Black Friday and other bad US exports to Brazil
Black Friday is a thing in Brazil. It’s one of many bad exports from the United States, and I’ll review a few more in this blog post. Black Friday is named just that, not translated—because I guess sexta-feira preta doesn’t have the same cachet. In fact, just about anything written in English is considered cool, even if it doesn’t make any sense. T-shirts with silly English phrases on them are ubiquitous.
Black Friday isn’t just a Friday, it goes on interminably for the entire month of November. Billboards, social medial promotions and TV ads hype the amazing sales that you don’t want to miss! Black Friday in the US began as a term to describe the day after Thanksgiving, a big shopping day in the lead up to Christmas, that due to the heavy sales traffic often put stores in a positive economic balance, or in the black, for the year. Hence, Black Friday. But there’s no Thanksgiving in Brazil, so the term isn’t connected to any particular Friday. It’s likely that many people don’t even know that Friday refers to a day of the week. It’s estimated that only five percent of Brazilians speak English.
If I were going to choose an American day to export to Brazil, it would be Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is also about unbridled commercialism to some extent, given the amount of food that is bought and consumed. But it involves a meal with family and friends, and it’s supposed to be a celebration of gratitude. The story of the pilgrims and Native Americans sharing food with them is largely apocryphal, but never mind.
Fast food is another bad US export to Brazil. In the 1970s there were no US fast food franchises to be found anywhere in the country. When I first visited Brazil in 1975, obesity was rare. More common, especially in the drought-stricken, impoverished Northeast, was malnutrition from inadequate caloric intake. I saw children with the wispy, bleached-out hair and distended bellies of kwashiorkor, the disease of severe protein deficiency. By the 2000s things had begun to change, with a dramatic increase in the prevalence of obesity. I remarked to my husband that the country could expect a tsunami of Type 2 diabetes, simply based on what I was seeing in the streets.
The first McDonald’s opened in Brazil in 1979. Burger King didn’t enter the market until 2006. In 1981, two business partners founded the first truly Brazilian fast food restaurant, Giraffa’s, in Brasília. Giraffa’s, with its logo of two cute giraffes, is now a franchise with stores throughout Brazil. Fast food is heavily processed and high in empty calories, leading to another kind of malnutrition. It’s too expensive for many Brazilians, but it has moved the public consciousness about what constitutes a good meal from rice, black beans and a protein such as chicken, beef or egg to cheeseburgers and french fries.
At the same time, the scourge of hunger has returned to Brazil. In 2014 the United Nations removed the country from its list of global hunger hot spots, after 10 years of the “zero hunger” campaign started by then, and again current, President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva had reduced the prevalence of hunger by 80 percent. By 2019 31 percent of the population again experienced food insecurity. The Covid-19 pandemic increased that number to 50 percent, as the Bolsonaro administration diverted funds for aid to families and exacerbated the pandemic by a slow rollout of vaccines and discouraging vaccination. But more on that in a minute.
Do you want a soda to go with that? Brazil was conquered long ago by the sweetened, fizzy drink industry. It is considered polite hospitality to offer a visitor to your home coffee or a soft drink. At any special gathering such as a birthday or holiday it is obligatory to serve soda such as Coca-Cola, orange Fanta or the very Brazilian soft drink guaraná, first manufactured by the Antarctica company in 1921. Guaraná is the seed of a climbing tropical vine found in the Amazon and it has mildly stimulant properties like caffeine.
Industrialized food production is another side effect of US influence, and the agrobusiness industry has been a key supporter of Bolsonaro and the far right political movement. Massive soybean and sugar farmlands occupy an ever-increasing share of land in the interior of the country. The direct result of this has been deforestation and displacement of indigenous people from their lands. The Bolsonaro administration encouraged these activities and turned a blind eye to enforcement of existing laws and regulations protecting public and indigenous lands. The public agency Conab, Companhia Nacional de Abastecimento, seeks to strengthen family farming but their remit and support were severely limited by Bolsonaro, who wanted to abolish it entirely. Food prices have increased and the variety of fruits and vegetables available in large supermarkets is somewhat limited, although not as starkly as in the United States. Farmers’ markets are easy to find most days of the week, however, and offer a rich variety of products.
Political polarization is another sad example of US influence in Brazil. Brazilian people have always engaged in passionate discourse about politics, but in the years leading up to the Bolsonaro administration, polarized anger from the extreme right increased alarmingly. Bolsonaro mimicked all the moves of the hard right in the US, and reveled in being referred to as “the Trump of the Tropics” after his election as president in 2018. Many families avoid discussing politics or have had their members alienated from one another if they sit on opposite sides of the political spectrum. The intensity of feeling on the extreme right was evident in the groups camped out in front of military headquarters across the country after the election, saying Lula had not been legitimately elected (there is no evidence of this) and demanding, even praying on bended knees for Bolsonaro to be returned to power. It’s not coincidence that Bolsonaro began the “rigged elections” mantra two years before his race for reelection in 2022. The vitriol and misinformation spread like wildfire on social media and culminated in the rioters attempting to destroy buildings of all three branches of government in Brasília on January 8, 2023.
Anti-vaccine fervor is another unfortunate theme adopted by Bolsonaro from the hard right conspiracy US playbook. He pooh-poohed vaccines and promoted the use of ivermectin, an anti-parasitic, and the anti-malarial hydroxychloroquine despite there being no evidence of their effectiveness and even potential for harm. He famously said that taking the vaccine would turn you into a crocodile .Ironically and predictably, there is now reporting that Bolsonaro secretly received the vaccine himself in 2021.
Another deadly consequence of US cultural adoption is the proliferation of private individual gun ownership and firearm culture in Brazil. Bolsonaro signed many executive actions to allow the purchase of firearms, and one of his favorite gestures is the index-finger-as-pistol. He was even photographed holding a three-year-old girl in his lap and teaching her to do the revolver gesture with her hands. There are sadly many other examples. Gun ownership increased 600% during his administration. And the very worst of America’s refusal to regulate firearms is seen in the tragic shooting at a school in Espírito Santo state in November 2022, where three people were killed and eleven injured.
It wasn’t that long ago that Brazilians made fun of the United States and resisted American influence. The Brazilian tune Chiclete com Banana makes fun of Tio Sam (Uncle Sam) and warns of the risk of mistaking chewing gum for bananas. American cultural imports are now much more dangerous than chewing gum and rock’n’roll.
Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash