Bové believes the future of French food -- and, by extension, of French society -- is in mortal danger from wholly new factors. Among them are the European Union's peasant-crushing Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the United Nations' sinister Codex Alimentarius international food treaty, unfettered global trade, environment-unfriendly agro-business practices, hormones, mad cows and GMOs. Another insidious threat allegedly comes from big-money fast-food chains, specifically McDonald's, which the French call "MacDo."

"If we don't act now it's finished, it's over," the gravel-voiced Bové told me recently, tracing a doomsday picture with his ever-present pipe.

Bové's critics call his rhetoric scaremongering. But if everything's hunky-dory in French fields, kitchens and dining rooms, then why is this 50-year-old dairy farmer from Roquefort a national hero?

Bové's book has been on the bestseller list for months. Wherever he goes, TV, radio and newspapers follow. French people of all ages cajole him to autograph their T-shirts, their pants, their books: whatever's handy when he appears.

Bové and his fellow Fédération Paysanne activists have not merely touched a chord in food-worshipping France. They're playing a cacophonous symphony with choral complement. Furious farmers, rabid ranchers, disgruntled politicians from across the spectrum and, most of all, millions of wary shoppers have lined up behind him, making him a Gallic David against the global Goliath.

Bové's deification began last August in Millau, a bucolic dairy village outside Roquefort, when the stocky curd-wrangler with a horseshoe moustache led a wildly enthusiastic group of 300 local farmers, environmental militants and Fédération Paysanne activists in the "destruction," according to prosecutors, of an unfinished McDonald's franchise as police watched.

Though several arrests were made at the time of the attack, a manhunt by French secret servicemen followed a few days later. Bové, along with a handful of fellow Fédération Paysanne militants, were tossed in jail for about three weeks.

Thus began what Bové now sees as "$30 million's worth of free publicity" for the Fédération Paysanne's peasant revolt against "la malbouffe" and its perpetrators.

On Friday and Saturday, an estimated 40,000 supporters showed up for Bové and his codefendants' hearing in Millau on charges of "ransacking" the McDonald's. But Bové's anti-"MacDo" crusade began in spring 1999, when the United States, faced with refusals by France to import American beef (as a result of feared growth hormone residues), applied punitive duties on dozens of French products.

One of the hardest hit was Roquefort cheese. Roquefort makers sell 440 tons of their pocked blue curd to America every year at a wholesale value of 30 million francs ($4.3 million). Needless to say, local milk suppliers like Bové weren't happy. As if to add insult to injury, a new McDonald's franchise -- nearly 800 Golden Arches already grace some 420 French towns -- was under construction in nearby Millau, Roquefort's backyard.

The punitive tariff on so symbolic a food was viewed by Bové as pure provocation. Roquefort isn't just any fromage. In 76 B.C. the ancient Roman chronicler Pliny the Elder traveled to Gaul, reporting back about the peculiar mold-flecked cheese. Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot called Roquefort "the king of French cheeses." In 1925 Roquefort became the first French product to receive the coveted AOC (Appellation d'Origine Controllée), devised to thwart counterfeiters.

"It was truly stupid for the American administration to take Roquefort cheese hostage in the hormone-beef trade war," Bové tells me in Paris, puffing away. "They represent two utterly irreconcilable types of farming. Doubling the import duties on a high-quality AOC to force us to buy hormone-beef? It's folly."

Despite the confrontational tone, Bové and his Fédération Paysanne's gastro-crusaders did not target McDonald's simply because it's American. Nor is Bové your average French dairyman. He spent part of his childhood in California with his scientist parents. (They were doing agricultural research at the University of California at Berkeley.) He speaks fluent English and scoffs at attempts to discredit him by labeling him anti-American or cravenly nationalistic.

"When I was in America last year I talked to farmers and consumers and our message got through," he says. "Texan cattle ranchers, non-GMO soy growers, Alaskan salmon fishermen -- they've taken inspiration from European movements. I think there's an awakening of consciousness in America, too; things are beginning to move."

Bové and his federation targeted McDonald's, he says, because the chain serves what he calls "food from nowhere" -- what he and many other Frenchmen perceive as corporate, culture-less and rootless food. Menu items such as hamburgers or chicken nuggets, notes Bové, are "recomposed" from myriad sources; they're standardized, bland, sterilized. This, to his mind, is the antithesis of traditional French food and all that goes with it -- the art of growing, eating and cooking with a reverence for the soil and the seasons.

"In France the link to your roots is very much through food and cooking traditions," explains Bové, whose ranchland near Roquefort is encircled by 800-year-old stone walls. "In America there's no sense of an ancient civilization with a rural identity, etched over time into the landscape."

The notion that food is both sacred and site-specific is the root of the emotionally charged French concept of "terroir." First applied to describe the association of grape variety and soil in winemaking, it has come to evoke the wholesome, earthy qualities of regional foods and cooking.

The more France goes global, the more fast foods and hyper-markets there are, the more tenaciously the French adhere to concepts such as "terroir," talismans against an uncertain future.

And for good reason. France's gastronomic future looks increasingly overweight. Researchers such as Dr. Philippe Froguel of France's prestigious CNRS and Institut Pasteur in Lille, believe that Europeans will reach American obesity levels in the next 20 years.

"Half of Americans are overweight," Froguel told me. "A quarter are obese. Right now 30 percent of Europeans are overweight. However, European children are getting fatter all the time. Child obesity has doubled in France in the past five years, and obesity among young French adults has shot up 45 percent." Froguel, also a diabetes expert, adds that "atypical diabetes" (i.e. juvenile diabetes) -- an affliction associated in part with a genetic predisposition and in part with unhealthy eating habits -- was unknown in France until 1999.

Why is this happening? According to Froguel, the French appear to believe they are increasingly under the sway of "MacDomination" and "Cocacolonization." The power of terroir would seem to be weakening.

"Just because we've got these great French chefs it doesn't mean the mass of French restaurants is good," says a pragmatic Bové. "Responsibility for McDonald's popularity falls on French restaurants and bistros that are frozen in time, like in a [Robert] Doisneau photograph [from the 1950s] ... Institutional restaurants are disgusting, school restaurants are revolting. In them we have tasteless, insipid, homogenous food, so kids prefer to eat at MacDo instead of the school cafeteria."

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