THE inclination to eat is nature working at its most basic and yet most powerful. It drives survival. Desire for food surfaces every few hours. Frequently, it is cause for a wonderful sensual experience as food and drink energise the body and ignite the spirit.
Much social interaction occurs across a table where food is consumed. Such ritual still dominates the lives of those in countries of plenty, but our food instincts have been shaken in the past decade more than at any other stage of the 20th century.
This century brought us a multitude of ingredients and dishes, one of the most tangible manifestations of the global village. With the advent of convenience food, the culinary experience should be as wonderful as ever. Yet consumers more educated than ever, more discriminating about food, more able to select global products - have a growing and sometimes overwhelming feeling of loss of control over what they eat.
Those involved in food production immediately point to food scares as the cause of a crisis in confidence. Delving further exposes many other unsettling influences. The risks from food consumption are increasing, in the case of food poisoning, sharply. Producer domination of the market place - raising justified concerns about additive and pesticide use - has such momentum that it is hard to redirect it in the consumer's interest.
Moreover, we are being hurtled into a stunning new world of designer agriculture, facilitated by genetically modified organisms, and the people who are supposed to matter most, the consumers, are not sure if they want to partake.
After all that, you end up in a supermarket aisle attempting to establish what natural orange juice is. How does it compare to "freshly squeezed orange"? Is it water added to concentrate? Does "no additives" mean it's untreated? Is it clarified to make it more attractive? Consumer unfriendly labelling has a lot to answer for.
Dr Vivion Tarrant, director of the National Food Centre (NFC) a division of Teagasc, the agriculture and food development authority - is best able to put food scares in context in the sense of how they impacted on the Republic. The past decade is marked by great success at the NFC in improving Irish food quality and diversification but it also had to confront the implications of food scandals: repeated instances in global markets of food that poisons with devastation.
The listeria bug, thriving on increased use of chilling techniques, was the emergent pathogen of the 1980s, causing major outbreaks of food poisoning. Salmonella outbreaks accelerated, at the height of which the former British health minister, Edwina Currie said it was hard to find an egg not contaminated by the bacteria.
The infamous clostridium botulinum got in on the act too, with one bad outbreak attributed to British yoghurt. Bubbling away was BSE. It had a low profile then hit the roof after the possible CJD link to humans consuming large amounts of meat was made. It was followed by E coli 0157 which caused more than 19 deaths in Scotland last year.
BSE provided European consumers with hard evidence for the first time that, as was increasingly suspected, "the food industry was not being run in the interests of customers but in the interests of producers", according to Feargal Quinn, owner of the Superquinn supermarket chain. Europewide customer dissatisfaction was building up, he feels. BSE sparked a crisis of confidence. It did not hit the US, but Ireland could not avoid it.
Ireland also had its own highly publicised food scares, but it was residues which hit the headlines: use of illegal growth hormones, invariably Clenbuterol (angel dust) in cattle and uncontrolled use of antibiotics in pigmeat production. Reports of residues received attention out of proportion to their health risk, Dr Tarrant says. "It's a feature of human psychology that people worry about long distance health. They don't worry about short term hazards."
The short term hazards are food born microbes and are likely to be a more serious threat to health, he insists. The food sector has had to come to terms with the fact that its products are perishable and can kill, if not produced and processed carefully. "The food industry has to jump twice as high a hurdle in terms of quality management. Hygiene does not raise its head in banking."
A decade of food scares, allied to people asking serious questions about their food, is now shaping future direction of the industry, he says. In many respects, the Irish food industry is, however, adapting better than most.
Consumers - increasingly vegetarian, and invariably eating less red meat - are now better educated, better informed, and asking questions about constituents and processing. They even want to know if the animals were happy.
The unease, however, does not end there. The failure of local authorities to police abattoirs, for example, continued to raise questions over home market meat even after BSE. After 10 local authorities were found in February not to be applying a full meat inspection service, the Department of Agriculture threatened legal action against Dublin Corporation. The vast majority of counties, including Dublin, are now applying the rigours of the Abattoirs Act, a Department spokesman said.
FOOD inspection roles continue to be divided between several bodies all operating to different agendas and criteria; not the best means to ensure food safety. Equally, a doubling of reported food poisoning cases during the first five months of 1997 in comparison to last year hides an Irish failure to monitor properly foodborne infection. The figures may be startling in that the number of bacterial cases, including salmonella infection, increased from 163 to 317, but have little credibility, according to Dr Mary Upton, lecturer in food microbiology at UCD.
The Republic is the only EU country without a national disease surveillance centre to collate infection incidence which is vital to controlling outbreaks. That shortcoming is "irresponsible", Dr Upton says, in the context of obvious threats, not least E coli 0157.
The real level of infection could be 100 times greater than official figures. "The Department would say we don't have a problem. On face value the figures generate a feel good factor, but this is not justified."
Against this background of food safety failure and inadequacy, the concerns of consumers, increasingly exposed to the severe consequences of food poisoning, and food scandal, are thoroughly justified.
The recent history of food consumation is charted. What then are the current threats to our eating? Is it possible to regain control over what we eat?
