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Nonfiction

The Art and Horror of the Argentine Asado

By Mariana Enríquez
Translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell
Mariana Enríquez considers Argentina's national food—the asado—and its political implications.
Large cuts of meat roast on a grill
Photo by Deby Rodriguez on Unsplash

The Argentine national food is the asado. I won’t go on about its mystery and metaphors, because that tends to be mere decoration, sometimes exaggerated, other times just rubbernecking. Really, it’s a simple custom. You cook meat on a parrilla (grill), or on a disc, or even stuck onto metal spears if the asado is out in the open. In Argentina, we eat the whole cow. Its intestines, which we call chinchulines. Its glands, or sweetbreads, which we call mollejas and are exorbitantly priced, a delicacy for special events or fancy restaurants. Its kidneys, which need a little lemon to mask a bitter taste that I wouldn’t recommend thinking too much about. Its blood, in the form of morcilla sausage: a Spanish custom. A mishmash of all the rest, maybe even the eyes, go into chorizo sausages. The popular way to eat those is the choripán (chorizo on bread), a street-food sandwich that can be eaten anytime, but especially after a difficult task, or on an afternoon by the river, or during a soccer game, or a political protest—in Argentina these happen almost daily and they tend to be long: eating is key, and choripán is cheap.

Cuts of meat have their own names, often very graphic, and only some are typical in English. A sample might translate as: rump, flap meat, rib, strip, entrails (skirt steak), rump tail, oxtail, large intestine, udder. Treatises are written about how to achieve the perfect asado, and the country often participates in international competitions. Off they go, asadores dressed like gauchos in baggy trousers and black caps, and they always come back losers. The most recent World Barbecue Championship was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, and it was a tragedy: the Argentine team came in last, and to make matters worse, the British team won. Keep in mind that Argentina and England went to war in 1982 over who owned the Malvinas Islands. It was a cruel war, instigated by our dictator and by Margaret Thatcher. All the Argentine soldiers were new recruits, generally from very poor families and terribly young: in the infantry, few were older than twenty. The British soldiers were all professionals, and grown men. Some Argentines have no love for the British—in the abstract, of course, except for the palpable resentment of the ex-combatants and their families. And some British, very few, tend to do stupid, drunken things like setting an Argentine flag on fire while they’re vacationing in Patagonia. Now that will expose them to the risk of public lynching, but they’re usually lucky enough to just end up at a police station. In sum: if coming in last is bad, the British winning first is an absolute public shame. 

Later, we found out that the fault lay with the Swedes: according to their rules, the meat had to be cooked for ten hours and the sauce—the only one allowed—had to be barbecue. We never use barbecue sauce. We use chimichurri (parsley, oregano, garlic, onion, pepper, vinegar, and oil) or salsa criollo (red bell pepper, tomato, onion, olive oil). Barbecue sauce is for gringos. And so, while last place was an embarrassment as is any affront to our carnivorous pride, the true ignorance lay with the northern Europeans, who have to disguise their inferior meat with a strong sauce (our condiments are added to taste, individually and in small quantities).

The British win took up hours of TV, made newspaper headlines, and was heatedly discussed in taxis. There were several women on the Argentine asado team, an inclusion that some found disconcerting. Because the asado is men’s business. That’s the time-honored country tradition and it’s the same way now, at every asado—neighborhood gatherings, street-corner barbecues, professional asados and those held on summer terraces. The man tends the meat but eats very little, because the different cuts have varying cooking times and he has to serve them in batches. He sweats beside the grill, monitors the charcoal or the wood, calculates the amount of meat necessary to fill up all the diners. He’s always on his feet except at the end, once everyone has eaten and is smoking and relaxing. The asador is a complex discussion in terms of gender roles. Yes: women should tend the asado just as men do, and the esoteric knowledge of the grill is a form of power. But in the act of the asado, the male takes on the more traditionally feminine role: the one who cooks, who pleases, who serves, the one who receives a symbolic reward (he’s applauded at the end, if the meat was to everyone’s liking), while the women wait, seated, knives in hand, like lords. In many cases they don’t even make the salad. It’s not very pleasant standing there beside the flames in the sweltering summer, just to reaffirm some macho who-knows-what. At the same time, it’s a world that must be entered, because nothing should be exclusive.

I don’t know any female asadoras. Or only one, really, but she has an electric parrilla, which is a synonym for inexperience and for horror. . . . 

I’ve eaten so many asados, more than I could count. I’ve seen some tragic ones—burned meat, bickering couples—and others that were delicious, or forgettable, or overcrowded. But only one could really be called indelible.

I’ve worked as a journalist since I was twenty-one years old. One of my first jobs, an assignment from the newspaper I work for now, was to cover an accident involving a cargo truck that had been headed south carrying live cows, I suspect toward a slaughterhouse. It was 1997, I think—and I say “I think” because the article isn’t digitized, I didn’t save it, and looking for it in the newspaper’s archives is a task that exceeds my tolerance for bureaucracy. That year, there were already portents of the crisis that would fully explode in 2001: unemployment, anomie, an extraordinary rise in the number of people living in the street or in precarious housing. In Argentina there have been villas (shantytowns or slums) for eighty years, but those down-and-out neighborhoods really spread in the ’90s. That was when Carlos Menem imposed his corrupt neoliberalism, after the hyperinflation under Raúl Alfonsin, whose ethical administration was fundamental in recovering democracy after the dictatorship in 1976–83 but was disastrous when it came to economic policy. Among other disasters, hyperinflation reached 1000 percent annually.

The truck full of cows, most of which died on impact, had crashed south of Buenos Aires in the city of Quilmes. It’s one of the most populous and intense areas of what we call the Conurbano, or greater Buenos Aires. Quilmes is socially diverse, but the poor people who live close to the Río de la Plata do so in very adverse and unstable conditions: back then their houses, which they had built themselves on land that was government-owned and in a flood zone, weren’t even made of brick; most people had used wood or even cardboard. The news that spurred the paper to send me to cover the accident was that the people of the surrounding slums had butchered the animals and brought pieces of them—sometimes an entire animal—to their houses, and were grilling them up. I remember it was hot. I remember the driver who brought me to Quilmes spent the whole time complaining. I decided to ignore him with the help of earphones. The photographer rode in silence as well: we barely knew each other. When we arrived the police were there, and the truck driver—who was crying—and the street, the only paved one in the area, was covered in cow’s blood and feces. The smell was unbearable. The blood that flowed down the gently sloping road, the furious midday sun, the abandoned cow heads with their staring eyes: it was biblical. I had a little notebook with me; I should have saved it, but I didn’t. I don’t know what I wrote down. From the villa along the road wafted the delicious smell of cooking meat. The blue sky was painted with smoke, and I could hear children laughing. The photographer was frantic; he made children pose beside the heads of dead cows, he slid in the blood, took pictures of the animals that were still in the truck—because not all of them had been dragged off to the houses. They were heavy. The driver was terrified: he’d tried to defend his cargo, he said, but people had pulled guns on him. He was also shouting brutal, racist slurs. He had nothing but contempt for those people who, meters away, were throwing a banquet. I didn’t dare go into the villa alone, but the photographer—Martín—took me by the hand and said: “I’ll talk to them.” I watched from a distance as he negotiated with a potbellied man. With a movement of his hand, he ushered us in. The villa’s passageways were one big party, a happy massacre. The meat was cooking on sheet metal or on grills, it was being stored in freezers, savage knives were merrily carving it up. Martín worked a little, and I interviewed a young woman who explained what had happened: the truck turned over, and the cows, she said, were already dead or very unconscious, and several groups of people, men and women, had butchered them in the road. They took around ten animals from the truck. What they couldn’t eat, they stored in their freezers—the neighborhood was illegally connected to a nearby electricity post.

“You know how long it’s been since we’ve eaten a good asadito around here?” she said.

And then she invited me to eat with her family. I said no, mainly because I had to go back to the newspaper to write the story. Martín stayed: I don’t remember what he said about it later when he returned to the editorial office. I think he had a good time.

My story about the cow butchering, which in a way anticipated the social crisis that would erupt in a few years, was published without a byline: I had just started working and hadn’t been paying my dues long enough for an article to carry my name. I remember that the photo, in black and white, didn’t in any way convey that red, blue, and gray afternoon. Nor did it transmit in the slightest the barbarity, the joy, the death, the smell of blood and shit, the shaken air in the moments after the upset, the knives sinking into hide, the crunch of ribs, the moribund moos of the besieged animals.

*

One of the earliest short stories in Argentine history is El Matadero (The Slaughteryard), by Esteban Echeverría, written between 1838 and 1840. It takes on the brutality of president Juan Manuel de Rosas’s government, and it culminates with the horrible assassination of a political resister. The action takes place in a slaughterhouse in the south of the city. Echeverría describes it this way:

The flayed bodies of forty-nine cattle were hanging over their hides, and some two hundred people tracked through that muddy floor spattered with the blood that poured from their arteries. Around each beast stood a group of human figures of various skin colors and races. The most prominent member of each group was the butcher, knife in hand, naked arm and chest, long, unkempt hair, shirt and chiripá and face smeared with blood.

A rough simplification for those who haven’t read this classic text of Argentine literature: it’s a political tale in which the butcher’s brutality is equated with the government’s persecutions and crimes. Echeverría opposed Rosas. I won’t go into the details of this story because not even I, who studied it—in school and because I wanted to—can understand them entirely. But I will say that the asado and political violence are linked in Argentina. During the dictatorship of 1976–1983, the most ruthless of many my country has suffered, the torture table was called the “parrilla.” Interrogators laid prisoners out, poured water over them, and applied an electric prod—a device that looks like a microphone and emits electric shocks. In 2013, some government functionaries of the Human Rights office held an asado in the ex-ESMA. The ESMA was the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics, an enormous property in the city of Buenos Aires that had been used as a concentration camp. Very few people who were held at ESMA survived. The place had a maternity ward for pregnant detainees, and in most cases those children were stolen and “adopted” (i.e., appropriated) by families close to the military officers in government. Many detainees were thrown from planes into the river close by. They were thrown out alive: the military thought that was a more merciful death. Others were murdered in the most diverse ways. Now the ESMA is a cultural center and memorial; the Ministry of Education’s TV channel is also housed there. In sum: in 2013, some functionaries organized an open-air asado. The attendees included a representative who was born there in the ESMA concentration camp, who’d been stolen, and had recovered his identity thanks to a search carried out by human rights organizations. The whole thing was a scandal. The representative said that ESMA should be a space of joy and needed to be redefined. Some human rights leaders considered it a “trivialization,” and declared it was “like baking pastries in the Auschwitz ovens.” They considered it a “sacrilege.” That the torture device was called a “parrilla” had something to do with it, of course. Also that in the jargon of that particular concentration camp, “having an asado” referred to the act of cremating a disappeared detainee to get rid of the body. I’m often asked if Argentine writers see themselves as obligated to write about the dictatorship and political violence. I don’t think so. But the truth is that reality offers plots, scenes, and metaphors that refer back to those years all the time, every day.

*

If I focus on the asado, it’s because the Argentine diet isn’t very diverse. After meat, favorite dishes include pizza, pasta, milanesas (fried, breaded meat) and empanadas (pastry dough filled with meat or chicken or vegetables). We can add baked chicken or chicken and rice. And pastel de papas, a kind of potato casserole. There’s not much more. The Argentine palate is strongly influenced by Italian immigration, and it mysteriously excludes the delicacies of Spanish cuisine. It’s an almost infantile palate. Over the past fifteen years, the gourmet boom that is already established in the rest of the world has made inroads in Buenos Aires, but certain things don’t change. I grew up with several tried-and-true bromides; for example, that French food is disgusting. “They eat orange duck,” repeated my parents and neighbors, and they said it as a demonstration of the absurd, like finding a sewing machine and an umbrella together on the dissection table—two things that could never coexist, much less be eaten together. Throughout my childhood, “sweet-n-sour” was a synonym for the extravagant, and also the inedible. Argentina is a country of immigrants, and its migratory laws are very generous. But it’s also a subtly discriminatory country. Not in its laws, quite the opposite: in attitude. The large Syrian-Lebanese, Japanese, Jewish, and Eastern European communities have never been given the chance to add their cuisines to our National Identity. I had no idea what the Japanese ate until recently. Many Japanese I know, for example, hate fish. Decades ago, of course, assimilation forced them to accept the minimal local offering. I first had hummus fifteen years ago, I think. Long after the first shawarma stands started to appear on the street. The same is true for sushi, which in any case is roundly rejected, because the idea of eating “raw fish” is unacceptable for a large portion of the population.

Not as unacceptable, of course, as the idea of eating something “spicy.” Finding spices in Buenos Aires, even today, involves a lot of investigation. Most of them, luckily, can be found in Chinatown. Chinese restaurants and the few spots in the city offering food from Southeast Asia greatly alter their dishes to adapt to the unadventurous porteño palate. The waiters always bring the spicy condiments separately. They don’t care if you tell them: “Please, I like it to burn.” They don’t believe you. They’ve had too many bad experiences.

I remember one gathering in particular, a small party I attended some years ago, maybe a decade. One of the guests, an upper-middle-class girl, derisively told a story about how a boy had invited her to have dinner at a Peruvian restaurant. “Imagine! Peruvian!” she said, and when she said “Peruvian” she wasn’t implying what we all know: that it’s one of the most extraordinary cuisines in the world. Rather, as she saw it, our Latin American neighbors could only own dreary restaurants, and of course could never possess an interesting cuisine worthy of exploring. That is the ignorance of discrimination: a girl educated at the most expensive schools in Buenos Aires who doesn’t know what any schlub could tell her: You’ll never eat better than in Peru, silly girl.

The Koreans settled thirty years ago in the south of the city, near my house. Koreatown is a somewhat dangerous place that often has problems with crime, but luckily its extraordinary restaurants close very early, before night falls—oh, in Argentina you usually eat around 10 p.m.—and it’s possible to eat in peace. In general the patrons are Koreans, plus a few foreigners who’ve been informed of this treasure’s existence. In many of the restaurants, if an Argentine comes calling they’re told “no, no.” Or they’re only admitted if they’re accompanied by another Korean. It’s not that the restaurant-owners are xenophobic: they’ve just had to fight too many times with Argentines who screamed like they were suffering industrial burns when their delicate tongues touched kimchi, with Argentines who don’t understand that they have to cook the food themselves at the table, with Argentines who ask for the pork to be served “less spicy.”

My cat’s veterinarian lives a block away from the Korean neighborhood. His own cat likes to roam, and one cold night he climbed into the body of a Korean neighbor’s car, between the wheel and the carriage near the motor: it must have seemed like a warm refuge. When the neighbor started his car in the morning to go to work, the wheel injured the cat; he ran yowling out of his hiding place with a wounded leg. The neighbor recognized the animal and ran to bring it to its owner’s house.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he cried. “It was an accident! I wasn’t going to eat him!”

The veterinarian, when he told me this anecdote, said: “I felt guilty. I don’t think that about him or his community. But other people do. Shame on us that they know a lot of people think they steal pets to eat them.”

Shame on us. And more shame that the neighbors don’t visit their restaurants and their lovingly served buffets.

There are many people, in the atom-based world and on social media, who complain about foods they call weird. In some cases they’re reacting to dishes with snobbish names or hipster presentations or other silly excesses. But mostly it’s a purely conservative reaction, nothing more. They complain as if the country were overwhelmed with molecular cooking and Michelin stars, when in fact, the appearance of restaurants with nontraditional cuisines is very, very recent. At the same time, there are many closed-door restaurants, street fairs, and food trucks; there’s a surge in the appreciation of food from the provinces, and every week there’s a new place serving food from Taiwan, Croatia, Cameroon, Colombia, and Mexico. Caribbean arepas are in fashion now. Hopefully it will continue, hopefully there is finally a real and accessible alternative to muzarella pizza. It’s said that change provokes anxiety in Argentines, because they’ve been forced to suffer so many changes involuntarily—shifts in the economic, political, financial, and social rules—that anything new is viewed with apprehension and opprobrium. There are few areas where this anxiety can be seen more clearly than with food. 

© Mariana Enríquez. By arrangement with the author. Translation © 2017 by Megan McDowell. All rights reserved.

English Spanish (Original)

The Argentine national food is the asado. I won’t go on about its mystery and metaphors, because that tends to be mere decoration, sometimes exaggerated, other times just rubbernecking. Really, it’s a simple custom. You cook meat on a parrilla (grill), or on a disc, or even stuck onto metal spears if the asado is out in the open. In Argentina, we eat the whole cow. Its intestines, which we call chinchulines. Its glands, or sweetbreads, which we call mollejas and are exorbitantly priced, a delicacy for special events or fancy restaurants. Its kidneys, which need a little lemon to mask a bitter taste that I wouldn’t recommend thinking too much about. Its blood, in the form of morcilla sausage: a Spanish custom. A mishmash of all the rest, maybe even the eyes, go into chorizo sausages. The popular way to eat those is the choripán (chorizo on bread), a street-food sandwich that can be eaten anytime, but especially after a difficult task, or on an afternoon by the river, or during a soccer game, or a political protest—in Argentina these happen almost daily and they tend to be long: eating is key, and choripán is cheap.

Cuts of meat have their own names, often very graphic, and only some are typical in English. A sample might translate as: rump, flap meat, rib, strip, entrails (skirt steak), rump tail, oxtail, large intestine, udder. Treatises are written about how to achieve the perfect asado, and the country often participates in international competitions. Off they go, asadores dressed like gauchos in baggy trousers and black caps, and they always come back losers. The most recent World Barbecue Championship was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, and it was a tragedy: the Argentine team came in last, and to make matters worse, the British team won. Keep in mind that Argentina and England went to war in 1982 over who owned the Malvinas Islands. It was a cruel war, instigated by our dictator and by Margaret Thatcher. All the Argentine soldiers were new recruits, generally from very poor families and terribly young: in the infantry, few were older than twenty. The British soldiers were all professionals, and grown men. Some Argentines have no love for the British—in the abstract, of course, except for the palpable resentment of the ex-combatants and their families. And some British, very few, tend to do stupid, drunken things like setting an Argentine flag on fire while they’re vacationing in Patagonia. Now that will expose them to the risk of public lynching, but they’re usually lucky enough to just end up at a police station. In sum: if coming in last is bad, the British winning first is an absolute public shame. 

Later, we found out that the fault lay with the Swedes: according to their rules, the meat had to be cooked for ten hours and the sauce—the only one allowed—had to be barbecue. We never use barbecue sauce. We use chimichurri (parsley, oregano, garlic, onion, pepper, vinegar, and oil) or salsa criollo (red bell pepper, tomato, onion, olive oil). Barbecue sauce is for gringos. And so, while last place was an embarrassment as is any affront to our carnivorous pride, the true ignorance lay with the northern Europeans, who have to disguise their inferior meat with a strong sauce (our condiments are added to taste, individually and in small quantities).

