Breaking bread

Rome, Jan. 6:After a five-year battle, the fast-food giant McDonald’s has retreated from a southern Italian town, defeated by the sheer wholesomeness of a local baker’s bread.

The closure of McDonald’s in Altamura, Apulia, was hailed yesterday as a victory for European cuisine against globalised fast food.

Luigi Diges?, the baker, said that he had not set out to force McDonald’s to close down in any “bellicose spirit”. He had merely offered the 65,000 residents tasty filled panini ? bread rolls ? which they overwhelmingly preferred to hamburgers and chicken nuggets. “It is a question of free choice,” Signor Diges? said.

His speciality fillings include mortadella, mozzarella and eggs or scamorza cheese, eggs, basil and tomato, as well as f?dda, a local version of bruschetta ? toasted bread drizzled with olive oil and salt and covered in chopped tomatoes.

McDonald’s opened in a piazza in the centre of Altamura, 45 km south of Bari, in 2001, infuriating devotees of traditional Apulia gastronomy such as Peppino Colamonico, a doctor, and Onofrio Pepe, a journalist. They campaigned against McDonald’s as the Friends of Cardoncello, named after a southern Italian mushroom.

Altamura, founded in the 5th century BC and rebuilt in the Middle Ages by Frederick II, is famed for its fragrant, golden bread ? and for Signor Diges?’s victorious panini.

“There was no marketing strategy, no advertising promotion, no discounts,” Il Giornale commented. “It was just that people decided the baker’s products were better. David has beaten Goliath.”

The queues outside the bakery grew longer while McDonald’s gradually emptied, despite the best efforts of Ronald McDonald, the mascot clown, changes of management, children’s parties and special offers.

In July 2003 Altamura bread was recognised by the European Union as a protected regional product after lobbying by Enzo Lavarra, Euro MP for the Bari area, Rachele Popolizio, the Mayor of Altamura, and Giuseppe Barile, head of the local bakers’ association.

Signor Pepe said he regretted the loss of 20 jobs at McDonald’s, but “tradition has won”. The campaign was supported by the Slow Food Foundation, founded in 1986 by Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist incensed by the opening of a McDonald’s on the Piazza di Spagna near the Spanish Steps in Rome. It has 82,000 members in 107 countries.

Despite a series of closures around the world and active opposition, McDonald’s increased worldwide sales by 4 per cent last year. Jim Skinner, the chief executive, said that it was “the leading global foodservice retailer”, with more than 30,000 restaurants in more than 100 countries, 70 per cent of them “owned and operated by independent local businessmen and women”.