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Crises associated with food safety and the consecutive drops in consumption have often been referred to as “food scares” or “food panics” or even, in the french media, “collective psychosis.” They have typically been described as irrational in view of the scientific, probabilistic evaluation of risk. Empirical work conducted on the occasion of the second BSE crisis (2000–2001) showed that consumers did not just perform an evaluation of risk. They also displayed disgust, moral judgments, and outrage, and they were sometimes led to manifest their disapproval of some aspects of the contemporary socioeconomic order. Data from four focus groups and a national survey on a representative sample of 1000 subjects collected in January of 2001—still at the peak of the crisis—show that subjects often describe not eating beef following the mad cow crisis as an act of protest or even a boycott. Between November 2000 and the spring of 2001, interviewees were highly indignant against the use of MBM (meat and bone meal) in animal feed and complained that “herbivores have been turned into carnivores.” A few months later, participants in focus groups seemed to have “forgotten” why they once boycotted beef. They now seemed to have internalized the view that the crisis was alarmist and irrational and they indiscriminately mixed images from this crisis with those from other ones, such as the foot and mouth disease epidemic or the first BSE crisis. Collective memory replaces individual memory.