“He went from oysters to cheese to meat to drinks, until 11pm,” Christophe Gabert, a breeder from the Isère region in the country’s southeast, told France Info radio. “Nobody knows how he managed to digest everything he ate! He started at 7am.”
Chirac’s close connection to France’s farmers was formed when he was minister of agriculture in the early ‘70s, well before he became president. Between becoming minister of agriculture in 1972 and his retirement from public life in 2011, Chirac missed only one fair – in 1979, following a car accident.
