Why I hate skinny iced caramel macchiatos

After the upliftingly optimistic, pre-Christmas message of my last blog post, I'm now aiming for maximum depression. Well, it is January after all.

In two months' time I set off on my bike again. I snake my way from the south coast of Spain, back across the Pyrenees into France, down the boot of Italy to Malta, along almost the entire coastline of mainland Greece, through Turkey to Cyprus, back across Turkey to Bulgaria, before hitting Albania and all the former Yugoslavian states, and I finish the second leg of this massive journey in Graz, in southern Austria, 8,000 miles from where I started. Although the journey is mostly Mediterranean, I will be visiting some very different cities: Madrid, Monte Carlo, Rome, Istanbul, Sofia, Tirana and Sarajevo to name just a handful.

There's nothing depressing about that, you might think, and I agree. But although these cities may be very different, unfortunately those differences have started to disappear. There will be depressingly familiar corners in each of these places thanks to globalisation and the open arms with which we welcome into our lives the brands it drags along with it.

'The odd thing is that the mass-produced fodder is not even as good as a lot of the stuff it replaces. So how does it manage to succeed?'

There was a time not very long ago when European travel was genuinely adventurous. I have been reading Tobias Smollett's Travels through France and Italy, written in the 1760s. The Italy of the 18th century sounds as different from Britain as Afghanistan does today. Not any longer. Nowadays, Italy has a lot of the same shops as Britain, most of the same brands and much of the same food.
My experience of the cities of western Europe during 2011's ride - London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Vienna and Lisbon - was disappointingly uniform. Don't get me wrong - I enjoyed myself immensely - but in these places there were many more similarities than there were differences. Globalisation ensures that this is only going to continue, as local businesses are replaced with yet more faceless chains.

The odd thing is that the mass-produced fodder is not even as good as a lot of the stuff it replaces. So how does it manage to succeed? Is it just that people crave the familiar and comfortable? In Salzburg a few years ago I watched hordes of American tourists gravitate towards McDonald's. The food in Austria is wonderful and shouldn't be particularly scary for an American - aside perhaps from Beuschel, the lung 'n' spleen stew I had in Graz this summer - but still they went for the stuff they could just as easily have eaten back home. And even in countries where the cuisine is not so consistently good as Austria's, isn't it better to take a risk and have a chance of discovering something amazing than to fall back on the guarantee of mediocrity?

The sad thing is that each time a Burger King or Starbucks replaces a homegrown business, not only is there less diversity in the world but there is less possibility of future diversity as the local cuisines and regional quirks are substituted for factory-produced, McBland averageness. The profits that would have been made at a local level to reinvest in the community leak away to the corporations and their shareholders. We accept this without question, in the food we eat, the supermarkets we use, the clothes we wear, the computer stores in which we shop, in everything. It's no one's fault but our own.

To reverse the trend, to rediscover diversity, would mean rejecting everything that big business provides. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds and, in the long run, it would cost more for anyone who tried to do it. It won't happen. That expensively logoed ship has already sailed. In some industries it is simply impossible to avoid global brands. Try buying a mobile phone from someone other than a multi-national. You can't.

'I'm glad I'm alive at this point in history when technology is advanced enough to allow me to study and cycle at the same time and yet diversity has not been entirely eroded'

Globalisation will eventually ensure that wherever we are in the world, our experience will be identical to everyone else's - economies of scale ensure that it's more profitable for them that way - and our money will go to the corporations and our local communities will wither and die. Eventually, if we're in the private sector, the only jobs available to us will be the ones offered by those same corporations and we will work as tiny, insignificant cogs in a huge, global machine. Happy New Year!

This trip has been revelatory in many ways, but as the international differences fade away, the purpose of a journey like mine, or any kind of journey for that matter, fades with it. I remember a road trip in America in the 90s. We were driving down a highway in a rented car, a car rented from a global chain, and every single intersection offered the same options - sing along with me! - McDonald's, McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut. Why, I asked, were we bothering to drive anywhere, if wherever we arrived was exactly the same as the place we'd left behind? That's our future. For many of the UK's towns, it's already the present, with each town centre a boring carbon copy of the next one a few miles away.

Not far from today, holidays will come down to a simple choice of deciding in which weather system we want to spend our time, or whether we want to be beside the sea or on a mountain. There won't be any other differences to the individual locations. I'm glad I'm alive at this point in history when technology is advanced enough to allow me to study and cycle at the same time and yet diversity has not been entirely eroded. There are still enough differences to make it worthwhile. Soon there won't be. Big business will have won, and we - every one of us - will have lost.

If you have a hankering to see what's special on this planet, please go and see it now, while it's still there. The similarities may be as sad as a Happy Meal but the unique bits are utterly delicious.