The British win took up hours of TV, made newspaper headlines, and was heatedly discussed in taxis. There were several women on the Argentine asado team, an inclusion that some found disconcerting. Because the asado is men’s business. That’s the time-honored country tradition and it’s the same way now, at every asado—neighborhood gatherings, street-corner barbecues, professional asados and those held on summer terraces. The man tends the meat but eats very little, because the different cuts have varying cooking times and he has to serve them in batches. He sweats beside the grill, monitors the charcoal or the wood, calculates the amount of meat necessary to fill up all the diners. He’s always on his feet except at the end, once everyone has eaten and is smoking and relaxing. The asador is a complex discussion in terms of gender roles. Yes: women should tend the asado just as men do, and the esoteric knowledge of the grill is a form of power. But in the act of the asado, the male takes on the more traditionally feminine role: the one who cooks, who pleases, who serves, the one who receives a symbolic reward (he’s applauded at the end, if the meat was to everyone’s liking), while the women wait, seated, knives in hand, like lords. In many cases they don’t even make the salad. It’s not very pleasant standing there beside the flames in the sweltering summer, just to reaffirm some macho who-knows-what. At the same time, it’s a world that must be entered, because nothing should be exclusive.

I don’t know any female asadoras. Or only one, really, but she has an electric parrilla, which is a synonym for inexperience and for horror. . . . 

I’ve eaten so many asados, more than I could count. I’ve seen some tragic ones—burned meat, bickering couples—and others that were delicious, or forgettable, or overcrowded. But only one could really be called indelible.

I’ve worked as a journalist since I was twenty-one years old. One of my first jobs, an assignment from the newspaper I work for now, was to cover an accident involving a cargo truck that had been headed south carrying live cows, I suspect toward a slaughterhouse. It was 1997, I think—and I say “I think” because the article isn’t digitized, I didn’t save it, and looking for it in the newspaper’s archives is a task that exceeds my tolerance for bureaucracy. That year, there were already portents of the crisis that would fully explode in 2001: unemployment, anomie, an extraordinary rise in the number of people living in the street or in precarious housing. In Argentina there have been villas (shantytowns or slums) for eighty years, but those down-and-out neighborhoods really spread in the ’90s. That was when Carlos Menem imposed his corrupt neoliberalism, after the hyperinflation under Raúl Alfonsin, whose ethical administration was fundamental in recovering democracy after the dictatorship in 1976–83 but was disastrous when it came to economic policy. Among other disasters, hyperinflation reached 1000 percent annually.

The truck full of cows, most of which died on impact, had crashed south of Buenos Aires in the city of Quilmes. It’s one of the most populous and intense areas of what we call the Conurbano, or greater Buenos Aires. Quilmes is socially diverse, but the poor people who live close to the Río de la Plata do so in very adverse and unstable conditions: back then their houses, which they had built themselves on land that was government-owned and in a flood zone, weren’t even made of brick; most people had used wood or even cardboard. The news that spurred the paper to send me to cover the accident was that the people of the surrounding slums had butchered the animals and brought pieces of them—sometimes an entire animal—to their houses, and were grilling them up. I remember it was hot. I remember the driver who brought me to Quilmes spent the whole time complaining. I decided to ignore him with the help of earphones. The photographer rode in silence as well: we barely knew each other. When we arrived the police were there, and the truck driver—who was crying—and the street, the only paved one in the area, was covered in cow’s blood and feces. The smell was unbearable. The blood that flowed down the gently sloping road, the furious midday sun, the abandoned cow heads with their staring eyes: it was biblical. I had a little notebook with me; I should have saved it, but I didn’t. I don’t know what I wrote down. From the villa along the road wafted the delicious smell of cooking meat. The blue sky was painted with smoke, and I could hear children laughing. The photographer was frantic; he made children pose beside the heads of dead cows, he slid in the blood, took pictures of the animals that were still in the truck—because not all of them had been dragged off to the houses. They were heavy. The driver was terrified: he’d tried to defend his cargo, he said, but people had pulled guns on him. He was also shouting brutal, racist slurs. He had nothing but contempt for those people who, meters away, were throwing a banquet. I didn’t dare go into the villa alone, but the photographer—Martín—took me by the hand and said: “I’ll talk to them.” I watched from a distance as he negotiated with a potbellied man. With a movement of his hand, he ushered us in. The villa’s passageways were one big party, a happy massacre. The meat was cooking on sheet metal or on grills, it was being stored in freezers, savage knives were merrily carving it up. Martín worked a little, and I interviewed a young woman who explained what had happened: the truck turned over, and the cows, she said, were already dead or very unconscious, and several groups of people, men and women, had butchered them in the road. They took around ten animals from the truck. What they couldn’t eat, they stored in their freezers—the neighborhood was illegally connected to a nearby electricity post.

“You know how long it’s been since we’ve eaten a good asadito around here?” she said.

And then she invited me to eat with her family. I said no, mainly because I had to go back to the newspaper to write the story. Martín stayed: I don’t remember what he said about it later when he returned to the editorial office. I think he had a good time.

My story about the cow butchering, which in a way anticipated the social crisis that would erupt in a few years, was published without a byline: I had just started working and hadn’t been paying my dues long enough for an article to carry my name. I remember that the photo, in black and white, didn’t in any way convey that red, blue, and gray afternoon. Nor did it transmit in the slightest the barbarity, the joy, the death, the smell of blood and shit, the shaken air in the moments after the upset, the knives sinking into hide, the crunch of ribs, the moribund moos of the besieged animals.

*

One of the earliest short stories in Argentine history is El Matadero (The Slaughteryard), by Esteban Echeverría, written between 1838 and 1840. It takes on the brutality of president Juan Manuel de Rosas’s government, and it culminates with the horrible assassination of a political resister. The action takes place in a slaughterhouse in the south of the city. Echeverría describes it this way:

The flayed bodies of forty-nine cattle were hanging over their hides, and some two hundred people tracked through that muddy floor spattered with the blood that poured from their arteries. Around each beast stood a group of human figures of various skin colors and races. The most prominent member of each group was the butcher, knife in hand, naked arm and chest, long, unkempt hair, shirt and chiripá and face smeared with blood.

