The strange case of hemoglobin – 02/01/2023 – Sérgio Rodrigues

It was one of the unforgettable moments of the vacation, even if forgetting it, in this case, was a blessing. But how can I forget that one day I was served sirloin steak with egg farofa and medical jargon?

I didn’t see the traumatic event approaching. Recently opened, the steakhouse was recommended by many people in the picturesque town of Serra da Mantiqueira, in the succulent stretch of rib-eye steak in the mountains that Minas Gerais shares with São Paulo.

Heloisa is a much less enthusiastic carnivore than I am, but that day the pendulum of the marital program was on my side. The place was nice and big, maybe too big: few tables occupied. I didn’t attach more importance to that. Only later would a possible link between the sparse clientele and the linguistic indigestion served there occur to me.

As blonde as she is young, the waitress looked awkward when I ordered my meat “medium to bad”, as I always do. Nothing special, just the “medium rare” of the English language. Usually one understands right away, but the girl needed convincing.

“You mean a little hemoglobin?” he asked the can. His very blue eyes didn’t even blink, seeming indifferent to the biochemical word that, once uttered, proceeded to emit squeaks and squirm in the center of the table.

At that point I should have gotten up and gone to get some sushi. Or a feijoada. Hours later, with that belated presence of mind that the French call “l’esprit de l’escalier”, I regretted not having doubled down on the bet: “Not just hemoglobin, what about leukocytes? You’re not going to tell me you work with leucopenic oxen!”.

Since life isn’t a sketch, I just stammered something along the lines of “I wish you hadn’t used that word, but that’s what it is.” As soon as the waitress left, Heloisa raised the possibility –which I soon adopted as a certainty– that she was an undercover vegetarian agent, radical and trained in the most advanced techniques of vocabulary terrorism.

It didn’t work for me. Terrorist or not, the word absurdly out of context, betraying centuries of euphemistic gastronomic culture, did not shake my carnivorous convictions.

The sirloin steak that soon arrived at the table, passed a little beyond the order (“where’s the hemoglobin you promised me?”, another sentence I didn’t say), just wasn’t phagocytosed with more pleasure because it was well below the reputation of the house .

None of this is to say that my carnivore is unshakable. I inhabit my time and have seen the old peace of mind associated with the act of eating animals falter, besieged on all sides by ethical, environmental and affective arguments (I have a vegetarian daughter, an experience I recommend to everyone).

The thing is, if rational arguments against the predation of defenseless species abound, the brief glimpse of the linguistic nightmare lived in Mantiqueira is not among them. The effect it had was the opposite — to strengthen my resistance to the medicalization of life that is a 21st century trend.

The intentions may be good, but reducing social gestures rich in cultural meanings to their biological dimension is an attack against the human spirit. Vocabulary choices have consequences.

We started by calling meat, chicken and fish “protein”, we ended up normalizing a hemoglobin at the lunch table. How about opening your eyes before a line like “let’s go home and release some oxytocin into your system” becomes acceptable?

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