The traditional approach to the analysis of food policy treatsgovernment as an impartial ‘clearing house’, balancing the needs of dfferent groups and correcting for market failures. Recent writings on political economy, particularly relating to agriculture, argue that policy making should be treated as an endogenous component of the food system which depends on the nature of the political institutions and the policy-making process, and on interest groups and their relative strengths. In this paper, these ideas are discussed in relation to food policy generally and in particular, to three specfic examples: food safety;food research and development (R&D) in relation to industrial competitiveness; and food labelling. The preliminary analysis presented in this paper supports the view that this is a fruitful area for further investigation.