Tasty Nestlé veggie sausages, anyone?

I never did like Linda McCartney's range of vegetarian food, but news that Nestlé may be about to buy it is still a little disconcerting. There's a definite trend of huge multi-national companies attempting to muscle in on healthy or ethical brands. L'Oréal bought Body Shop and McDonald's bought a large chunk of Pret-A-Manger.

It means the high street lines between good and evil are being blurred, and some people, no doubt, are going to get confused.

"Hmmm," says one innocent shopper. "I'll just pop in and get a freshly made organic avocado sandwich from Pret. How can that hurt anyone?" Or, "I want to help save the world, so I'll stop eating meat. That Linda McCartney was a vegetarian activist, and a nice lady, I'll buy her veggie sausages. That'll show them."

Except that the fat Nestlé executives in their tall, energy-sucking buildings, with their wall-graphs showing the rate at which African women are buying their milk [and if you don't know what's wrong with that, look here], are laughing at you, the hapless shopper, confused by the mirror tricks of multi-branding.

It's just downright dirty. But, I guess, that's why we hate them. If they didn't do things like that, we'd like them and then it wouldn't matter. Is that a Catch-22? I'm not sure. But to be safe, only eat home-grown bean sprouts for the foreseeable future. And only drink water.