ARGENTINA: Let Them Eat Vegetables

Meat can shorten a man's life, warned Health Minister Ramon Carrillo last week in a speech to 4,000 fellow Argentines. With evangelistic fervor, Carrillo urged them to eat less meat and more vegetables, and to persuade other citizens of the Republic of Beef to do the same. The occasion was a government-sponsored conference on "Rational Eating." Officially, its purpose was to improve Argentines' health by educating them to "modify negative eating habits"; actually, the conference was another effort to relieve Argentina's beef shortage.

By most countries' standards, Argentina has plenty of beef. But Argentines are just about the most carnivorous people on earth, stowing away an average of 235 Ibs. of meat a year, mostly beef. (U.S. average: 130 Ibs., about half of it beef.) Despite heavy home consumption, Argentina used to have lots of beef for export. Then Juan Perón & Co. began tinkering with the national economy. A soak-the-farmers policy cut heavily into grain and cattle production. Last year, despite severely curtailed beef exports, Buenos Aires got its first taste of a meat shortage, with meatless days in restaurants and queues outside butcher shops. Since then, Perón has given cattlemen a somewhat better break, but beef is still in short supply.

Perón's problem is to export more beef to pay for essential imports without making the beef-loving voters at home too unhappy. In the drive to bring down meat consumption, Health Minister Carrillo is trying to scare his countrymen into becoming vegetarians. At a busy corner in downtown Buenos Aires, he has put up a "Health Cooking" stand featuring free, meatless recipes, and a huge blackboard warning of disorders, from gallstones to high blood pressure, which he insists are caused by excessive meat-eating.