Environment : Pesticides on Menu in Beirut : The food looks tempting but may have unlisted ingredients: bacteria and banned chemicals. Meat may be thawed, refrozen.

You’re invited for lunch, and a dip afterward. Everything you’ll eat was either swimming, grazing or growing yesterday, and the beach beyond the restaurant is postcard perfect--shimmering in tones of Mediterranean blue.

Who’d turn down this invitation?

You, if you listen to the experts here.

“We’re killing ourselves,” biochemist Usama Mugharbil says. He’s one of dozens of concerned Lebanese scientists working with the government on the problem of contaminated food.

Let’s start slowly, with a drink before lunch.

Are you sure that VAT 69 is the real thing? In Lebanon you don’t judge a bottle by its label. Label-forging factories professionally update, reconstitute and freshen up almost any product on the market here.

It’s up to the government’s Central Laboratory to make sure that the contents of a container bear some resemblance to the label. Twice looted during the years of civil war, the lab is now back at work, testing bottles of wine, beer and your VAT 69. A well-known fundamentalist Muslim group showed up one day with cans of “Islamic beer”--i.e., supposedly nonalcoholic. The group just wanted to make sure it really was.

A Lebanese mezzeh --a wide selection of hors d’oeuvres-- willvres accompany your drink. The centerpiece of many a mezzeh is a platter of fresh, leafy vegetables set off with a couple of perfect tomatoes and green peppers. But this seemingly picture perfect still-life may contain a deadly surprise.

Some 300 pesticides, insecticides and fungicides are sold on the market here. Recently the government issued a list of 77 that are banned, but some of those are still around, brought in during the war years through militia ports. And the flow of forbidden types into the country may not have stopped completely.

“Sometimes they’re labeled ‘shampoo’ and in they come,” asserted an American University of Beirut agricultural expert.

Even the approved sprays are often misused. Imported in bulk, they are often repackaged without labels or directions. The farmer believes that if one dose is good, two or more are better. Protective masks and gloves are rarely used. And the recommended delay between spraying and harvesting is often overlooked--farmers think the crops preserve better if sprayed just before picking.

Not all is ignorance. One environmentalist tells of a farmer who said he suspected pesticides formerly stored near his home caused his wife’s miscarriages. But he continued to use the chemicals on his cash crops--keeping a separate plot of vegetables for home consumption.

But the prize for creative use of pesticides goes to the guys who provide you with your next course--fresh fish.

During the civil war, fishermen simply used dynamite to bring their catch to the surface--plenty of the stuff around then, after all. Now that the government has regained control of the ports and stopped the dynamite fishing, some fishermen have turned to Lannate--an approved pesticide. They mix the colorless, sugar-like substance into bread dough as bait, dropping large quantities into the sea. The highly toxic pesticide kills quickly, sending the fish floating to the surface where they are scooped up by the fishermen.

Traces of heavy metals such as mercury have also been found in bottom-feeding fish, according to Mugharbil. Looking on the bright side, he adds that this means the poor man eats more safely than the rich man, because it’s the larger, more expensive fish that are the bottom feeders.

The source of these heavy metals is not Lebanon, environmentalists insist. The Christian Lebanese Forces militia was accused of taking toxic waste from Europe in 1989. When residents suspected what was being buried in their back yards, the militia reportedly dumped the remainder in the sea.

But the government has its hands full of problems more serious than guessing which fish is into heavy metal. Bloated carcasses of cows and sheep lie rotting less than a hundred feet from an area inhabited by the poor just south of Beirut.

“It’s a crime, a sin,” said one of the women living there. “They bring the animals at night, pay someone off and dump them here.”

A five-minute walk away is the major slaughter area for west Beirut. (The city’s official slaughterhouse was destroyed during the war and has yet to be rebuilt.) No doctor examines the animals before or after butchering.

Even so, the present makeshift system beats the sight of merchants around town who do their own butchering outside their shops. At six in the morning hapless animals are tethered outside meat shops. By seven the sidewalks are blood-soaked and the carcasses are being carved up. Customers forgive the spectacle because they feel the approach at least guarantees that the meat is fresh.

Lebanon imports 70% of its red meat--much of which comes frozen. “Frozen, thawed, re-frozen, re-thawed,” corrects an environmentalist whose tales of rotten meat and its various disguises would turn Mike Tyson into a vegetarian.

An unscrupulous Lebanese importer nicknamed Kojak is said to scour the Mediterranean for ships carrying meat rejected by other countries. Spicy sausages are a great hide-out for rotten meat. Cheaper pork stretches a national dish called kibbeh nayyeh made with ground lamb and eaten raw--an invitation to trichinosis, as a number of kibbeh nayyeh fans discovered after eating their favorite dish at certain Beirut restaurants.

If you think the solution is to eat at home, listen to Beirut resident Betsy Travis of New York. She caught her butcher warding off flies and wasps by spraying his meat with Pifpaf--a locally available insect spray.

The government is aware of the seriousness of the problem, said Health Ministry spokesman Dr. Emile Marakem. “Our goal is control. We want to apply the standards of Western countries,” he said. Controlling imports has proved easier than dealing with local problems, like Betsy’s butcher, Marakem added, pointing to a consignment of frozen fish from the Persian Gulf that was destroyed here as substandard.

Sorry to spoil your lunch. But how about that promised dip in the sea?

A few words of advice on your way to the waves. The sand truly is fine and white. Trouble is, it’s buried under garbage washed up from neighboring seaside landfills. Perhaps it’s also wise to keep in mind that Beirut’s untreated sewage runs directly into the sea.

Not feeling well? Choose your drugstore carefully. Licensing of pharmacies stopped in 1975, the year the war began. Consequently that man or woman in the white coat behind the counter could be another menu to disaster.