Most of the people I met in Argentina were by times bemused and horrified that I was a vegetarian. It proved to be a challenge and I think, although she was very graceful about it, a bother for the mother of my friend, but for others, I became a cipher and a challenge.
Most people were merely aghast and held up slices of sticky beef on skewers from their asado 
to test my resolve, but a few people at a social occasion became concerned about my health. They told me, in no uncertain terms, that a human cannot live without meat. Setting aside the many millions of people worldwide who do just that, I asked them how long they thought a vegetarian would survive without that most important of foods. They told me that such a person might last two years at the most.
The social occasion was an impromptu house party at a friend of a friend’s, so it didn’t behoove me socially to enter another room let alone cause a conflict, but my incredulity certainly was evident. It was amazing to me that these perhaps otherwise intelligent people had a test case immediately before them that proved their assertion wrong and still persisted in their premise.
I’d been a similar situation in Mar de Plata so I wasn’t entirely unprepared. My friend was reading a Spanish translation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
when his aunt happened by and mentioned that McMurphy, the protagonist, had been sent into the asylum to test conditions. I typically missed much of the ebb and flow of rapid Spanish around me so my friend had to ask me if that were indeed true. I stared at him dumfounded. He’d seen the film some thirty times and was nearly halfway through the book. How could he not know that his aunt’s gross misreading of the text was terribly, inarguably wrong?
Luckily, among the assertions of my imminent death due to meat withdrawal, considering I’d been a vegetarian for more than twenty years, we caught the interest of my friend’s father, who was a doctor. In fact, he was a nutritionist. Instead of inquiring about the specifics of my diet, or my use of supplements, he cut right to the heart of the matter. “How many years have you been vegetarian?” he asked me.
“Over twenty,” I answered.
“He looks healthy to me,” he told the table of smoking and drinking teens and went back to his wine.