A rough simplification for those who haven’t read this classic text of Argentine literature: it’s a political tale in which the butcher’s brutality is equated with the government’s persecutions and crimes. Echeverría opposed Rosas. I won’t go into the details of this story because not even I, who studied it—in school and because I wanted to—can understand them entirely. But I will say that the asado and political violence are linked in Argentina. During the dictatorship of 1976–1983, the most ruthless of many my country has suffered, the torture table was called the “parrilla.” Interrogators laid prisoners out, poured water over them, and applied an electric prod—a device that looks like a microphone and emits electric shocks. In 2013, some government functionaries of the Human Rights office held an asado in the ex-ESMA. The ESMA was the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics, an enormous property in the city of Buenos Aires that had been used as a concentration camp. Very few people who were held at ESMA survived. The place had a maternity ward for pregnant detainees, and in most cases those children were stolen and “adopted” (i.e., appropriated) by families close to the military officers in government. Many detainees were thrown from planes into the river close by. They were thrown out alive: the military thought that was a more merciful death. Others were murdered in the most diverse ways. Now the ESMA is a cultural center and memorial; the Ministry of Education’s TV channel is also housed there. In sum: in 2013, some functionaries organized an open-air asado. The attendees included a representative who was born there in the ESMA concentration camp, who’d been stolen, and had recovered his identity thanks to a search carried out by human rights organizations. The whole thing was a scandal. The representative said that ESMA should be a space of joy and needed to be redefined. Some human rights leaders considered it a “trivialization,” and declared it was “like baking pastries in the Auschwitz ovens.” They considered it a “sacrilege.” That the torture device was called a “parrilla” had something to do with it, of course. Also that in the jargon of that particular concentration camp, “having an asado” referred to the act of cremating a disappeared detainee to get rid of the body. I’m often asked if Argentine writers see themselves as obligated to write about the dictatorship and political violence. I don’t think so. But the truth is that reality offers plots, scenes, and metaphors that refer back to those years all the time, every day.

*

If I focus on the asado, it’s because the Argentine diet isn’t very diverse. After meat, favorite dishes include pizza, pasta, milanesas (fried, breaded meat) and empanadas (pastry dough filled with meat or chicken or vegetables). We can add baked chicken or chicken and rice. And pastel de papas, a kind of potato casserole. There’s not much more. The Argentine palate is strongly influenced by Italian immigration, and it mysteriously excludes the delicacies of Spanish cuisine. It’s an almost infantile palate. Over the past fifteen years, the gourmet boom that is already established in the rest of the world has made inroads in Buenos Aires, but certain things don’t change. I grew up with several tried-and-true bromides; for example, that French food is disgusting. “They eat orange duck,” repeated my parents and neighbors, and they said it as a demonstration of the absurd, like finding a sewing machine and an umbrella together on the dissection table—two things that could never coexist, much less be eaten together. Throughout my childhood, “sweet-n-sour” was a synonym for the extravagant, and also the inedible. Argentina is a country of immigrants, and its migratory laws are very generous. But it’s also a subtly discriminatory country. Not in its laws, quite the opposite: in attitude. The large Syrian-Lebanese, Japanese, Jewish, and Eastern European communities have never been given the chance to add their cuisines to our National Identity. I had no idea what the Japanese ate until recently. Many Japanese I know, for example, hate fish. Decades ago, of course, assimilation forced them to accept the minimal local offering. I first had hummus fifteen years ago, I think. Long after the first shawarma stands started to appear on the street. The same is true for sushi, which in any case is roundly rejected, because the idea of eating “raw fish” is unacceptable for a large portion of the population.

Not as unacceptable, of course, as the idea of eating something “spicy.” Finding spices in Buenos Aires, even today, involves a lot of investigation. Most of them, luckily, can be found in Chinatown. Chinese restaurants and the few spots in the city offering food from Southeast Asia greatly alter their dishes to adapt to the unadventurous porteño palate. The waiters always bring the spicy condiments separately. They don’t care if you tell them: “Please, I like it to burn.” They don’t believe you. They’ve had too many bad experiences.

I remember one gathering in particular, a small party I attended some years ago, maybe a decade. One of the guests, an upper-middle-class girl, derisively told a story about how a boy had invited her to have dinner at a Peruvian restaurant. “Imagine! Peruvian!” she said, and when she said “Peruvian” she wasn’t implying what we all know: that it’s one of the most extraordinary cuisines in the world. Rather, as she saw it, our Latin American neighbors could only own dreary restaurants, and of course could never possess an interesting cuisine worthy of exploring. That is the ignorance of discrimination: a girl educated at the most expensive schools in Buenos Aires who doesn’t know what any schlub could tell her: You’ll never eat better than in Peru, silly girl.

The Koreans settled thirty years ago in the south of the city, near my house. Koreatown is a somewhat dangerous place that often has problems with crime, but luckily its extraordinary restaurants close very early, before night falls—oh, in Argentina you usually eat around 10 p.m.—and it’s possible to eat in peace. In general the patrons are Koreans, plus a few foreigners who’ve been informed of this treasure’s existence. In many of the restaurants, if an Argentine comes calling they’re told “no, no.” Or they’re only admitted if they’re accompanied by another Korean. It’s not that the restaurant-owners are xenophobic: they’ve just had to fight too many times with Argentines who screamed like they were suffering industrial burns when their delicate tongues touched kimchi, with Argentines who don’t understand that they have to cook the food themselves at the table, with Argentines who ask for the pork to be served “less spicy.”

My cat’s veterinarian lives a block away from the Korean neighborhood. His own cat likes to roam, and one cold night he climbed into the body of a Korean neighbor’s car, between the wheel and the carriage near the motor: it must have seemed like a warm refuge. When the neighbor started his car in the morning to go to work, the wheel injured the cat; he ran yowling out of his hiding place with a wounded leg. The neighbor recognized the animal and ran to bring it to its owner’s house.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he cried. “It was an accident! I wasn’t going to eat him!”

The veterinarian, when he told me this anecdote, said: “I felt guilty. I don’t think that about him or his community. But other people do. Shame on us that they know a lot of people think they steal pets to eat them.”

Shame on us. And more shame that the neighbors don’t visit their restaurants and their lovingly served buffets.

There are many people, in the atom-based world and on social media, who complain about foods they call weird. In some cases they’re reacting to dishes with snobbish names or hipster presentations or other silly excesses. But mostly it’s a purely conservative reaction, nothing more. They complain as if the country were overwhelmed with molecular cooking and Michelin stars, when in fact, the appearance of restaurants with nontraditional cuisines is very, very recent. At the same time, there are many closed-door restaurants, street fairs, and food trucks; there’s a surge in the appreciation of food from the provinces, and every week there’s a new place serving food from Taiwan, Croatia, Cameroon, Colombia, and Mexico. Caribbean arepas are in fashion now. Hopefully it will continue, hopefully there is finally a real and accessible alternative to muzarella pizza. It’s said that change provokes anxiety in Argentines, because they’ve been forced to suffer so many changes involuntarily—shifts in the economic, political, financial, and social rules—that anything new is viewed with apprehension and opprobrium. There are few areas where this anxiety can be seen more clearly than with food. 

