If enjoy a croissant on the bus to work, a cup of coffee on the tram or a train picnic on a long journey, then we've got bad news for you. In an attempt to reduce obesity, the government is proposing a rule which would ban all eating on public transport.
Dame Sally Davies, outgoing Chief Medical Officer for the UK, suggested the plan, claiming that we are nowhere near our nationwide target for the reduction of obesity, suggesting that if we can't eat on the go we might make progress.
If Dame Davies had her way, all eating and drinking on public transport would be banned, other than drinking 'fresh water'. A cup of coffee on the way to work? No way. A nice biscuit on a train? Unthinkable.
This is despite the fact that many of us eat our meals on public transport because we're time poor, overstretched and unable to do it any other way – because if we don't eat on the train then we're not going to get to eat at all. Three million people in the UK commutefor more than 120 minutes a day, largely because we can't afford to live near work.
As with the sugar tax, this kind of ban is designed to tackle a kind of eating most common in people who work longer hours and have less time for food preparation. There's still no suggestion of a tax on people spending £500 on a dinner at a top restaurant, or anything to prevent you from buying a kilogram of brioche and covering it with Bon Mamon jam or serving an enormous tiramisu at a dinner party. As ever, middle-class indulgence is left alone and the eating habits of people who are strapped for time and cash are under attack.
It's not clear how this plan would be implemented. Perhaps there would be a boost to employment figures as people who were previously limited to being parking wardens are now able to apply for roles where they walk around bus stops and train stations smacking croissants out of people's hands.
You can't change the way that a nation eats by banning things left, right and centre, even if it's an appealing policy because it costs very little to implement.
The suggestions have been met with wide objections for a number of reasons. Those of a more libertarian leaning have claimed that the measure would be draconian and that it's another enormous leap towards a full-on nanny state.
Health experts were also keen to point out that there are plenty of people, most of all diabetic people, who need to be able to eat whenever and wherever their blood sugar demands. Eve Simmons, health correspondent and author of Just Eat It, described the idea from Davies as 'A laughable vanity project at this point' and went on to point out: 'If you have low blood pressure, type 1 diabetes or lots of other common conditions, you can have a potentially fatal attack on the bus because the Govt won’t let you eat a handful of Haribo.'
If we really want to prevent people from being obese (and there are plenty of people who believe that a person's weight should be only their business and not subject to intervention from the government) then measures like this one will not work. You can't change the way that a nation eats by banning things left, right and centre, even if it's an appealing policy because it costs very little to implement.
Cooking classes to teach people who don't cook how to make healthy food on a budget. Cheap or free access to the gym and green spaces. Subsidised fruit and vegetables on sale at shops that are easy to access. Those measures would enable people to make healthier choices if they want to.
Unfortunately those kinds of measures also require a large scale financial investment and a structural change in how we teach people about food. It's cheaper and easier to just ban things. So enjoy your drunken night Tube McDonald's or your morning Pumpkin Spice Latte while you can - before long there'll probably be someone with a clipboard ready to take it off you.