The Roquefort Files -- cont.

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Outside Magazine June 2001

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The Roquefort Files -- cont.

NEEDLESS TO SAY, THE McDONALD'S Corporation was not amused—and is still not amused. "We are so the wrong target," says company spokesman Brad Trask from global headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. "Our French outlets are virtually entirely locally sourced and Bové knows that quite well. You'll find no better supporter of local agriculture than us." Besides, Trask sniffs, "Bové is a gentleman farmer who got his farm by squatting and falling into it. He's an unlikely spokesman."

Bové, who has been making powerful enemies his entire adult life, is indeed more complicated than the gruff peasant he projects.The son of two crop scientists, Bové lived in Berkeley from the age of three until he was seven, while his parents, Josy and Colette, studied microbiology at the University of California. His two younger brothers grew up and got normal jobs, but José made a career of rebellion: At 16, he got kicked out of Catholic school in a Paris suburb for writing a short story about a not-so-godly hero with a fondness for drugs. Two years later, in 1971, he dropped out of Bordeaux University after one month. "I thought I had other things to do," Bové says—things like campaigning for disarmament, fighting the French military's narrow definition of "conscientious objector," and hanging around Bordeaux reading Thoreau and Gandhi. He met his wife, political science student Alice Monier, when they found themselves painting a protest banner side by side.

It was their antimilitary activism that drew Alice and José to the Larzac. In the fields outside the town of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, native ewes graze native grasses, and the cheese made from their milk is infused with the venerable fungus Penicillium roqueforti and aged for months in limestone caves. As with French wines, the operative word is terroir ("of the earth")—the very essence of the soil in which a product is grown.

In the early 1970s, a large swath of this sacred cheeseland lay in the path of a proposed army base expansion. José and Alice joined scores of students, socialists, feminists, and general lefties in the Larzac farmers' fight. In February 1976, married and with an infant daughter, Marie, the couple moved to the Larzac full-time to squat on land purchased by the army. (They'd been hiding out on a collective farm in the Pyrenees until then, so that José could dodge the draft.) They occupied an old farmhouse in the village of Montredon, and Bové busied himself planning pranks. That June, he and 20 cohorts broke into a military camp and stole records documenting farm foreclosures; the next summer, he piloted one of 90 tractors in a convoy that occupied the base's firing range. By the time the government eventually backed down, in 1981, Alice and José had another daughter, Hélène, and, with four partners, a robust flock of sheep producing fine Roquefort milk.

With the army off their backs, the Larzac farmers turned their attention to more general reform, and in 1987, Bové and fellow farmer-activist François DuFour helped found the Confédération Paysanne. For the next decade, the new national farmer's union lobbied for small farming, created co-ops, and fought the increasing use of the milk-yield hormone bovine somatotrophine (BST).

In January 1996, as the mad cow crisis roiled Europe, Bové's genius for symbolism reached new heights. He led Gertrude and Laurette, a cow and her calf, to the steps of the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris to dramatize how normal farm animals would be rendered obsolete if the import of hormone-fed meat was permitted. That September Bové led farmers into the Central Customs Service in Toulouse and made off with documents uncovering the large quantities of British animal feed being shipped into the country. In January 1998, Bové and others broke into a facility in Nerac owned by the Swiss company Novartis and destroyed genetically engineered corn seeds. In June 1999, just before the sacking of the Millau MacDo, he pulled the transgenic rice caper at the research lab, one of the cases on the docket in Montpellier.

In the aftermath of the McDonald's incident—his third arrest in two years—Bové transcended regional notoriety: Thirty thousand Bovistes thronged Millau for the first trial of the McDonald's Ten in July 2000. The defendants rolled into town on a cart pulled by a tractor, echoing the preferred means of delivery to the guillotine. Now Bové is on his way to international celebrity. Having sold 100,000 copies in France, his book, Le Monde N'est Pas Une Merchandise, cowritten with François DuFour, is being translated into nine languages, including Turkish, Japanese, Korean, and Catalan. The U.S. version, The World is Not For Sale, will be published by Verso Books this summer.

Only in France, and perhaps Central America, do green peasant revolutionaries become megacelebrities. Would Americans wear fey little neck scarves for Ralph Nader? Bof. Ecoprotesters here risk jail time to save endangered lynx. In France they do it for mold.

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