IT has been an intense, passionate affair, and now it's over. For nearly 20 years, we have conducted an almost breathless romance with food. We have explored new cuisines and brought the specialities of the world into our own kitchens. We have become expert travellers along the Pacific Rim, can stroll through the Mediterranean armed only with our trusty Sabatiers, can distinguish Madrasi from Balti, and can confidently state that there is no such thing as Italian food, only regional Italian cooking.
We spend hours in bigger and bigger supermarkets, expect to find new products with almost every visit, fuss over olive oils, Mediterranean breads, tortillas and salsa. We browse in elaborate kitchen shops, plan holidays around eating out and indulge our obsession with wine. We have been in love with food.
Welt with the newest BSE/CJD scare, the romance with food is over, and reality is here. This is no lovers' tiff or excusable misunderstanding, to be forgotten over a few glasses of wine and a candlelit dinner. We have been faithful, but behind our backs the food business has been not merely playing away from home, it has proven itself to be treacherous, duplicitous. We can't enjoy the comfort of trust anymore.
So, forget Love of Food as a way of living, and say hello to Fear of Food. For fear is the taste of the future, the bitter taste.
"I'm 38 years in the business and I've never seen such a scare," says Danny O'Toole, a butcher in Terenure in Dublin, who sells only meat from organic farms. "I hope this does make a change in the way people think about the food they are buying," says Paul Rankin, the much garlanded chef proprietor of Belfast's Roscoff restaurant. "I hope it makes them stop and ponder just what they are buying for themselves and their children.
Paul McNulty, Professor of Agricultural and Food Engineering at UCD, sees this scare as the catalyst which will alter the entire focus of our national food policies.
"The background lies with the change in food policy after the second World War, when the theme was to increase food production at all costs. Certainly when Teagasc was set up here, the impetus was to increase production, and that was the theme of the 1950s and 1960s and right up to the 1970s, until food surpluses began to appear, when we then turned to the issue of food quality.
"But the problem was that it is difficult to switch off the system overnight, people just couldn't stop the train because there were too many on the train. I think that this scare will undoubtedly stop that policy of continually increasing production at whatever cost."
There have been food scares before, and we have done our best to overlook them: Of course there is no salmonella in our eggs, or angel dust to limber up the beef we roast on a Sunday. Our cheeses are safe from listeria and we wouldn't know e coli if it stood up and said hello. But the BSE/CJD debacle is different. I believe it will represent a watershed in our attitude to food. Previously, food scares were for the most part localised and immediate. But this is something else.
Unpredictable, unfathomable, the BSE/CJD scare is of vital importance because of what it may represent in the future.
The extent of the dangers it may unleash is unknowable and, while it may have been vastly exaggerated, as Professor McNulty points out: "The reaction is explained by the fact that there is something about brain diseases in humans which frightens all of us. If you have a sore toe, OK, we can do something about it, but when you touch the core of ourselves which is the brain, then I think this explains the reaction." But what this farrago also trades on is a deep rooted distrust which has been festering for decades.
And that fear is simply this just what are we eating? What does it contain? Can we believe what the manufacturers tell us about it? Can we trust the government to exercise proper care over food manufacturers? What are we really feeding our children, and how will it affect them? In short, we have to eat to sustain life, but could it be that the food we eat is killing us?
For the food writer Joanna Blythman, the leading investigative food journalist in the UK, whose new book, The Food We Eat, is a searing indictment of many of the practices of the large scale food industries, the response to the string of food scares is simple and obvious: "Food production must be returned to human levels, we must have sustainable agriculture which gives farmers a decent price, which protects animal welfare, and which ultimately gives us food which is not compromised.
This fact of compromise is one of the tragic realities of modern, processed food. This compromise is what has given us BSE, angel dust, salmonella, all the ills of the modern food world. Indeed, this cynical compromising of food is such a given that those who offer us true, real food suffer for their determination.
Ms Blythman says the problem lies with "brinkmanship farming and brinkmanship food production. We have a situation where big industry writes its own policies, and they work hand in hand with the food bureaucracy, whereas small scale, good food producers have the full weight of government bureaucracy thrown at them. We think mechanisation produces clean food because the process is sleek and shiny, whereas many people think that a careful artisan working in a little dairy somehow cannot do this. It's totally anomalous, because it is actually the other way round."
"Consumers have to become more thoughtful and intelligent," says Paul Rankin. "They have to ask: why is this food so uniform in shape? How is this produced? I fear that we could be heading for a meltdown scenario with the food chain, and if we go too far it will be irreversible."
For a seller of food such as Danny O'Toole, the difficulties which have now become manifest have been simmering for years. "I was going organic long before BSE. I was always selling the best, and here I was reading about angel dust and growth promoters and hormones, and I couldn't give a 100 per cent assurance that the meat wasn't tampered with somewhere along the line, because visually and taste wise you can't tell. So, I turned to meat from organic farms.
Myrtle Allen, president of Eurotoques, the European association of chefs, and founder of Ballymaloe House in east Cork, argues that the difficulty has arisen because of our incessant demand that food should be a cheap commodity.
"I think the only possible good thing that can come out of this won't happen, and that is that the price of feed and the price of food must increase in order that we ensure that everything we eat is food. But that won't happen. Many people, and especially people in the UK, seem to think that there is a right to have cheap food, and this means that people don't relish food and enjoy it. So people have plenty of money, but they will spend it on anything other than food."
