Ten years ago, José Bové, a French sheep farmer from the beautiful rural region of Aveyron in Southern France took on the might of Ronald Macdonald, partly as a retaliation against the US slapping a massive tax on Roquefort cheese (for which his sheep produced milk), and partly, one imagines, as a protest against the vile products and principles of the American arch-food-criminal. He and a group of supporters made a serious attempt to dismantle a new branch of Macdonalds being constructed outside the Prefecture of Millau. He was arrested, stood trial and was jailed, despite massive national and some international support for his actions.

Bové, despite much being made by the media of his “Asterix” moustache and peasant hero persona, is the son of academic agronomists who lectured in California when he was a child; he’s certainly quite sophisticated enough to know that human obesity will come close to degrading a large percentage of the world’s population, and that Ronald Macdonald and his emulators are the principle culprits.

A quite separate but valid objection could also have been to the cultural insult of imposing a Macdonald’s Burger Hell on a small city in the depths of rural France. It’s tragic to consider that Macdonalds, who must have done their research, concluded that it was worth opening a branch in a place like this; that the hitherto haughty and gastronomically xenophobic French were capable now of being seduced by the insidious appeal of the American fat-burger.

I feel the rumblings of emotions similar to José Bové’s when I hear a rumour [which I passionately hope is untrue] that fast-salt-sugar-and-fat purveyors, Subway are planning to open one of their crass, ugly outlets in the middle of Ludlow, among the best-looking and, currently, best-fed towns in the kingdom. The service that Subway claims to provide is already offered better, cheaper, using local produce and with the profits staying within the community in two individual establishments within yards of their proposed site.  Adjacent to it there is already a Costa imposing its ghastly manners and homogeneity on the town; it is tragic that the planning authorities do not have the power, or perhaps the inclination to deter retailers who will irrevocably change the nature and appearance of what is a uniquely lovely town, as well as offering yet another source of rubbish food, increasing obesity and litter in town, at the same time, imposing on it the ugliness that is now the sad lot of the average unprotected English high street.

It is a tragedy that so many towns and cities in Britain have already been damaged beyond repair by the decisions of short-sighted, dim-witted or downright greedy individuals on planning authorities, while the public are offered almost no say on the aesthetic implications of these decisions.

I will let you know if Subway succeeds in burrowing into the very core of Ludlow’s medieval fabric.

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