It's been another week of food fright for consumers. The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain prompted the Department of Agriculture here to ask supermarkets to remove certain meat and dairy products from their shelves yesterday.
Gardai are patrolling the Border to prevent the importation of animals or animal products from Northern Ireland.
This follows the deluge of BSE-related news which has washed over us over the past few months. Irish cattle have been slaughtered in their thousands, but their carcasses are not to be eaten. Irish beef is now said to be safe but there are concerns about German imports.
In the background has been the occasional withdrawal of other foods relating to incidents such as tin traces in a batch of canned spaghetti. Our food vocabulary has expanded to include the potentially lethal E.coli 0157 as well as the more familiar salmonella.
What are shoppers to do? Pausing in the supermarket aisles or standing on the tiled floor of the butcher's, parents are wondering if they are putting children at risk by feeding them beef, lamb, pork or chicken.
Mr Pat Brady, chief executive of the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland, says: "While Irish consumers have proven resilient in the face of some of the recent scares and have been supported by the reassurances of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, this development in the UK will undoubtedly spook many people unnecessarily about meat consumption."
Consumers have been reassured that foot-and-mouth is not a public health issue but, rather, an animal health issue, but nobody likes to think that the piece of meat or the spoonful of yoghurt or the chunk of cheese they are about to put in their mouth may contain the foot-and-mouth virus.
Many foods contain bacteria and viruses - most of these will be killed by cooking, or pasteurisation, some are even good for us - but as consumers become increasingly divorced from food production, we like to think everything that is shrinkwrapped or plastic-bound is sterile.
Reassurances about the safety of food products have come from a variety of sources including veterinarians, the Food Safety Authority, the Food Safety Promotion Board, Bord Bia, supermarkets and butchers.
At the back of their minds, many consumers have an innate distrust of State bodies or those with vested interests in the food market. They are wondering what they have not been told, whose interests these bodies may represent (industry or consumer?) or what the scientists may not yet know.
The Food Safety Authority was set up in 1999. Accountable to the Minister for Health and Children, it is a consumer-based protection agency. Its key objective is to "develop a culture of food safety in Ireland so that Irish consumers and purchasers of Irish food abroad can have the utmost confidence in our standards and controls".
So, what has the authority to say about foot-and-mouth? Very little, in fact. It has deliberately distanced itself, as it sees foot-and-mouth as an animal rather than a public health issue.
Mr Paschal Gibbons, president of Veterinary Ireland, says the only danger with infected food products was that the virus might be disseminated to other animals. "For instance, if a farmer went into a supermarket, bought an infected product and brought the virus home to the farm, he could infect his cattle, pigs, sheep or goats."
Foot-and-mouth disease can infect humans but when it does, the illness is usually in a mild form. It is very rare and humans cannot contract the infection through eating meat or drinking milk from infected animals. People can be infected through skin wounds when handling diseased stock.
Variant Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (vCJD) is a very different proposition. It is a progressive fatal neurological disease with a frighteningly long incubation period (five to 30 years). From the onset of symptoms to death is usually just 18 months. The consumption of contaminated beef products is a risk factor for vCJD.
The Food Safety Authority says there is a BSE epidemic in cattle; "however, Ireland does not have a vCJD epidemic in humans. One case of vCJD has occurred in an Irish lady who resided for a long period in the UK. The likelihood of a human epidemic occurring is unknown.
"A vCJD epidemic may not occur, since food-borne exposure in Irish people may have been minimal and use of mechanically recovered meat (which would have contained spinal cord and other specified risk material) was not widespread here."
Irish cattle born after 1996 are thought to be safe as they were not fed bonemeal, which is believed to have facilitated the transmission of the BSE prion.
The EU has banned the feeding of meat and bonemeal to pigs and poultry and has introduced a controversial purchase-for-slaughter scheme designed to take animals older than 30 months out of the food chain.
There was a recent scare about imports of German beef but the major supermarkets here and the Associated Craft Butchers say they sell only Irish beef.
People are increasingly turning to organic meat and produce, if they can afford them, in the hopes that fewer chemicals, natural diets and less intensive rearing will lead to healthier eating. Others are considering vegetarianism or, at least, forgoing beef. For the Food Safety Authority, the issue is how to ensure all produce, conventional or organic, is safe. Organic foods are more expensive and food elitism should not be allowed to develop, according to Dr Wayne Anderson, the chief specialist (food science) with the authority.
Other consumer-focused bodies include the Food Safety Promotion Board, which is a cross-Border body. A pan-European food safety agency is scheduled for 2002, but for many consumers, it will be some time before the pleasures of eating again outweigh their gut fears.
The Food Safety Promotion Board's safe food helpline is at 1850 404 567.