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Q: In your new book, ''The World Is Not for Sale: Farmers Against Junk Food,'' you call genetic modification a ''technique of tyranny.'' What do you mean by that?
José Bové: The moment you have G.M. seeds in a field, the other fields around it are inevitably going to be contaminated. You can't grow conventional corn next to the genetically modified stuff. The same with soybeans. This imposes on all farmers a single kind of agriculture that is contrary to the natural biodiversity. So the technique itself is totalitarian.
The press has portrayed your attack on McDonald's as a kind of anti-Americanism. But you dispute that claim.
Of course. The same thing that is happening in the United States is happening in France and everywhere else: big conglomerates are trying to standardize food production and consumption to their exclusive advantage. It's not at all a question of the company's national origins.
Perhaps Americans just get defensive, because the French always seem to think their culture is so, well, superior.
That's one of the problems with the United States. Criticism directed at a particular issue is automatically taken as a global criticism of the United States and its population. There's this impulse to justify and defend everything without realizing that it's through debate that people begin to understand each other.
Do you ever eat fast food yourself? Have you ever had a Big Mac?
No. It's not the kind of food I like.
How do you know it's so bad if you've never had it?
I know how the hamburgers are made. I know where the meat comes from. I know what kind of vegetables are used and how they're cultivated. I know how everything is formatted and industrialized. This kind of food has absolutely no relation to what I consider food to be. Food is something that's different every time, that varies from place to place.
So you avoid fast food not on political principle but because you don't like the way it tastes?
It's everything: the desire of these multinationals to impose this kind of food on the entire planet, their social organization in which employees are treated like pawns, their way of destroying local agriculture. Taste is one reason but not the only one.
How do you explain the fact that millions of people all over the world seem to love the stuff?
The paradox is that in the United States, more and more people are trying other options. In some countries where fast food is taking off, I think there's a sense of buying into the American dream. People don't realize that in the United States, fast food is nobody's dream anymore.
Don't you have a weakness for any kind of junk food? I eat quite well, but I do have a weakness for French fries.
French fries are not necessarily bad for you. It depends on the kind of potatoes you use.
What do you do when you're stuck for hours in an airport?
Even in airports, there are places where you can eat more or less properly.
McDonald's just announced it has bought the rights to use the French cartoon figure Asterix in ads in France. You've often been compared to Asterix, a symbol of Gallic independence who also happens to have a handlebar moustache. Did you take McDonald's action personally?
Well, I don't think it's an accident that they did this.
Any truth to the rumors that you were planning to run for president?
No. Those were false rumors put out by people who thought I could present an alternative. But I'd rather devote my energy to developing political opposition than to trying to unite the votes of the disaffected.
Before we go, one last question: It's lunch time in France. What are you going to eat?
Celery.
-- NY Times Magazine
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