Saturday morning : big supermarket shop - a week's supply including ready to eat meals to bung into the microwave, (the lasagna, the pizzas, the pies all ready in minutes).

Saturday evening : dinner out in a restaurant after the children eat early in a fast-food outlet.

Sunday: it is sunny; family barbecue in the back garden.

This scenario is not untypical for many families this summer weekend. It is the product of growing affluence in an age where convenience is happily married with frequent eating out. We have become the generation whose main meal is prepared in an average seven minutes, compared to an hour 20 years ago.

This picture is not to indicate highly risky eating trends or suggest that fiendish bugs lurk in every bite, in every foreign kitchen or sandwich bar. To be frank, Western civilisation is producing food of unprecedented quality - Ireland more than most - and enjoying new and often exotic foods delivered within days, if not hours, from farms and fruit groves around the world.

It is to highlight that people are putting responsibility for food safety into the hands of others. And if something goes wrong, it can go badly wrong.

E-coli 0157 in the wrong circumstances leaves people dead and others with permanent kidney damage. Ireland has been riding its luck so far with very small outbreaks caused by this new bacterial strain. The ominous shortcomings of current monitoring, poor traceability of foodstuffs, failure to find its source in outbreaks and delays in definitively "typing" bugs serve ample warning.

These difficulties have been exposed in five major salmonella outbreaks in recent months involving more than 220 cases of illness, 14 of whom required hospital treatment. They have coincided with such newspaper headlines as: "270 per cent rise in food poisoning". What is the food scare-weary Irish consumer to make of it all?

The head of the Food Safety Authority, Dr Patrick Wall, whose previous job in Britain was to trace food poisoning sources through four or five countries if necessary, says too much should not be read into such figures. How much is genuine and how much is due to improved reporting is anybody's guess.

Food poisoning, nonetheless, is on the increase globally. Ireland is behind other Western countries but showing every indication of following suit. We are also quickly catching the US in lifestyle trends. There, 50 per cent of money spent on food goes on eating out.

Dr Wall said a complex interplay between these and many other factors combined to cause a genuine increase in food poisoning. There was better reporting of cases, the public was more conscious of such illness and GPs were taking more specimens. Health boards had created public health departments.

In addition to new eating trends, food poisoning cases were now "chased more aggressively", leading to improved identification of bug types and, hence, outbreaks, according to Eastern Health Board public health specialist, Dr Derval Igoe.

In many instances "we probably always had a problem", she adds, but the new regime allowed for quicker intervention and better treatment.

However, there are obvious delays in having to send samples to Britain for "phase-typing". This is the microbiological equivalent of identifying a car and its registration number and is essential to link cases in an outbreak.

Risk is heightened by mass distribution of food. Most supermarkets distribute from large centralised points. There is also the obvious success of convenience foods.

"In Dublin, every shop is making sandwiches or has a little deli counter," said Dr Wall. Many were staffed by young people on a part-time basis. Few, if any, had training in handling food, which was now required by law.

He said another key factor was that microbes changed. The salmonella typhimurium DT104 bacterium, which caused the Dundrum outbreak in Dublin and made 75 people ill, appeared in 1990.

Shopping patterns have also changed. Fridges are crammed, often preventing the temperature getting down to less than 4, a consequence of "the big shop".

Dr Wall speculates on the influence of people having less immunity. This may result from living in a sterile environment assisted by aggressive detergents and bacteriocidal washing-up liquids. Is our immune system not challenged enough as a consequence? All he knows, is that it is "not possible to go back to the old days".

E-coli O157 changed everything as far as food poisoning microbes are concerned, much the way BSE changed world meat production. Old complacencies are no longer acceptable. A proliferation of bugs resistant to many antibiotics, especially salmonellas, serves to amplify the grim warning.

Such is the E-coli threat that the Irish farm research body, Teagasc, recently convened an international alliance to pool expertise involving 30 of the EU's most eminent food, medical and veterinary scientists.

Its co-ordinator, Dr Geraldine Duffy, of the National Food Centre, said while the UK had better facilities and detection capability (because of some 30 E-coli 0157 deaths in the past three years) Ireland compared well with other countries in doing research.

Food microbiologist, Dr Mary Upton, of NUI Dublin, warned, however, that we may be seeing the beginnings of a large E-coli 0157 problem. "We need to be vigilant. We need to have information in circulation all the time and it's an area needing further research."

She said she was like a broken record in underlining the need for information, education and food training with protocols to verify their effectiveness. The lessons from the current outbreaks were that everyone - producers, supermarkets, caterers and food handlers - had a responsibility to ensure safe food.

Dr Wall said it might seem as if the onus was heaped on the consumer, who was being made to "cremate everything". However, the consumer was the last link in a chain of responsibility. It was not sufficient any more for individual parts to simply say their house was in order. "A hotel may have a pristine kitchen but it may be getting chickens from the back of unrefrigerated vans."

He said this was a time when one defective piece of food could cause widespread illness. "One sub-standard abattoir or dodgy exporter can destroy an entire industry" and one weakness in the chain can cause the demise of a product or food business.