Asado

La comida nacional argentina es el asado. No quiero extenderme en su mística y sus metáforas porque suelen ser adornos, a veces exagerados y a veces simplemente turísticos. Es una costumbre sencilla. Se trata de cocer carne sobre una parrilla o disco o incluso clavada en lanzas de metal si el asado se hace al aire libre. En Argentina se come la vaca entera. Sus intestinos, que llamamos chinchulines. Sus glándulas que llamamos mollejas y son carísimas, delicatessen para eventos especiales o restoranes elegantes. Sus riñones, que necesitan un poco de limón para quitarle cierto sabor amargo sobre el que no conviene pensar demasiado. Su sangre, en forma de morcilla: esta es una costumbre española. Un revoltijo de todo el resto, quizá incluso los ojos, en los chorizos, cuya forma popular es el choripán (pan y chorizo) un sandwich al paso que se come en cualquier momento pero especialmente después de un trabajo pesado, o una tarde junto al río, o durante un partido de fútbol o en una manifestación política –en Argentina son casi diarias y suelen ser extensas: comer es fundamental y el choripán es barato–. Los cortes de la carne tienen nombres particulares, a veces muy gráficos: nalga, vacío, costilla, tira, matambre, entraña, colita de cuadril, rabo, tripa gorda, ubre. Se escriben tratados sobre cómo hacer el asado perfecto y el país suele participar de competencias internacionales. Allá van los asadores vestidos de gauchos, con sus bombachas y sus boinas negras y siempre vuelven perdedores. El más reciente Mundial de Asado, que se hizo en Goterburgo, Suecia, fue una tragedia: el equipo argentino salió último y para colmo el ganador fue el equipo inglés. Hay que recordar que Argentina e Inglaterra fueron a la guerra por la soberanía de las Islas Malvinas en 1982, una guerra cruel propulsada por nuestra dictadura y por Margaret Thatcher. Todos los soldados argentinos eran reclutas, la mayoría de familias muy pobres y jovencísimos: en infantería pocos pasaban de los 20 años. Los soldados ingleses eran todos profesionales y adultos. Algunos argentinos no quieren a los ingleses -–en abstracto, claro, excepto por el resentimiento palpable de los ex-combatientes y sus familias– y algunos ingleses, muy pocos, cuando vienen de visita, suelen hacer estupideces de borrachines como quemar una bandera argentina en la Patagonia durante sus vacaciones, cosa que los expone al linchamiento público aunque por lo general tienen la suerte de terminar en una comisaría. En fin: si salir últimos es malo, que queden en primer lugar los ingleses es un escarnio absoluto.

Después se supo que la culpa era de los suecos: sus reglas decían que la carne debía cocerse diez horas y que la salsa –la única permitida– debía ser barbacoa. Nosotros no usamos barbacoa nunca. Usamos chimichurri (perejil, orégano, ajo, cebolla, ají, vinagre y aceite) o salsa criolla (morrones, tomate, cebollas, aceite de oliva). Usar barbacoa es de gringos. Por lo tanto, el último puesto fue una vergüenza porque cualquier afrenta a nuestro orgullo carnívoro lo es, pero la verdadera ignorancia fue la de los europeos del norte que tienen que tapar el sabor de su carne de mala calidad con una salsa fuerte. (Nuestras salsas se usan a elección del comensal y en poca cantidad).

Lo de los ingleses llevó horas de televisión, titulares de diarios y agitadas discusiones en taxis. En el equipo de asadores había varias mujeres, inclusión que ofuscó a algunos. Es que el asado es un asunto de hombres. Lo es desde la tradición campera y lo es ahora, en cada parrilla de barrio, en las que se montan en las esquinas, en las profesionales, en las de las terrazas veraniegas. El hombre cocina el asado pero come muy poco, porque la carne tiene diferentes tiempos de cocción y tiene que servirla por tandas. Transpira junto a la parrilla, controla el carbón o la leña, calcula la cantidad de carne necesaria para atiborrar a los comensales, siempre está de pie salvo al final, cuando todos ya han comido y fuman y se relajan. El papel del asador es una discusión compleja en términos de roles de género. Si: las mujeres deberían ser tan asadoras como los hombres, el conocimiento esotérico de la parrilla es una forma de poder. Pero, en el acto del asado, el varón se encuentra en el rol femenino más tradicional: el que cocina, el que complace, el que sirve, el que recibe una gratificación simbólica (se lo aplaude al final, si la carne estaba rica), mientras las mujeres esperan sentadas con sus cuchillos en mano como patronas y en muchos casos ni siquiera preparan la ensalada. No es muy grato estar junto a esos fuegos en pleno verano solamente para reafirmar un no se qué de masculinidad. Al mismo tiempo, es un mundo al que hay que ingresar porque nada debería ser exclusivo.

No conozco a ninguna mujer asadora. Sólo a una, en realidad, pero tiene una parrilla eléctrica, sinónimo de inexperiencia y horror.

 

 

He comido demasiados asados, más de los que puedo enumerar y los hubo trágicos -–la carne quemada, una pelea de pareja–, deliciosos, olvidables, multitudinarios. Pero sólo uno puede calificarse de memorable. Trabajo como periodista desde los 21 años. Uno de mis primeros trabajos, un encargo del diario que ahora me emplea, fue registrar el accidente de un camión de carga de vacas (vivas) que iba hacia el Sur, sospecho que hacia algún matadero. Era 1997, creo -–y escribo “creo” porque el artículo no está digitalizado, yo no lo guardé y buscarlo en los archivos del diario es una tarea que excede mi tolerancia a la burocracia–. Ese año los signos de la crisis que culminaría en 2001 con un estallido social sin precedentes ya eran evidentes: desempleo, anomia, aumento inédito de personas viviendo en situación de calle o en viviendas precarias. En Argentina hay villas desde hace ochenta años, pero la generalización de estos barrios marginados ocurrió en los 90, cuando el gobierno de Carlos Menem impuso su ortodoxo/corrupto neoliberalismo después de la hiperinflación del gobierno de Raúl Alfonsín, un gobierno muy ético y fundamental en la recuperación de la democracia después de la dictadura 1976-1983 pero desastroso en materia de política económica, con una hiperinflación que alcanzó el 1000% anual entre otros desastres.  

