http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=01/12/26/6849756 Josi Bovi A French farmer who dismantled a McDonalds By Florence Williams, Outside The accused threads his way up the steps of the stone Palais de Justice in the ancient French city of Montpellier. He has receding sandy hair and a comically long walrus mustache, wears a little yellow neck scarf, and clutches a pipe. Muscular young activists in yellow T-shirts escort him past dozens of aggressive TV cameramen, all jockeying for a better angle. Halfway up the stairs, the defendant turns, smiles into the cameras, and gazes over the several hundred protesters gathered on the street below. He gives a thumbs-up and pumps his fist. The crowd goes wild. Their hero is, with the possible exception of President Jacques Chirac, Frances most famous political personality. His name is Josi Bovi. He makes cheese. It is the morning of February 15, 2001, and Bovi, 47, and his nine (virtually unnoticed) co-defendants are appealing their sentences for criminal vandalism convictions, charges resulting from a 1999 protest in which a McDonalds under construction just outside the farming village of Millau was disassembled, bolt by bolt, and carted away. Bovi, sentenced to three months in prison, is unapologetic. He took apart the McDonalds to protest American imperialism, its trade policies, and the general, noxious spread of malbouffe. Malbouffe, Bovi has said, "implies eating any old thing, prepared in any old way . . . both the standardization of food like McDonaldsthe same taste from one end of the world to the otherand the choice of food associated with the use of hormones and GMOs [genetically modified organisms], as well as the residues of pesticides and other things that can endanger health." Read more