DURING the past year or two we have seen one food scare after another: BSE has been linked to CJD in humans. Unscrupulous farmers are being prosecuted for injecting cattle with angel dust, a banned carcinogenic hormone. Dotted around the country, there are small abattoirs where farmers slaughter herds without bothering to notify the local authority, so that the meat enters the food chain uninspected and containing who knows what dangerous chemicals.

Antibiotics, which may be encouraging an epidemic of antiobiotic-resistant and potentially fatal infections in humans, have turned up in 17 per cent of samples of pork. Salmonella is rife in eggs and chickens. Genetically-engineered fruit and vegetables are reaching the market with scant, non-existent or incomprehensible labelling. Cancer-causing nitrites are seeping into our water from fertiliser-drenched farmland.

Munch an apple and you risk consuming over 100 different chemical residues. Eat a peanut and traces of 119 artificial chemicals enter your body. Biocides, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are as essential as rain to the livelihood of most vegetable growers. Even before planting, seeds may be coated with a variety of chemicals, including lindane one of the most carcinogenic substances known to man.

While heart disease is falling in the Western world - including Ireland cancer is on the increase, especially among children and young people. In women, the rate of breast cancer has increased by nearly 25 per cent. Some scientists suspect that a main culprit is DES diethylstilbestrol a hormone now banned in Ireland but which is still used in the US.

We may have reached the point where, ironically, we are actually safer eating processed foods than we are eating foods which appear "natural", suggests Dr Michael Gibney, professor of nutrition at Trinity College Dublin. Multi-national brand-name food processors and dairy co-ops, whose products are directly traceable to them, cannot risk selling contaminated food. But beef, pork, chicken and most vegetables are generic products which are untraceable to their source so that farmers need not fear retribution.

The BSE crisis has received the most media coverage, even though the risk of actually getting CJD from Irish beef is minuscule perhaps even less than the risk of dying of Sellafield's radiation which permeates fish caught in Irish waters. Many of us have been avoiding beef in favour of pork and poultry, but do you know what they're putting in your pork chops and your Christmas turkey, which at this very moment is being fattened up? These animals are exposed to not only to antibiotics - many of them penicillin-derived but to hormones, growth promoters and a range of sulphanomide drugs throughout life.

Ironically, beef may actually be far safer than the pork and poultry which many of us have started eating instead. Paula Giles, Green Party spokeswoman on agriculture and an organic lamb farmer in West Cork, believes that beef, relatively speaking, is the most "natural" of the non-organically produced meats that you can buy. Others agree with her. The intensive rearing of pork and poultry means they need more medication to survive.

The most terrifying thing of all, however, is that our Department of Agriculture is allowing pigs and poultry to continue being fed ruminant-derived feeds containing other animals' spinal columns, offal and brains - the very stuff that caused BSE in cattle. Prof P.J. Quinn of the UCD veterinary college explains that while cattle still eat naturally occurring herb age, poultry and pigs are totally dependent on artificial and imported feeds mixed by local millers.

Including ruminant-derived protein in the feeds is "unhealthy and abnormal" because it "recycles disease", he says. Feeding pigs and poultry the offal of other animals allows a developing genetic disease like BSE to jump 50 generations in only one generation, making pork and poultry versions of BSE entirely likely.

Feeds for pigs and poultry also contain hundreds of different drugs developed for each stage of an animal's life. They are so many and so complex that a textbook would be required to describe them. Suffice to say, most are potentially dangerous if they enter the food chain. Each of the many drugs has its own withdrawal period during which the animal should fully metabolise the drug. But these periods may or may not be observed as the Consumers' Association found out. Yet even when withdrawal periods are observed, no account is taken of the synergistic reaction of drugs to one another.

Millers add broad-spectrum antibiotics and anti-microbial drugs such as bacitracin (toxic to human kidneys), tetracycline and mecadox to pig feed. Weaned at the unnaturally early age of three or four weeks, pigs are intensively reared in cramped conditions, putting them at risk of a range of disease so that antibiotics are essential, although used minimally by some farmers and more by those whose husbandry is poor. Also milled into pig feeds are growth hormones, copper sulphate, and growth promoters known as probiotics. Even if withdrawal periods are scrupulously observed, drugs can find their way into feeds without the farmer knowing. The antibiotic-laced feed mixed by the miller for one farmer may remain in the mill equipment and thus contaminate the next antibiotic-free feed which is made.

On the farm itself, troughs can retain residues of drugs and contaminate other feeds. Even the ground on which pigs stand can contain many drugs defecated by the pigs and thus the drugs may enter the bodies of other pigs. Banned drugs may also find their way into pig meat, introduced by unscrupulous farmers willing to use illegal drugs such as chloramphenicol, banned for use in livestock but still allowed in pets. It is so highly toxic that when correctly used in humans to fight salmonella and typhus infections, the patient risks bone marrow aplasia and death.

