Oh do bugger off would you?

The snack vans, often found in busy lay-bys, must now offer soup, salads or low fat yogurts with their artery-clogging kebabs.

They must also limit the amount of mayonnaise served – because it has been branded a "very high fat product".

Environmental health officers will inspect menus during routine hygiene checks.

And traders who fail to meet the strict new standards in Guildford, Surrey, will be refused a street trader\’s licence when it comes up for renewal each year.

Councillors at Guildford Borough Council this week reviewed their street traders policy for the first time in seven years and insisted every menu has at least one healthy option.

I am, of course, all in favour of diversity of provision. That there are hundreds if not thousands of different things with which we can, to taste, assuage our hunger/stuff our gobs.

But there are two ways of having that diversity. We can insist, as above, that each individual outlet provides a diverse menu. Or we can have a number of different outlets, each creating their own menu, the diversity coming from the fact that each menu will be different.

Consumers can thus eat healthily (to the extent that the docter in Woody Allen\’s "Sleeper" was wrong) by choosing which outlet to eat at rather than forcing each menu to offer them that option.

I would prefer that latter method of gaining the diversity we all applaud. Unfortunately it doesn\’t offer an opportunity for tax funded council prodnoses to interfere, so of course it won\’t be the method adopted.