RIO DE JANEIRO – After years preparing hearty vegan meals for an ashram in the mountains outside Rio de Janeiro, Luiza de Marilac Tavares saw her life ruined and without a job when the pandemic forced the center to close.
She started cooking at home, hoping to survive taking orders from people she knew. Instead, orders for her exquisite food skyrocketed: with a little marketing on Instagram, she inadvertently hit Brazil’s growing demand for plant foods.
The country, which is the world’s largest beef exporter, has undergone a dramatic shift towards plant diets. The number of self-declared vegetarians in Brazil has almost doubled in a six-year period, according to research by the research firm Ibope; 30 million people, or 14 percent of Brazilians, reported being vegetarian or vegan in 2018.
Ms. Tavares, a Hare Krishna who describes cooking as a sacred act that brings her closer to God, says: “There is a shift in consciousness underway.”
But the increase in demand goes far beyond the set of namaste.
Conventional supermarkets now stock food made from vegetable protein alongside meat, poultry and fish. And in the more sophisticated neighborhoods of big capitals, restaurants that pay as much attention to the atmosphere as to the menu serve creative and meatless dishes for a casual and hip crowd.
This transformation has transformed the nation of 212 million people – known worldwide for barbecue at will and increasingly under siege by the carbon footprint of their cattle farms – into a powerhouse for plant-based food innovation.
Brazilian plant-based food start-ups have seen increasing demand since animal protein analogs became widely available in 2019 in supermarkets and restaurants. Its founders predict that within a few years consumers will be unable to distinguish between a cow burger and one made with pea protein, beet juice and potato starch.
“We are going through a revolution,” said Bruno Fonseca, co-founder of New Butchers, one of several new Brazilian companies that make vegetable replicas of animal protein, including hamburgers, chicken breast alternatives and salmon imitation.
A few years ago, giving up meat was unthinkable for the vast majority of Brazilians. Feijoada, a national dish, is a stew made with beans and pork. Weekend outdoor barbecues, in which families and friends gather for hours, eating generous steaks, chicken and sausage, are a revered ritual across the country.
“Eating is the most cultural thing that exists,” said Gustavo Guadagnini, managing director of the Good Food Institute Brazil, which supports companies producing vegetable alternatives. “It’s about the region you are from, family recipes.”
Until recently, Guadagnini said that suggesting that Brazilians stop eating meat meant asking them to give up an essential part of their identity.
“We are now offering the same foods that people are used to eating, but in a way that depends on new technologies,” he said. “They can make the choice without much difficulty.”
Proponents of vegetarian and vegan diets in Brazil ask people to start with small changes, such as meatless Mondays.
Sandra Lopes, managing director of Mercy for Animals, oversees a team that does secret investigations into abusive practices on food farms. But in addition to these conventional tactics of name and shame, Mercy for Animals has had considerable success recruiting school districts and companies interested in reducing the amount of animal meat they serve.
Several public schools across the country have agreed to reduce animal protein by 20%, generally eliminating it entirely one day a week, Lopes said. This exposes children to vegan alternatives from an early age and gives local authorities the satisfaction of supporting a segment of the food industry that operates in a more sustainable way.
“We are not making a radical request,” said Lopes. “And children like the food being served.”
Groups like Mercy for Animals, which opened an office in Brazil in 2015, have found powerful allies among some of the country’s biggest celebrities.
Anitta, one of the largest record labels in Brazil, says she has drastically reduced meat consumption out of concern for the environmental impact.
Felipe Neto, a videoblogger and businessman with more than 40 million subscribers on YouTube, announced last year that he was becoming a vegetarian while Brazil attracted global outrage over an unusually destructive fire season in the Amazon.
“You know that feeling when you are doing something wrong, you know you are wrong, and its consequences weigh on your conscience,” he said last year, explaining his decision.
The most militant vegan celebrity in Brazil is television presenter Xuxa Meneghel, whose daytime variety show was a sensation throughout Latin America in the 1990s. Meneghel, 57, attributed his energy level and libido to his vegan diet . But she said that watching documentaries like “Cowspiracy” and “What the Health” convinced her that eating animals was not only harmful to health, but also unfair.
“I would recommend people to reconsider the custom of celebrating birthdays and meeting friends with dead animals on a plate,” she said by email. “I would really like to see people reduce the consumption of corpses.”
Companies that trusted Brazilians’ love of meat noticed the change in opinion and appetite and started to enter the increasingly crowded vegetable market.
The Outback Steakhouse, one of the most popular restaurant chains in Brazil, launched a hamburger made with broccoli and cauliflower earlier this year.
The Brazilian JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, which has been criticized for its role in illegal deforestation in the Amazon, launched last year a line of vegetable products that are marketed as having the same texture and flavor as meat.
The company claims that expanding this sector is the only way to feed humans sustainably in the coming decades.
“The world will have about 10 billion people in 2050, so the demand for food will increase and it will be necessary to offer alternatives,” the company said in an e-mailed statement. “JBS ‘vegetable protein strategy seeks to offer new alternatives to consumers, whether they are vegan, vegetarian or flexicile.”
Marcos Leta, founder of Fazenda Futuro, who in 2019 became the first major Brazilian start-up to sell vegetable meat products in supermarkets, studied the country’s meat industry supply chain and its export models and believes that the Brazil has the potential to become a major exporter of plant-based foods.
Leta likes her products to be displayed in supermarkets alongside packages of frozen chicken breast and ribs. He says it is only a matter of time before he and his competitors can produce on a scale that makes their products competitive with cheap meat and chicken.
“My competition is butchers,” said Leta, who said she eats meat nowadays mainly as part of research and development efforts to bring the taste and texture of her food closer to the original. “The company’s mission is, at some point in the future, to make refrigerators obsolete.”
Leta said his company is making progress towards that goal. He recently started exporting his products to the Netherlands, which include imitations of meatballs, ground beef and sausage. It has already closed distribution contracts in the United Kingdom, Germany and several countries in Latin America.
Mrs. Tavares, 61, who works long hours to prepare around 400 meals a week with the help of the cooks at the Hare Krishna temple in Rio de Janeiro, where she loves, rolls her eyes at the mention of these new companies working hard to create imitations of meat.
But she admits that they can be a stepping stone for many towards discovering the richness and pleasure she found in cooking and eating plant-based foods that look and taste like plants.
“When you become a vegetarian, it’s like a key has turned,” she said. “You start to see things differently.”
Lis Moriconi contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro.