Old Hobbits die hard.

[mattd]

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."
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