IN the era of part-time opening or locked down pubs and eateries, it can be hard to remember when they were all open and busy.

It’s not so long ago since Costa added yet another coffee shop to those it already had in Carlisle, its bosses no more expecting the coronavirus pandemic than anybody else.

And last week it was three years since the world’s largest café opened.

The Starbucks in Shanghai first welcomed customers in December 2017. It covers an area of 30,000 square feet – making social distancing easy.

Reading about this I wondered why the citizens of Shanghai wanted a coffee shop anyway, and such a big one, given all the tea in China. And the idea of frothy lattes and cappuccinos are a relatively recent addition to Chinese tastes. Before the last century milk was generally shunned as the rather unpleasant food of western invaders, and even in the Mao era it was rarely available. Only in the last few years has it become a symbol of wealth.

It’s another sign of that phenomenon I’ve often complained about, the creeping Americanisation of the world, what the French call “coca-colonialism”.

Starbucks comes all the way from Seattle, the place that also gave the world Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana. So Seattle isn’t all bad.

Recently I came across a defence of America’s cultural empire. It pointed out that most American exports actually originated in Europe. It’s true of coffee. Starbucks and Caffe Nero are both US chains, but it was brought to America by Europeans. It had been popular on this side of the ocean since the 16th century when Pope Clement VIII tasted it, blessed the coffee bean and gave it the papal seal of approval.

The trouble is that everything America got from Europe is repackaged, given an unmistakable American flavour, and sold back to us. Winnie the Pooh and The Jungle Book are by English authors but the characters are familiar to us now with American accents. Winnie the Pooh sounds like he comes from New York, while that other bear, Baloo, has what sounds like a southern US accent.

Pinnochio is Italian and Snow White is German, but after the Disney treatment you’d never guess.

The USA owe democracy to ancient Greece – as we all do – but make a mockery of it. And they got the English language from us but the version that’s been taught and learnt around the world is American English, not British English.

So it is with the food and drink. The “Americano” coffee began when American tourists found the Italian espresso too strong and too small, and asked for it to be diluted with hot water. The “deep pan” pizza is unknown in Italy. An authentic Italian pizza is only ever thin. And hamburgers are also a European creation with an American makeover. The word has nothing to do with ham. They are so called because they originated in Hamburg. But Americans didn’t realise that, and so coined words like beefburger, cheeseburger and chicken burger – all on sale in Europe from Burger King.

It’s American food that is most troubling at the moment. Thanks to the Brexiteers, the UK food market is set to be flooded with cheap American produce with far lower animal welfare and hygiene requirements.

And the US are insisting that British markets will have to be open to American agriculture in any trade deal. In other words we’ll be forced to take it. Many British farms could go bust, unable to compete against the cheap American imports. And they could endanger our health.

In American slaughterhouses chicken is washed in chlorine. It is supposed to rid them of disease, but there are still 26,500 hospitalisations and 420 deaths a year from salmonella. In the European Union – which has 120 million more people than the US – there are 1,766 hospitalisations and 10 deaths.

Beef, pork, lamb, dairy produce, fruit and sugar could also be of lower quality. Those who voted for Brexit surely didn’t vote for food that was unfit for human consumption.

And don’t think our prime minister is going to do anything about it. When the Agriculture Bill was going through parliament, MPs – including some Conservatives – put forward an amendment that would have guaranteed food safety and animal welfare standards in UK law. But the Government voted it down.

It’s yet another unforeseen and dangerous consequence of Brexit. In the brave new world outside the EU we can look forward to chlorinated chicken and hormone-fed beef, all the way from USA.