November 2, 1983

The Rath Packing Company, an employee-owned meatpacker hailed as a leader in a new era of industrial democracy, filed yesterday for protection and reorganization under Chapter 11 of the Federal bankruptcy laws. In 1980, employees bought the company to try to keep it from failing. At noon yesterday, many of those same employees were told by Lyle Taylor, a former butcher and union leader who was elected president of Rath in March, that the company was seeking protection from its creditors.

The House of Representatives today rejected attempts to cut funds for the MX intercontinental missile and the B-1 strategic bomber. By a vote of 217 to 208, the House turned back an effort to delete funds for production of the missile. Earlier it voted, 247 to 175, against an attempt to bar financing of the new bomber for more than one year at a time. Both efforts were led by Representative Joseph P. Addabbo, Democrat of Queens, who is chairman of the Defense Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. They represented the fall-back positions of those whose initial efforts to kill the projects had been rejected by the House. Last July, the House approved production funds for the MX missile by a larger margin, 220 to 207.

There are leaflets, mailings, palm cards by the millions. There are whistle-stop tours, campaign promises, a flashy television advertisement and even a brass band or two. And by Election Day there will be just about everything needed for a political campaign - except a live candidate. It is all part of an effort that Governor Cuomo has put together on behalf of a ballot issue, Proposal 1, authorizing the state to borrow $1.25 billion for transportation projects through a bond sale.

GENERATIONS of children have held their noses and eaten their spinach or beets or whatever in order to get at the chocolate pudding with whipped cream or even the Lorna Doones. Later in life dreadful dinners of mystery meat and gray-green vegetables have been redeemed by buttery-crusted lemon chiffon pies, meringue cakes filled with mocha butter cream and the sweet-tart flavor of a fresh raspberry mousse that explodes on the tongue. Most Americans have a sweet tooth. Indeed, despite protestations to the contrary, we can probably still match our collective sweet tooth against any other nation's. We may get through an entire dinner without eating a roll or but ter and carefully scrape the beurre blanc off a poached fish, but when the dessert cart rolls by we happily surrender to chocolate mousse cake laced with Grand Marnier Recipes are on page C8.

With clipboards and large-scale maps, investigators for a lawyers' group are out walking the 13,000 miles of sidewalks in New York, using eight symbols to note every pothole, raised manhole cover and broken curb.. Behind them, scores of checkers hired by the City Department of Transportation will soon follow with their own maps and clipboards, verifying the lawyers' findings with another set of symbols. The map making, which has so far involved more than 3,000 charts and the marking and double-checking of 750,000 defects in three boroughs, is the latest phase in a sidewalk war being waged between the city, which says it has been losing millions of dollars in personal-injury suits, and the lawyers, who represent the injured, and whose own livelihoods are at stake. In the last few years, settlements and judgments against the city have been swelling, and officials say they are paying out more each year than the budget of either the Department of Health or the Department of Parks and Recreation. The suits against the city depend on what one lawyer calls an ''essential incongruity'' in the legal status of the sidewalks. For the most part, they are owned by the adjacent property owners, who are responsible for keeping them in good condition, but the legal liability for personal injuries if they are in poor condition rests with the city.