SYMPOSIUM Food Safety: Risk Assessment Methodology and Decision-Making Criteria

come more complex and, therefore, open to greater scientific de-bate. Risk assessment has always been a part of the regulatory notification and approval process for foods. However, the method-ologies applied to risk assessment and decision-making have be-come diverse, dependent on a number of features, including the areas of the world in which one operates, the need to use cumula-tive risk assessment for pesticides and other ingredients or alterna-tive risk assessment considerations for evaluating nontraditional or bioengineered foods. Diverse institutional structures within a single federal regulatory authority may tend to lead to diversity in risk outcomes that creates policy decisions that complicate and confuse the risk management process. On top of this challenge, decisions become more complicated by the need to examine beneficial factors of foods rather than the adverse effects of foods and food additives. Foods are a complex mixture of ingredients. Regulatory group