El camión con las vacas, que murieron en el impacto, al menos la mayoría, se accidentó en la ciudad de Quilmes, al sur de Buenos Aires, uno de los puntos más poblados e intensos de la zona que llamamos el Conurbano. Quilmes es socialmente diverso pero la gente pobre que vive cerca del Río de la Plata lo hace en condiciones muy adversas y precarias: en aquel momento sus casas, construidas por ellos mismos en terrenos fiscales e inundables, ni siquiera eran de ladrillo, la mayoría había usado madera e incluso cartón. La noticia por la que el diario me enviaba a cubrir el accidente era que la gente de estos barrios cercanos al accidente había carneado a las vacas muertas, se había llevado  pedazos de los animales a sus casas, a veces una res entera, y habían hecho asados. Recuerdo que hacía calor. Recuerdo que el chofer que me llevó hasta Quilmes se la pasó rezongando. Yo decidí ignorarlo usando auriculares. El fotógrafo también iba callado: nos conocíamos poco. Cuando llegamos, estaba la policía, el chofer del camión –que lloraba– y la calle, la única asfaltada de la zona, estaba cubierta de sangre y heces de vaca. El olor era insoportable. La sangre que bajaba por la calle levemente inclinada, el sol furioso del mediodía, las cabezas de vaca abandonadas con los ojos vacíos: era bíblico. Yo tenía un pequeño cuaderno, mi anotador. Debería haberlo guardado pero no lo hice. No sé qué anoté. De la villa, junto a la ruta, llegaba el olor delicioso de la carne sobre las parrillas, el cielo azul se pintaba de humo, se escuchaban las risas de los chicos. El fotógrafo estaba desesperado: hacía posar a chicos junto a cabezas de vacas muertas, se resbalaba en la sangre, tomaba imágenes de los animales que aún estaban en el camión, porque no todos habían sido arrastrados hasta las casas. Pesaban mucho. El chofer estaba asustado: había intentado defender su carga, decía, pero le apuntaron con armas. También gritaba cosas brutales, rascistas. Solamente tenía desprecio por los que, a metros, se daban un festín.

Yo no me atrevía a entrar a la villa sola, pero el fotógrafo –Martín– me tomó de la mano y dijo: “Yo les hablo”. Desde lejos, vi que negociaba con un hombre panzón. Con un gesto de la mano, me indicó que podíamos pasar. En los pasillos de la villa todo era una fiesta, una feliz masacre. La carne se cocinaba sobre chapas, sobre parrillas, se guardaba en heladeras, se cortaba alegremente con cuchillos brutales. El fotógrafo trabajó un poco, yo entrevisté a una mujer joven que me explicó lo ocurrido: el camión se cayó, las vacas, decía ella, ya estaban muertas o muy dormidas, y varios grupos de personas, hombres y mujeres, las carnearon sobre la ruta. Bajaron del camión a unas diez, aproximadamente. Lo que no podían comer, lo guardaban en sus heladeras –el barrio estaba ilegalmente enganchado de un poste de electricidad–.

–¿Sabés cuánto hace que no nos comemos un buen asadito acá? –me dijo.

Y después me invitó a comer con su familia. Le dije que no, sobre todo porque debía volver al diario a escribir. El fotógrafo se quedó: no recuerdo su relato posterior cuando él también volvió a la redacción. Creo que la pasó bien.

Mi crónica del carneo de las vacas, que de alguna manera anticipaba la crisis social que se desataría en pocos años, salió sin firma: recién empezaba a trabajar y no había hecho méritos para que un artículo llevara mi nombre. Recuerdo que la foto, en blanco y negro, no ilustraba para nada esa tarde roja, azul y gris ni transmitía en lo más mínimo la brutalidad, la alegría, la muerte, el olor de la sangre y de la mierda, el aire sacudido por los momentos posteriores a la turba, los cuchillos hundiéndose en el cuero, el crujir de los costillares, posiblemente los mugidos moribundos de los animales atacados.

 

Se considera que el primer cuento de la historia argentina es El matadero, de Esteban Echeverría, escrito entre 1838 y 1840. Se refiere a la brutalidad del gobierno de Juan Manuel de Rosas y culmina con el horrible asesinato de un opositor político. Todo transcurre en un matadero en el sur de la ciudad. Describe Echeverría: “Cuarenta y nueve reses estaban tendidas sobre sus cueros y cerca de doscientas personas hollaban aquel suelo de lodo regado con la sangre de sus arterias. En torno de cada res resaltaba un grupo de figuras humanas de tez y raza distinta. La figura más prominente de cada grupo era el carnicero con el cuchillo en mano, brazo y pecho desnudos, cabello largo y revuelto, camisa y chiripá y rostro embadurnado de sangre.” Haciendo una simplificación algo burda para quienes no han leído este texto clásico de la literatura argentina, es un relato político donde la brutalidad del matadero es comparada con la brutalidad del gobierno, sus persecuciones y sus crímenes. Echeverría era opositor a Rosas. No entraré en los pormenores de la historia porque ni siquiera yo, que los estudié –en el colegio y por gusto propio– puedo entenderlos del todo. Pero sí diré que el asado y la violencia política están ligados en Argentina. En la dictadura 1976-1983, la más brutal de las muchas que ha sufrido el país, a la mesa de tortura donde se ubicaba a los “interrogados”, donde se los humedecía y se les aplicaba la picana –una máquina similar a un micrófono que proporciona descargas eléctricas– se la llamaba “parrilla”. En 2013, algunos funcionarios de gobierno del área de Derechos Humanos hicieron un asado en la ex-ESMA. La ESMA es la Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, un enorme predio en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires que se usó como campo de concentración. Muy pocos sobrevivieron a su paso por ESMA. El lugar tenía una maternidad para las detenidas embarazadas y esos chicos en la mayoría de los casos eran robados y “adoptados” (apropiados) por familias cercanas a los militares que ejercían el gobierno. Muchos de los detenidos eran arrojados desde aviones al río, que queda muy cerca del predio. Se los arrojaba vivos: los militares creían que era una muerte más piadosa. Otros eran asesinados de maneras diversas. Ahora la ESMA es un centro cultural y un espacio de memoria; también funciona ahí el canal de TV del Ministerio de Educación. En fin: ese año, 2013, algunos funcionarios, incluyendo un diputado que nació ahí, en la ESMA, en ese campo de concentración, que fue robado y que recuperó su identidad gracias al trabajo de búsqueda de organismos de derechos humanos, organizó un asado al aire libre. Y fue un escándalo. El diputado dijo que la ESMA debía ser un espacio de alegría y que tenía que ser resignificado. Algunos líderes de los organismos de derechos humanos lo consideraron una “banalización” y declararon que “era como hacer pan dulce en los hornos de Auschwitz”. Lo consideraron “una profanación”. Que se haya llamado “parrilla” a la mesa de torturas tuvo que ver, claro. También que en la jerga de ese campo de concentración en particular se llamara “hacer un asado” a la acción de cremar a un detenido-desaparecido para eliminar su cuerpo.

Suelen preguntarme si un escritor argentino se ve obligado a hablar de la dictadura y de la violencia política en su literatura. Yo creo que no. Pero lo cierto es que la realidad ofrece tramas, escenas y metáforas que remiten a esos años todo el tiempo y todos los días.

 

….

Si me concentro en el asado, es porque la dieta argentina no es muy variada. Después de la carne, los platos favoritos son la pizza, las pastas, las milanesas –carne frita rebozada con pan– y las empanadas –una torta de masa rellena de carne o pollo o verduras–. Podemos agregar el pollo al horno o con arroz. Y el pastel de papas. No hay mucho más. El paladar argentino está poderosamente influenciado por la inmigración italiana y excluye misteriosamente las delicias de la gastronomía española. Es un paladar casi infantil. En los últimos quince años el boom gourmet que ya está instalado en el resto del mundo llegó a Buenos Aires pero ciertas cosas no cambian. Yo crecí con varios latigullos: por ejemplo, que la comida francesa es asquerosa. Uno de sus platos es el pato a la naranja, repetían mis padres y vecinos, y lo decían como demostración del absurdo, del encuentro en la mesa de disección de una máquina de coser y un paraguas, de dos cosas que jamás podían estar juntas y menos aún ser comidas juntas. Durante toda mi infancia “agridulce” fue sinónimo de extravagante y también de incomible. Argentina es un país de inmigrantes, muy generoso en sus leyes migratorias además. Pero también es un país sutilmente discriminador. No con leyes, todo lo contrario: con actitudes. A las grandes comunidades sirio-libanesas, japonesas, judías y de Europa del Este nunca se les ha dado la oportunidad de ingresar con sus comidas al Ser Nacional. Yo ignoraba qué comían los japoneses hasta hace poco. Muchos japoneses que conozco, por ejemplo, detestan el pescado. Hace décadas, es claro, la integración los obligó a aceptar la mínima oferta de comida local. Conocí el hummus hace quince años, creo. Hace mucho menos que empezaron a aparecer los primeros locales de shawarma a la calle. Lo mismo sucede con el sushi que es de todos modos inmensamente rechazado porque la idea de comer “pescado crudo” es inaceptable para gran parte de la población.

No tan inaceptable, claro, como la idea de comer algo “picante”. Conseguir especias en Buenos Aires es, todavía hoy, un trabajo de investigación. La mayoría, por suerte, se consiguen en el Barrio Chino. Tanto la gastronomía china como los escasos locales de comida del sudeste asiático de la ciudad adaptan muchos platos al poco aventurero paladar porteño. Los mozos siempre traen el picante separado. No importa que uno les diga: “por favor, me gusta que me queme”. No se lo creen. Han tenido demasiadas malas experiencias.

Hace unos años, quizá una década, recuerdo una reunión en particular, un pequeño festejo. Una de las invitadas, una chica de clase media alta, contó en sorna, horrorizada, que un chico la había invitado a cenar a un restaurant peruano. “¡Imagínense! ¡Peruano!”, decía, y cuando decía “peruano” no daba a entender lo que todos sabemos, es decir, una de la gastronomías más extraordinarias del mundo, sino que se refería a esos vecinos latinoamericanos que, indudablemente –para ella–, sólo podían ser dueños de locales penosos y que, por supuesto, jamás podían ser poseedores de una gastronomía interesante o digna de explorar. Ésa es la ignorancia de la discriminación: una chica educada en los colegios más caros de Buenos Aires que ignora lo que cualquier persona mas o menos mundana podría contarle: jamás comerás mejor que en el Perú, nena boba.

Cerca de mi casa, en el sur de la ciudad, se instalaron los coreanos hace casi treinta años. Coreatown es un lugar algo peligroso porque queda cerca de un barrio marginal donde suele haber problemas criminales, pero por suerte sus extraordinarios restaurantes cierran muy temprano, cuando todavía no es de noche –ah: en Argentina se come alrededor de las 10 PM normalmente– y es posible ir a comer con tranquilidad. En general los comensales son coreanos, van algunos extranjeros advertidos de la existencia de este tesoro y en muchos de los locales si un argentino toca la puerta le dicen “no, no”. O solo lo dejan entrar si vienen acompañadps de otro coreano. No son xenófobos: es que tuvieron que lidiar demasiadas veces con argentinos que gritan como si sufrieran quemaduras industriales cuando sus lenguas delicadas tocan el kimchi, con argentinos que no entienden que deben cocinarse la comida ellos solos y en la mesa, con argentinos que piden que el cerdo se sirva “con menos picante”. El veterinario de mi gata vive a una cuadra del barrio coreano. Su propio gato, que es paseandero, se metió una noche fría en el auto de un vecino coreano, entre la rueda y la carrocería, cerca del motor: le debió haber parecido un refugio calentito. Cuando el vecino encendió el auto por la mañana, para salir a trabajar, la rueda lastimó al gato, que salió del hueco a los gritos herido en una pierna. El vecino reconoció al animalito y lo llevó corriendo hasta la casa de su dueño.

–¡Perdón! ¡Perdón! –gritaba. –¡Fue un accidente! ¡No me lo quise comer!

El veterinario, cuando me contó la anécdota decía: “Me sentí culpable. Yo no pienso eso de él ni de la comunidad. Pero otros sí. Qué vergüenza que se haya enterado que mucha gente cree que roban mascotas para comérselas.

Qué vergüenza. Y más vergüenza aún que los vecinos no visiten sus restaurantes y sus banquetes amorosamente servidos.

Ya hay muchas personas que, en el mundo de los átomos y en las redes virtuales, se quejan de comidas que llaman estrafalarias. En muchos casos reaccionan frente a platos con nombres esnobs o a presentaciones hipsters y otros excesos tontos. Pero la mayoría reacciona de puro conservadores, nada más. Se quejan como si el país estuviera abrumado de cocina molecular y estrellas Michelines cuando, en realidad, la aparición de los restoranes con comidas no tradicionales es muy, muy reciente. Al mismo tiempo, hay muchos restoranes de puertas cerradas, ferias en la calle, food trucks, se revalorizan las cocinas de las provincias y cada semana abre un local de comida de Taiwán, de Croacia, de Camerún, de Colombia, de México, de curry, thai y más: están de moda las arepas caribeñas. Ojalá siga, ojalá por fin haya una alternativa real y accesible a la pizza de muzzarella. Se dice que a los argentinos el cambio les provoca ansiedad porque son tantos los cambios que deben sufrir involuntariamente –cambian las reglas  económicas, políticas, financieras, sociales– que cualquier novedad es mirada con rechazo y aprensión. En pocos rubros se nota esa ansiedad más que en la comida.

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mage of National Book Award winners Samanta Schweblin, Megan McDowell, and John Keene