Opinion – Cozinha Bruta: Tomato, the bad guy of food inflation

This century-old newspaper became a punching bag because of the following statement, used in calls and in a post from Sheet on twitter: “Tomato is the villain of the plate-made and meal vouchers last for less days”. The phrase refers to a good article on staple food inflation, published in Economics on Tuesday (10), and whose title was later changed.

The bad mood of the netizens accuses the press – before the Sheet, the G1 portal attributed to tomatoes the role of a villain in prices – turning a blind eye to the government’s responsibility in the escalation of inflation. Passing a cloth, as they say, for Bolsonaro and Guedes.

There are at least three issues involved in the episode. The language vices that contaminate newsrooms have enormous weight in the equation. There is also a lack of understanding of the subgenres of the journalistic text.

The unwillingness of groups of readers towards the professional press completes the picture. The slack comes from people of any ideological orientation – in this case, the plaintiffs are from the left.

Let’s start with the most important. Our mistakes, those of journalists. Is it genius to call the tomato a villain? No, on the contrary: it’s a frayed, exhausted formula of lukewarm creativity, a cliché that comes out automatically.

In newsroom jargon, it is what is conventionally called a “crutch”: an expression that almost every writer uses to fill in spaces, without thinking about the size of the commonplace. How to call celebrity love affairs an “affair”, to take another example.

Speaking of which, check out the “villains” in the photo gallery below. Apparently, the potato is the new tomato.

The unfortunate statement, like the one about the evil tomato, justifies the bad will of the press critics. Several of them, by the way, other journalists who no longer have ties to the major media groups.

These people know that neither the Sheet nor the G1 blame the tomato actively in food inflation. They know that it is a figure of speech to say that the price of tomatoes rose the most among the components of the prepared dish – rice, beans, meat, chicken, eggs, potatoes and salad.

The complainants demand a more critical position from the newspaper when reporting the absurd prices of food. Should we? This is where the discussion of sub-genres of journalism comes in.

A journalistic text can be informative, opinionated, analytical or even literary, with hybrids of all kinds. The tomato report is 100% informative, it would even fit some analysis – but, under no circumstances, opinion.

There are other spaces, and many, for the emission of opinions in the Sheet. This one is one of them. Not everyone will agree with these opinions, thankfully.

Finally, there is the learning of the mess that a furreca word can cause. “Vilão”, an easy joke in the formulation of titles, has an accusatory charge that goes unnoticed for the journalist… but not for the reader.

A feather. The story of the pê-efe exposes with numbers and crystalline didacticism the devastating rise in prices at lunch for low-income workers – a shrewd and empathetic approach to the suffering of the population.

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