Chef fights claim he libelled food industry

Pots and pans will fly, metaphorically, in a Parisian courtroom today when one of the most respected chefs in France is accused of libelling the French food industry.

Alain Passard, chef of L'Arpège restaurant in the heart of Paris, told television viewers last December that the city's wholesale food market at Rungis "sold mad cows" and "vegetables which had never seen real soil".

Mr Passard, who has three stars in the Michelin Guide, had earlier announced that he had abandoned using meat in his restaurant and would concentrate on vegetable and fish dishes.

He is accused of "defamation" by the organisation that runs the Rungis market, which contains scores of independent traders. On a live television programme called Bonne Bouffe, Mal Bouffe – which translates as Good Grub, Bad Grub – he said that vegetables sold at Rungis were often mass-produced without contact with real soil; that the meat sometimes came from animals raised "in deplorable conditions"; and that some beef came from "mad cows".

The lawyer for Rungis, Maître Jean-Marc Fedida, said yesterday that the chef's comments were a "bad stew, unworthy of Mr Passard's talents. You can't throw discredit on an entire profession in that way. It's unfair. It as if the head of Rungis went around saying that there are famous restaurants in the Rue de Varenne which sell rotten fish."

The Rue de Varenne, in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, contains Mr Passard's restaurant. It is also the address of the Prime Minister's official residence.

Mr Passard's lawyer, Francis Pudlowski, said that his client would claim freedom of speech and "fair comment. No one is casting doubt on the honesty and integrity of [Rungis] but it is normal for a chef to take an interest in the quality of the food he serves," he added.

Asked to comment by Le Figaro newspaper, traders at the Rungis market near Orly airport, south of Paris, said they had been asked not to talk.

One said: "Large sums of money are at stake,"

Another pointed out, however, that the market's reputation had not been helped by the recent discovery of 28 blank certificates of food safety in one trader's office.