The Roquefort Files -- cont.

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Outside Magazine June 2001

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The Roquefort Files -- cont.

BETWEEN TV APPEARANCES and strategy sessions with his attorneys, Bové is hunkered down in a faux-leather couch, sipping espresso and smoking, in the lobby of his hotel in downtown Montpellier. In his plaid shirt, green wool V-neck sweater, and jeans, with that ubiquitous pipe, Bové looks out of place amid the mod decor. As we talk, he alternately ignores and courts the swell of reporters—TV crews, the Paris papers, the BBC—milling about the lobby. He seems impatient, like he's got more important McNuggets to fry. He's been 18 months without a vacation, he complains. He's tired. But there's work to be done.

"In the Larzac we have been fighting together for 20 years, and people know how to fight. They won't be scared to fight again," he says. "Farmers are losing 15 million francs each year because of the United States. There is no international court where we can say we don't agree. That's why we demonstrated against McDonald's."

Roquefort cheese, Bové points out, is as opposite as you can get from cheap beef. "Terroir is a human story, the story of the land. It means not just geography, but a special way to make a product. The agricultural industry wants to put all this out of business and keep a little place for terroir, only for rich people." Meanwhile, he says, "American consumers care only about price, not about what kind of food. People are eating out more and more, eating quickly, having problems with health and 30 percent obesity. The problem is the industrial way of making food."

"Making cheese," on the other hand, "you know exactly what you're doing." Bové's agricultural solutions are extensions of this philosophy of self-reliance. "Each area in the world should feed its own population, not the whole world," he says. "One of the first things we have to do is stop the subsidies and just feed our own population. ... Cheese and wine have no subsidies. People who want to buy it, buy it. People who don't, don't."

All week I've been asking Bové to show me his Montredon farm, to see how his two careers as protester and farmer have connected. First he tells me, "Later," in that noncommittal French way, and then, "I've stopped inviting media to my home." It's true, the attention is wearisome, but life in the spotlight has also made it difficult for Bové to juggle increasingly complex social obligations. When I drive through the Larzac's rolling grasslands and lonely limestone outcroppings to see the farm where it all began, I find Bové's wife and longtime comrade-in-arms, who is no longer one of his fans.

A petite, pretty woman with a smooth, warm face and a grayish bob, Alice Monier invites me into their 130-year-old stone farmhouse, on a village lane ending abruptly in fields. With a glance at her two visiting daughters, Marie and Hélène, smoking cigarettes by the fireplace, she presents me with a long cri de coeur published last year in the Confédération Paysanne newsletter, in which she scathingly makes accusations of infidelity—Bové, she says, left her for another woman last June—and recounts her subsequent emotional abandonment by Confédération Paysanne. Not only is Monier disgusted with Bové, she is disgusted with the whole pack of farmer-activists, the whole damn "union of machos."

Even some of the machos have grown disillusioned with their local star. A couple of activists have jumped ship to work with other organizations, citing unhappiness with what they perceive as Bové's media-lapping. But most are still firmly behind him. In another old stone house not far from Montredon, I catch up with McDonald's codefendants Richard Maillé, a pink-cheeked fellow with a Caesar haircut, and Jean-Emile Sanchez, a Cat Stevens look-alike with limbs like tree trunks. This is his family's farm, Maillé, 34, tells me; the land has been cultivated since the 12th century. (His graying father, Léon, brandished a chainsaw during the Millau incident.)

I ask whether Bové gets too much credit. "Yes," answers Sanchez quickly. "People are becoming more interested in his persona and forget about what the movement's about. He's not the charismatic leader. This is not only about him."

Adds Maillé, "They think if they send just him to prison, they will destroy the movement. But the movement is bigger than that. We will continue to destroy more crops. It will be fabulous."

The Maillés recently decided to produce organic ewes' milk, and so they have switched from selling it to a Roquefort company (which, Richard scoffs, is highly industrialized and not organic) to a local producer. He cheerfully spreads the cheese on bread and passes it around.

Sanchez takes a bite and makes a face. "You can taste the nuts in the bread," he says. "The cheese is not as strong as it should be."

Maillé is crestfallen. "I know," he admits sheepishly. "It's a new company, and this cheese is only aged a month and not three or four months because there's not enough production to fill the orders yet."

"We'll sell it to the Germans," he adds, brightening. "They're not connoisseurs."

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