Barbecues are basically considered sacred rites. In my country, meat is part of our national identity. But to many Argentinians, a meat dish is not seen as a being, but merely as protein. And we do the same with other sentient beings. When faced with their suffering, we look the other way. Thus, we devour each other because we are generally blind to our kinship with others. This massacre, executed by bureaucrats, would not have been possible without the indifference of “good” citizens. Hannah Arendt, says in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, whose subtitle is: “A report on the banality of evil”, that the extermination of Jews in Germany and other European countries was not down to the pure evil in Nazi rulers, but to society’s indifference. Seeing how a wild animal is skinned alive is heartbreaking. Seeing how chickens get their beaks cut off so they won’t peck each other due to overcrowding is disturbing. That was the hardest part of the process, the one most difficult to face due to the violence of the imagery. I also watched movies, documentaries and videos. I read a formidable amount of manuals, instructions, fiction material and essays on cannibalism, on meat industry operations and animal rights. I had the story quite clear in my head before sitting down to write it. The creative process was visceral, compulsive but since I am obsessive, there was a preparation process. That is, he has a naked woman in his possession. The protagonist runs a meat-processing plant and is gifted a female to butcher or raise. Humans start being butchered in meat-processing plants. And the plot that I imagined is this: there is a so-called virus affecting animals rendering them inedible and cannibalism becomes legal. I wanted to write about how, in the near future, cannibalism could be legalised, but I needed a story. One day I was walking by a butcher’s shop and all I saw were bodies of animals hanging down and I thought, “Why can’t those be human corpses? After all we are animals, we are flesh.” And that’s how the idea for the novel emerged.

To me, a steak is now a piece of a corpse. When I did, a veil was drawn, and my view of meat consumption was completely changed. Thanks to my own reading on the topic I gradually changed my diet and I stopped eating meat. Gonzalo Bazterrica is a chef and he works with organic food but above all, he is a conscious food researcher and, through his cooking and his research I could understand what Hippocrates meant by: “Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food”. The idea arose from the long evenings I spent at his restaurant Ocho Once in Buenos Aires. It all started with my brother, to whom I dedicated the novel.

Tender is the flesh read