The Roquefort Files -- cont.

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Outside Magazine June 2001

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The Roquefort Files -- cont.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, was first discovered in British cattle in 1986. A similar infection, scrapie, had most likely jumped species after sheep offal was fed to cows; the disease, which riddles the host's brain with holes, spread further when the remains of diseased cows were fed to other cattle. More than a thousand cases a week were being reported in the United Kingdom by 1993. Only a handful of French people have contracted new-variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—the fatal nervous-system collapse that stems from eating BSE-infected beef—as opposed to 90 in Great Britain, but 161 mad cow cases were documented in France last year (and 1,101 in Britain). When several French supermarket chains revealed last October that they had stocked meat from a contaminated farm, national beef consumption dropped 40 percent.

The mad cow disaster, however, has been dwarfed by this year's outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The first confirmed case of the nonfatal skin infection, in which animals develop sores, lose weight, and stop producing milk, turned up on February 20, 2001, in pigs in Northumberland, England. They had dined on restaurant slop containing illegally imported meat from Asia, where foot-and-mouth is common. The disease poses no risk to humans, but is highly contagious and economically devastating; this spring, as British farmers slaughtered up to 30,000 animals a week, scientists warned that 30 percent of the nation's farms may be hit by the epidemic, and half of its livestock sacrificed.

It wasn't long before foot-and-mouth jumped the Channel. On March 13, France confirmed its first case at a dairy farm in Laval, where the cows had been grazing near imported British sheep, and has since sent 50,000 animals to the pyres. Eight days later, Dutch officials announced the Netherlands' first case of foot-and-mouth.

But what does any of this have to do with the construction of yet another McDonald's? Bové's beef was not with McDonald's per se, but in August 1999 the fast-food chain was a convenient scapegoat. Europe had weathered a number of food scares that summer: Benzodioxin had turned up in Belgian chickens, and, in an unrelated and unsolved incident, 14 Belgian schoolchildren had fallen ill after drinking Coca-Cola, prompting a three-country ban on Coke products. Mad cow worries lingered. The immediate trigger for the assault, however, was a minor trade war between France and the United States, in which a chief victim was Roquefort cheese, the pungent blue made from sheep's milk and produced only in Bové's home region, the Larzac—a rugged, heath-covered plateau in Midi-Pyrénées about halfway between Toulouse and Marseilles. That July, after France renewed its refusal to import American hormone-fed beef, the U.S. slapped a punitive tariff of 100 percent on 77 French agricultural products, including Roquefort. "We didn't understand why the U.S. did this thing," Bové gripes. "It was a real provocation." Although McDonald's restaurants in France use only French, hormone-free meat, many there view the chain as the embodiment of the American 800-pound gorilla. (There are 850 McDonald's outlets in France, and 1.5 million people—out of a population of 60 million—eat there daily, malbouffe ou non.) When Bové and his fellow radical sheep farmers heard that a "MacDo" was going up in their backyards, they were insulted.

And so, on the morning of August 12, 1999, after informing police of their plans, the farmers, accompanied by several hundred supporters, rumbled in their tractors and forklifts and Citroëns to the site of the nearly completed McDonald's. With chainsaws, chisels, and screwdrivers, the crowd, kids too, set about removing windows, prying off tiles, dismantling walls, and taking down signs. "The whole building appeared to have been assembled from a kit," Bové recalled with mild Gallic disdain. "The structure was very flimsy."

The event was made for television. There was Bové, lugging around a broken McDonald's sign bigger than he was. There was the parade of farm vehicles loaded with debris, which was gently deposited on the lawn of the Millau regional prefecture. There were the farmwives, cheerfully passing out Roquefort snacks to drivers and passersby. "Every single symbol was there," Bruno Rebelle, director of Greenpeace France, says admiringly. "A small farmer, a big fast-food, low-quality, highly globalized company."

"You see," he adds, "in the U.S., food is fuel. Here, it's a love story."

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