BUENOS AIRES – Gonzalo Hernández’s butcher shop is just down the road from statues of a bull and a cattleman, near a neighborhood that gets its name, Mataderos, from its historic role as the center of the city’s beef slaughterhouses.
But even in a cow-centric area in this beef-obsessed country, his customers over the weekend were increasingly lined up for a different type of meat: pork.
“It used to be that this was something we sold as an extra, the same way we did with coal for grilling,” Hernández said, showing off a refrigerated counter full of thick-cut pork shoulder. “Now, pork is a main part of our business.”
That Hernández has had to transfer some of his counter real estate to the humble pig is just one sign of how a tough economy and severe austerity measures – coupled with changing cultural norms – have been pushing people in this South American colossus of beef toward a different kind of red meat.
Right-wing libertarian President Javier Milei, an ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has been slashing federal subsidies and government spending to tackle record inflation, which peaked at a yearly rate of nearly 300 percent in April. His economic shock therapy has further tightened grocery budgets – and in 2024, Argentine beef consumption dropped to the lowest figure per capita in 110 years of data, according to the Rosario Board of Trade.
It is no coincidence, economists say, that Argentines were also on track for 2024 to eat more pork than ever before.
“The Argentine palate has changed,” said Franco Ramseyer, a livestock economist at the Rosario Board of Trade. With total meat consumption holding steady, pork “is a cheaper, leaner alternative with a convincing flavor. So it’s no surprise that people are going to buy it more to replace beef.”
Argentina’s distinction as the country that consumes more beef than any other in the world does not appear likely to change soon: At about 104 pounds per capita, the 2024 figure is down from the historical average (157 pounds), yet still higher than the United States (84) or neighbors Brazil (75) and Chile (57).
But the shift here aligns with a global trend away from beef, Ramseyer added. In North America, fast-food chains have increasingly added chicken items to their menus as healthier, cheaper alternatives. Australia, Brazil, and the European Union are all seeing a steep increase in poultry consumption.
In Argentina, consumption of chicken and processed pork products like chorizo has stayed relatively flat. It’s fresh pork meat that has been on the sharpest rise, contributing to an overall increase from about 19 pounds per person annually a decade ago to a projected 37 pounds in 2024.
Walter Sosa, a third-generation butcher in Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city and a major agricultural center, had for years sold mostly beef out of his family’s shops around town.
Noticing a slight change in sales patterns, they opened up a new store – Carnes Don Francisco – seven years ago to focus exclusively on selling pork. “It had to be a new shop,” he said, “to break people’s habits: ‘You won’t be able to come here and buy a steak.’”
It is hard to overstate the importance of beef in Argentina, a nation of about 46 million where cattle outnumber people and cows are grass-fed for at least part of their lives before slaughter.
Under the country’s populist Peronist party, exports were often limited to reserve beef for the domestic market. But it was also under those governments that inflation spiraled out of control, forcing many Argentines to make adjustments at the butcher shop or grocery store.
Inflation is declining under Milei – it is now at 166 percent – but beef exports are up and production has not increased, thus keeping prices high, said María Julia Aiassa, an analyst for the Rosgan livestock market.
At Hernández’s butcher shop in Buenos Aires, the lines this past weekend stretched out the door, and many customers, still complaining of sticker shock, were forgoing beef.
“Eating a bife de chorizo these days is a luxury,” said Felipe Gil, a 24-year-old student, referring to the most prized cut of beef, a thick-cut steak, which was selling for 18,000 pesos, or $17, per kilo (about 2.2 pounds).
Where Gil’s family could afford to put beef on the dinner table almost every night when he was a child, he said, they have cut back to consuming it two or three times a week. In its place, his father has taken to preparing milanesa – a breaded veal cutlet akin to schnitzel – with tenderized pork instead.
“He would always use eye of round, or more expensive cuts of beef, but times change,” Gil said.
A few decades ago, many Argentines saw pigs as dirty, and pork meat as somewhere between too fatty and too tasteless. What little was eaten – often a cochinillo, or roast suckling pig, on Christmas Eve – was at one point far more expensive than beef.
Daniel Fenoglio, president of the Argentine Porcine Federation, which represents about 90 percent of the country’s pork producers, said technological advances brought from overseas in the 2000s made pork much cheaper to produce.
Where it typically takes years to raise a calf for slaughter – not to mention plenty of open grassland for grazing – pigs could be farmed in far less time and much smaller pens. A national boom in corn and soybean production provided easy access to feed nearby. But consumption really started to grow, Fenoglio said, when the industry began renaming cuts of pork – which had inherited names from Spain – to match Argentines’ distinct denomination for parts of the cow.
“People could start comparing cuts to beef in their flavor, cooking time and price point,” he said. Although chicken is cheaper, pork became a more natural substitute: “The cooking possibilities are very similar in terms of what goes in the oven, on the grill or in a pot on the stove.”
Popular cooking shows have started promoting recipes for pork to make vitel toné, a popular holiday dish of veal in a creamy sauce of anchovies and capers. Marketing campaigns helped spread the idea that fresh pork – which is typically carved up at butcher shops rather than being prepackaged in individual cuts – is healthier than beef.
At least part of that message had stuck with Ramón Chavez, a 50-year-old electrician who was waiting to buy pork shoulder on Saturday.
“It’s not as greasy. It doesn’t make you gain weight as much,” he said, pointing out that pork’s lower melting point renders more fat off the meat. “Well, ask me in a few years.”
For whatever increase it has assumed in Argentines’ diets, no one would dare to say that pork will ever dethrone beef as the most prized item on the grill.
“I’m not convinced,” said Adriana Gutierrez, a government worker who came to buy pork ribs at the butcher. For health reasons, she limits her beef intake to an occasional lean rump steak from a neighborhood restaurant. But even she said the idea of vitel toné with pork seemed “ridiculous.”
At Sosa’s butcher shop in Rosario, meanwhile, the pig paraphernalia covering his Don Francisco store does not appear to have made its strictly pork-only inventory clear to even some of his regular customers.
Several customers – home cooks and grill masters who had been coming in once a week or more – walked in during the holiday rush last week seeking beef as a special treat for Christmas Eve.
“I had to tell them: ‘We simply don’t sell that here,’” he recalled saying. “You’ve been buying only pork for the last year, brother.”
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Sebastián López Brach in Rosario contributed to this report.