Perspective is very important in understanding the area of food safety. This importance is illustrated by a favorite cartoon of mine that features an older, experienced mouse giving advice to a young mouse. The older mouse, in wrapping up, says to the younger, "... and stay away from scientists— they cause cancer." Facing an avalanche of infor-mation on links between diet and health, consumers may, in frustration, sympathize with the mouse's view, and are having some difficulty sorting out which are the important cause-and-effect relation-ships. Government and industry also are struggling to develop a coherent approach to food safety and nutrition. Here, I stretch the term food safety to cover all linkages between diet and health, including tradi-tional safety concerns (e.g., microbial contami-nation, pesticide residues, additives, naturally occurring toxicants, and environmental contami-nants), as well as the increasingly prominent area of links between dietary composition and health (e.g., between dietary fiber and cancer). In the United States, both types of diet-health linkages have been front-page news throughout the late 1980s. A short review of some key events will serve to set the stage. In 1985 the largest recorded outbreak of sal-monella-related food poisoning in the United States occurred in the Chicago area when, it is believed, unpasteurized and pasteurized milk were mixed in a processing plant owned by the Jewel Companies, a supermarket chain. There were over 16,000 con-firmed cases of salmonellosis as a result and experts believe more than ten times that number were ac-tually affected (Ryan et al.). In 1986 the U.S. General Accounting Office (1986a, 1986b) released two reports concluding, in effect, that the Food and Drug Administration's (PDA) inspection system for pesticide residues in domestic and imported food was woefully inadequate. In 1987 the television show "60 Minutes" aired a report, considered infamous in the eyes of in-dustry (which believed it was inflammatory), on the presence of salmonella bacteria in chicken products. Growth in the demand for chicken products slackened after the report (Charlier). First appearing in 1984, the number of health claims on food products exploded after 1987 as the Reagan administration reversed previous policy, which had effectively outlawed such claims. The most no-ticeable result, perhaps, has been the oat-bran craze. More importantly, however, large numbers of food products now carry health claims, either explicit (e.g., diets high in fiber have been shown to reduce the risk of colon cancer) or implicit (e.g., no cho-lesterol). The piece de resistance of the decade's growing focus on diet-health linkages came in early 1989 with the Natural Resources Defense Council's well-orchestrated release of its report "Intolerable Risk: Pesticides in Our Children's Food.' * Accom-panied by a "60 Minutes" segment and extensive media coverage, the release caused a panic among consumers, especially parents, in regard to the presence of residues of the growth regulator Alar in fresh apples and processed apple products. These events are a small sample from a much larger set. Understanding of this set of events is often overwhelmed by the number of safety and nutrition issues involved; the amount of coverage the issues have received; the number of players in-volved, including consumers, firms, state govern-ments, and federal agencies; and the intricacies of federal law. To cut through this confusion, I focus here on what I consider to be the bedrock questions facing public policies and private (consumer, firm, and interest group) strategies in the area of food safety and nutrition. To do so, we turn first to an overview of the demand for and supply of food safety in the U.S. and then focus on the common denominators of the related policy choice prob-lems. These common denominators define the food safety policy fights of the 1980s and 1990s.