With all eyes on the World Cup presently, let’s not forget that the days are ticking away for our 2012 Olympic Games.

Ever since I heard a couple of years back about the global sponsorship deal that MacDonald’s has with the International Olympic Committee, I have been running a little crusade which I am now following up with the new coalition government and the various local and regional authorities involved.

In case you weren’t aware, the burger chain has an exclusive tie-up on branded food offerings for visitors to the Games. We’d been told so many things about the benefits that hosting the Games would bring for London (and which I hope materialise) but no-one told us about this. Funny that.

As many as three million people will be visiting London at that time. With Borough Market and Roast, we have been slowly but surely dispelling the reputation abroad that Britain has no credible food offering. Along with Visit Britain, I have been hosting foreign press trips about what real British food is and Lawrence, our head cook, has been well received when he has done cookery items for TV programmes in the US.

And so now we face the prospect of our biggest opportunity to sell that message while we command the world stage effectively ruined.

Well, hopefully not quite.  I don’t like criticising something without offering an alternative solution.

I am helping the Mayor’s office in the construction of a series of food festivals around the capital for the Games and to ensure that local people don’t lose out, I am planning a festival of all that London has to offer in culinary terms – and place it just outside the sponsorship exclusion zone by the Olympic Park. The idea is generating increasing support and may in turn lead me to creating a permanent food village in the docklands.

Thank you Macdonald’s for helping me come up with this idea!

The more that can be done to use the Olympics to promote London's food and hospitality industry, not to mention it's local growing communities, better.

The Olympics is a perfect opportunity to educate people, both locally and internationally, of the benefits of good food. Blanket sponsorship by Behemoth burger chains is clearly and categorically not in the spirit of such an opportunity.

I run a restaurant called Konstam that focuses on produce sourced from in and around Greater London and I'm fully behind the idea of setting up alternateive food promotions and events to do more for London food around the 2012 Olympics. Let us know if there is anything we can do to help.