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most likely targets of overseas demonstrations against “U.S. imperialism.” Today fast food restaurants have assumed that symbolic role, with McDonald’s a particular favorite. In 1995, a crowd of four hundred Danish anarchists looted a McDonald’s in downtown Copenhagen, made a bonfire of its furniture in the street, and burned the restaurant to the ground. In 1996, Indian farmers ransacked a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Bangalore, convinced that the chain threatened their traditional agricultural practices. In 1997, a McDonald’s in the Colombian city of Cali was destroyed by a bomb. In 1998, bombs destroyed a McDonald’s in St. Petersburg, Russia, two McDonald’s in suburban Athens, a McDonald’s in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, and a Planet Hollywood in Cape Town, South Africa. In 1999, Belgian vegetarians set fire to a McDonald’s in Antwerp, and a year later, May Day protesters tore the sign off a McDonald’s in London’s Trafalgar Square, destroyed the restaurant, and handed out free hamburgers to the crowd. Fearing more violence, McDonald’s temporarily closed all fifty of its London restaurants.

In France, a French sheep farmer and political activist named Jose Bove led a group that demolished a McDonald’s under construction in his hometown of Millau. Bove’s defiant attitude, brief imprisonment, and impassioned speeches against “lousy food” have made him a hero in France, praised by socialists and conservatives, invited to meetings with the president and the prime minister. He has written a French bestseller entitled The World Is Not for Sale — And Nor Am I! In a society where food is a source of tremendous national pride, the McDonald’s Corporation has become an easy target, for reasons that are not entirely symbolic. McDonald’s is now the largest purchaser of agricultural commodities in France. Bove’s message — that Frenchmen should not become “servile slaves at the service of agribusiness”— has struck a chord. During July of 2000 an estimated thirty thousand demonstrators gathered in Millau when Jose Bove went on trial, some carrying signs that said “Non à McMerde.”

The overseas critics of fast food are far more diverse than America’s old Soviet bloc adversaries. Farmers, leftists, anarchists, nationalists, environmentalists, consumer advocates, educators, health officials, labor unions, and defenders of animal rights have found common ground in a campaign against the perceived Americanization of the world. Fast food has become a target because it is so ubiquitous and because it threatens a fundamental aspect of national identity: how, where, and what people choose to eat.

The longest-running and most systematic assault on fast food overseas has been waged by a pair of British activists affiliated with London Greenpeace. The loosely organized group was formed in 1971 to oppose French nuclear weapon tests in the South Seas. It later staged demonstrations in support of animal rights and British trade unions. It protested against nuclear power and the Falklands War. The group’s membership was a small, eclectic mix of pacifists, anarchists, vegetarians, and libertarians brought together by a commitment to nonviolent political action. They ran the organization without any formal leadership, even refusing to join the International Greenpeace movement.

A typical meeting of London Greenpeace attracted anywhere from three people to three dozen. In 1986 the group decided to target Mc-Donald’s, later explaining that the company “epitomises everything we despise: a junk culture, the deadly banality of capitalism.” Members of London Greenpeace began to distribute a six-page leaflet called “What’s Wrong with McDonald’s? Everything they don’t want you to know.” It accused the fast food chain of promoting Third World poverty, selling unhealthy food, exploiting workers and children, torturing animals, and destroying the Amazon rain forest, among other things. Some of the text was factual and straightforward; some of it was pure agitprop. Along the top of the leaflet ran a series of golden arches punctuated by slogans like “McDollars,