The turkeys being fattened for our tables this Christmas are reared so intensively that coccidiosis (disease caused by internal parasite) is inevitable without a variety of coccidiostat drugs from an early age. Amprolium, sulphonamides and tetracyclines are fed at a constant rate for a long period of time. Chickens, too, are routinely dosed with these anticoccidial drugs, as well as being battery-reared in settings which compromise their immunity and thus make the use of other drugs necessary.

Will your Christmas turkey be withdrawn from such drugs for the proper length of time before slaughter? Some vets admit that some farmers may find it too tempting, if the price of turkey peaks, to put their turkeys on the market before the withdrawal period has lapsed.

ALL the drugs are considered "safe" for the consumer as long as the withdrawal period is observed. "Safe" means that the residues are there, but below a level considered by the EU to be harmful. Despite such assurances, there is still a worrying air of sinister mystery for many consumers, who do not realise what their food actually contains. There is a sense, for people in the agriculture area, that what goes into our food is privileged information.

"A very limited number of people have the information and are responsible for implementing the use of these drugs," says Prof Quinn.

For this article, the Department of Agriculture was asked: "What constituents are allowed into the food for pigs, cattle, poultry and sheep?" Then answer came back, "the question needs to be more specific".

It's that old conundrum, as Mr Bruton said, to get the right answer, you need to ask the right question.

It is not good enough. "Consumers are not being hysterical and their biggest problem is that the consumer is not being told what is happening. Shopping for food feels like playing Russian roulette," says Paula Giles.

The IFA may regard its minority of errant farmers as "thick" as one IFA spokesman put it but it is we the consumers who have been the fools. "Food for years has been producer-driven rather than consumer-driven," says Dr Gibney. "The mindset of your average Irish beef farmer is back in the 18th century. There is a terrible, complacent attitude that you have to fatten them up as soon as possible and get them to slaughter and the consumer doesn't come into it."

Prof John Hannan, recently retired head of the UCD veterinary college, recalls that during his 40-year career as a vet he has tried repeatedly and in vain to make farmers and the Department of Agriculture understand the dangers of allowing drug-contaminated meat on to the consumer's table before the correct withdrawal periods were observed.

"I remember going to the Department of Agriculture 10 to 15 years ago - I was trying to get these principles across," he says. "There is a greater consumer awareness now, but in the past we would try to do something about the problem and there was no support from anyone. The will has not been there."

All that has changed now. The will from consumers has never been stronger and now is the time to enforce change. Voices are growing, to be fobbed off by the Government's proposal to introduce a Bill to set up a Department of Health-based Food Safety Council, which would merely be a watchdog body overseeing the work of Government departments, would be to miss an opportunity.

Prof Quinn thinks that traceability is the only answer. "We need a thorough monitoring system of inspection which traces cases back to the farms. What the consumer needs to do now is to make representations that from the point of rearing to the point of slaughtering to the shop, the beef should be wholesome and come from a source where well-considered methods of production, hygiene and butchering are used."

Michael Slattery, deputy president of the IFA which has been so shaken by the crisis, is disappointed by the Government's proposal because it is not strong enough. He believes that the body should be totally independent of any department, generously funded and made up of scientists an4 medical doctors who conduct investigations and research and receive no pressure from vested interest groups. Alongside, a committee made up of representatives of the various interest groups, including farmers and consumers, would propose areas of investigation to the scientists. Like Prof Quinn, he also thinks that a computerised system of traceability should be put in place to enable every piece of meat which reaches the consumer be traced to the farm of origin.

PAULA Giles says that the Green Party sees the Government's proposal as "another waltz around the dance floor", especially considering that the Department of Health would be in charge - look at how it handled the Hepatitis C scandal, she says. She believes that "the fundamental question is that we don't need better inspection and monitoring of the methods, we need to change the farming methods themselves from intensive, artificial, centralised rearing of animals to an organic, more natural method where the animals are under less stress and therefore need a minimum of antibiotics." The chances of such revolutionary changes happening may be slim in a food industry dominated by huge producers and multinationals, but at the very least, "public access to the work of whatever body, agency or council is put in place is the key word," she says.

As for the consumer, who after reading this article might bravely attempt a little food shopping, there is some hope of avoiding contamination. Enjoy beef and other meat but make sure that your butcher is reputable and knows precisely which farm the meat comes from, advises Prof Quinn.

"In Ireland there is no reason why you should not know where your food is coming from and why you should not be able to ensure that it is of sufficient quality," suggests Myrtle Allen, of Ballymaloe House, which is fine for those of us who have the money, the transport and the time to do so. Those of us who want cheap, convenient shopping have a problem.

We can all reduce our risk by eating less beef, poultry and pork, and when we do eat it make sure it is of better quality free-range and organic if possible. It's a funny thing, that it used to be it was only the "greenies" and the "hippies" who cared about such things. If this latest food scare teaches us anything, it is that corruption of our food supply is everybody's problem now.