked Lula at a meeting with journalists on Tuesday (18).

Then he explained how to do it. “You have to remove the shell and chew 16 times. Shrimp with shell hurts when entering and exiting.” If you can’t say it was an elegant shot, it’s impossible to deny that it was good.

The cork shrimp incident is loaded with symbolism and irony. Weeks earlier, the ultra-rightist militancy had killed actor Wagner Moura. He had been photographed eating dried shrimp, offal, with vatapá, donated by sympathizers, with a plate and plastic cutlery, at a meeting of the MTST.

Bahian that he is, Wagner has certainly known since he was a boy eating shrimp, a popular food in Salvador. Lula, born in the Pernambuco countryside and raised in ABC, must have taken longer to learn. Bolsonaro, a politician who has held elected office for 33 years, never learned.

Lula, by the way, is a fantastic apprentice. He arrived saying “menas” and was already getting along with the Suplicys and Bicudos of the seminal PT elite. In 2002, on the verge of being elected president for the first time, he sipped a Burgundy Romanée-Conti wine, then valued at R$6,000, offered by the marketer Duda Mendonça.

He was beaten a lot because of that, including here at Folha. “A former mechanical lathe worker can (and perhaps should) reach the Presidency of the Republic, but no candidate for President of the Republic can take Romanée-Conti”, wrote columnist Elio Gaspari at the time.

It was certainly naive for the candidate Lula to drink that wine in public, but he learned a lesson from the episode.

As president, Lula appeared drinking beer and became famous in Brasília for being a fan of the Bahian restaurant Tia Zélia, which specializes in brutalities such as the galopé (rooster with a pig’s foot).

He also attended dinners hosted by the world’s greatest leaders. Never heard of a vexation of the ex-worker.

Bolsonaro, on the other hand, made noodles at the hotel after the Japanese emperor’s banquet. He posed like a hotshot, barefoot in the bar, drinking soda. Away from the cameras, he stuffed himself with shrimp – quite literally.

Bolsonaro is not the modest type that his minions advertise. He’s just a brute who brags about his ignorance and refuses to learn anything.

Among squid and shrimp, Jair also deserves a marine animal of his own: the puffer fish. That fish that, cornered, inflates like a bladder full of thorns. This is the only reaction the pufferfish knows to face any adverse situation.

The animal is problematic even to become sushi. If the fishmonger bursts a venom-filled blister, the puffer fish’s flesh can be lethal. As Bolsonaro himself says, inedible.

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