Georgina O'Sullivan, home market manager of An Bord Bia, agrees with this prognosis: "Quality has to be paid for. You can't have cheap, cheap, cheap. I think this incident has two lessons. Firstly, it shows to the industry that the consumer is king. Secondly, the consumer must realise that better food is not going to come cheaper. I mean, what do you think you are getting if you buy six burgers for 90 pence? As one of the butcher's who works with us says, `I can't tell you what's in it, but I can tell you what's not in it!'.
Paul Rankin outlines a modern scenario which is chillingly candid. "Some kids, first thing in the morning, have highly processed orange juice, a highly processed cereal and milk from suspect cows. At lunchtime they have bleached bread, a manufactured spread from God knows what animal, and mayo made with powdered egg. Back home they have chick steaks made from antibiotic fed chickens, oven chips which are reconstituted potatoes, and ketchup which is sugar. Where is the nutrition? If we really are what we eat, then what does that food say about us?"
But how are the revelations of the last week going to change the way we have been behaving for two decades? What will the newest BSE scare mean, when the dust from all those hooves finally settles?
It will mean the death of the British beef industry, of course, which Paul McNulty sees as now being "mortally wounded". And the successful expansion of the Irish beef industry, most likely, with every hindquarter clearly labelled as "Irish Beef" when it leaves these shores.
"There is pressure to brand Irish beef in the UK," says Georgina O'Sullivan, "and I think some of the supermarkets will now break ranks and go down that road".
LIZ Mee of Dublin's Elephant & Castle restaurant has already seen a change in people's attitude to ordering beef. "There has been a definite movement away from beef, especially beefburgers, even though we make our own burgers from 100 per cent beef. I think that has arisen because people have a suspicion about beef products. In the future we will be putting more fish dishes on the menu, and we are looking forward to the new spring lamb. Overall, I think this will make people more careful about how they shop, but they must be prepared to pay more. The problem is the people want cheap food."
But there will, I believe, be greater repercussions from this latest scare. For what the BSE/CJD fiasco reveals is inept management by both the food industry and government. "Right from 1985 there has been mismanagement by the British of the BSE question," says Paul McNulty. And given that we are on the brink of forking out £50 million in fines for our own beef fiasco, we have need to worry about just how central government responds to shady practices in the food industries. More importantly, this carry on is symptomatic of a brand of cynicism of the highest order, the cynicism of a global, mass market food industry which pays no heed to anything other than the fast buck.
If you think that this is a big scare and things will quickly quieten down, let me warn you that the next thing you will be concerned about is orange juice, and after that I predict battery chickens will come to haunt the roost, and then hopefully animal rights campaigners will turn our attention to the treatment of pigs. Organophosphates remain a live issue, and post harvest pesticides will linger for some time yet.
The sea change marked by BSE/CJD is that from our fear of food comes mistrust.
"John Major has pinned his arguments on scientific research, and this is objective and reasonable," says Paul McNulty, "but consumers no longer trust scientific opinion. What really shook the credibility of the scientific establishment and I am one of that establishment - was thalidomide. That went right to the core because it involved babies and brains, and scientists said it was safe and it wasn't, and that shook the confidence of the public in scientists."
But this challenge which comes from our mistrust of food is one which a butcher like Danny O'Toole relishes. "The new customers who come in to the shop say `Prove it to me, prove where your meat comes from'. And say: `Here is the list of organic farmers I buy from'. I show them the whole system, even the ear tag number, and I say there's a phone, call the Johnstown farm where this animal came from, they will tell you they sold it to me, then call IOFGA [the organic growers association] and they will tell you where the animal came from, and call the Department of Agriculture and they will tell you where the animal came from. There must be a third party, that clinches it. People want reassurance.
For Noirin Gibney, co ordinator of the Irish Organic Farmers' and Growers' Association (IOFGA), one of the origins of the fear of food lies with the loss of connectedness to where the food we eat comes from. "Consumers want organic beef because they have confidence in the organic system. And people are very anxious, especially in the cities and in urban areas where they have little or no connection to the agricultural base."
In response to demands, IOFGA has drawn up a county by county list of organic producers, and Ms Gibney hopes that people will not only buy from these farmers, but will take the chance to visit the farms where the food originates. "The box system whereby organic growers supply directly to consumers is expanding rapidly, and I think it is because it allows people a connection with the producer of the food."
This issue of being able to identify the source of food is one which everyone agrees is now of vital importance. Myrtle Allen believes that: "we need to be able to tell people what is in food. Also, you must know where your food is coming from, all meat and all food should be directly tagged back to the supplier, and we must establish the identity of foods. We have lost that, and losing your identity is a terrible thing."
This idea of a direct link back to the farm echoes a theme which the former Minister of Agriculture, Joe Walsh, was keen to introduce some years back. Mr Walsh wanted a situation akin to the French Label Rouge concept, which identifies the area of origin of foodstuffs. But nothing was ever done. This newest debacle gives Ivan Yates the chance to march such a system into operation as fast as possible.
As Georgina O'Sullivan points out: "We must fight to establish the status of our food, for it does have intrinsic quality, and we must protect this. One way to do this is through traceability."
All of this is sound common sense, but we can have no real confidence that it will happen. Common sense is the ingredient missing from this whole murky pie, as agriculture has driven itself increasingly down a scientifically obsessed dead end. I suspect that people will remain fearful of food, not merely because of factors such as contamination, but because we cannot trust the people in control. We have gone from accepting assurance, to requiring reassurance.
Danny O'Toole is optimistic about what we can learn from this scare. "I think something good will come of it," he says. "People are coming in to the shop and saying we should get back to what it was, we have had enough of this, and now nature is saying stop. I really feel this will happen." We can only hope Mr O'Toole is right, but meantime a healthy degree of fear remains our best protection.