IS it any wonder that fewer than one in five shoppers trusts the government to tell the truth about the safety of food, as a survey showed this week?

For in the past few days alone - characteristic of the food scandals to which we are regularly exposed - consumers have been alerted to;-

Supposedly 'natural' free-range eggs with artificial dyes that make their yolks a deeper yellow.

Imported eggs from Germany that contain a colorant chemical linked to eye defects.

EU-approved low-cost chicken that comes from dirty and cramped farms in the Far East and South America.

Chickens so pumped up with fattening antibiotics that they become virtual cripples and so that people who eat them risk lowered resistance to disease.

The half-hushed-up business of Belgian pears coated with pesticides banned in Britain being on sale over here.

Top all this up with the prospect of a kowtow to the perfidious French - who banned our beef because of the BSE threat - by allowing them to label it with the Union Jack, so that, in contravention of the EU laws on protectionism, shoppers in France can boycott it in preference to their own beef, which might have come from animals fed sewage.

It is plain that, whichever side of the Channel consumers are on, people are deliberately kept in the dark by profit-driven food producers about the wholesomeness and the safety of the food they eat - and that governments are part of the equation.

Do you not have a right to know that the meat you eat is from France where the BSE risk is now greater than in Britain and where animals have been fed dung?

Do you not have a right to know that 20 per cent of chicken breast sold in this country with EU approval is not from Europe, but from Brazil or Thailand?

Do you not have the right to know that Belgian pears are coated with banned chemicals?

When are we going to get the independent food standards authority this government promised.

And when, above all, are the food producers and retailers going to realise that their greed and dubious practices invite a backlash from consumers that will send them into deserved bankruptcy?

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.