David Lawdaydoes his best to explain a nation that fusses over food but flocks to McDonald's

No disrespect to the Italians or the Chinese, but food is a French thing. Look for the reasons for France's intransigence towards British beef not in the bacterial ifs and buts of science, but in the caverns of the French psyche. It may be that an agreement is at hand. But a question remains: what choice cut of their soul will the French sell for European unity?

The French are uneasy. Political fears and rivalries, as well as their unique food culture, have a part in the dilemma. Trite to say, but, yes, the average Frenchman cares deeply about food. Bankers, bureaucrats and bakers yearn to be peasants stuffing the larder with fresh vegetables and hauling in game from the woods. Many play out the fantasy at weekends.

Concern for quality and freshness now rises automatically as a barrier against British beef and stays there. Call it irrational, but the mad cow export ban is not expunged from French minds by the scientific assurances of food-safety panels. The French do not give the British high credit for knowing about food, though it is an irony that one item from which they have not previously shrunk is roast beef (hence les rosbifs, their kinder counterpart in name-calling to the British "frogs").

It may also have escaped notice that the French, when things are normal, are Britain's biggest single beef market, and that around 40 other countries, including the US, also haven't yet changed their minds about buying it.

But there are serious contradictions in the French position on food, which cause France's current unease. The beef war has somehow become confused with a defensive line that the French popularly draw between food and industry. Whereas the British blithely lump them together, the French see the second as the enemy of the first. This twists the facts. France has the biggest food processing industry in Europe and counts upon it for its economic success.

The swift rise to Robin Hood status of one Jose Bove, a moustached paysan from the agricultural south who last month tore down the local McDonald's, reflects French contradictions in the midst of food-industry globalisation. What the heroic Bove resents is the dumbing-down of food. He aims to make sure French farmers can go on providing the right stuff. And all the while McDonald's does roaring business in France and giant food markets proliferate with all the plastic wrap that big industry can produce.

Obstinacy over British beef relates not only to some looming cloud of grief that food-quality traditions are in danger, but, more precisely, to politicians' fears of making a false step on the public health tightrope. The horror story of France's blood transfusion stocks becoming tainted by the Aids virus still numbs the ruling Socialists. More than 5,000 people, including fully half of France's haemophiliacs, became infected. Hundreds died. The political ambitions of Laurent Fabius, the prime minister who unwittingly presided over this catastrophe in the 1980s and eventually stood trial for manslaughter this year, are finished.

No wonder a chill grips the present government of Lionel Jospin; no wonder precaution is the notice of the day. Precaution, precaution. It has led France into a trap. By way of precaution, it last year set up its own food safety agency in competition, it seems, with the European Commission's highest technical panel, which has given British beef the all clear. Did the French realise the obvious scope for conflict that this entailed? At the very least, the creation of the French panel looks ill-judged, since the authority invested in it threatens the basic principles of European integration that France supports. The French agency's continuing doubts - it reckons that a further 2,000 or more mad cow cases in Britain this year are evidence that the disease isn't entirely contained - have stood as the basis for France's core conditions for letting in British beef: national labelling and a control system that ensures infected meat can't enter the food chain.

For Jospin, the political risk of ignoring his new agency's publicly announced doubts is too high to take. If things went wrong, he would be in a worse plight than Laurent Fabius. Moreover, Jospin's "defender of the health" title is disputed by the Gaullist president, Jacques Chirac. These two are already squaring off for the next presidential election. Unlike the dry Jospin, Chirac is very good at playing the paysan. He never looks happier than when squeezing people carrying hoes. The trouble is that neither Jospin nor Chirac can afford to show they are cavalier about the safety of what the French eat. So now they are in the electoral ring with a side of British beef wedged between them.

This is unfortunate for Tony Blair. It is equally unfortunate for Europe. Since France's "precaution" policy comes down to side-stepping the basic principles that bind the European Union, Europe's single market is ultimately in jeopardy. Taking France's cue, some other member country could claim that French cheese really is a hazardous trial for the nose. Hence France's unease over its stand . The act of saving its soul - or seeming to - not only threatens Europe, but it arms those who are hostile to both Europe and the euro.

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