September 28, 1985

The Philip Morris Companies, the nation's biggest cigarette maker, has agreed to buy the General Foods Corporation, one of the country's biggest food producers, the two companies announced yesterday. Philip Morris will pay General Foods' stockholders almost $5.8 billion in cash, making the merger the costliest in history outside the oil business. The combination is the latest in a succession of food-company acquisitions: The lure, as consumers become increasingly eager for convenience foods, is established brand names. General Foods, for example, makes Jell-O, Maxwell House coffee and Birds Eye frozen foods. The trend also reflects the desire of tobacco companies to diversify into other consumer products because of the pressures that health questions are putting on their cigarette business.

Hurricane Gloria charged up the Atlantic seaboard yesterday and slammed into the New York metropolitan region with pounding winds and heavy rains. Long Island and Connecticut bore the brunt, but most of the region appeared to take the awesome storm in stride. The hurricane - 300 miles of churning spiral arms that hurled winds up to 130 miles an hour - drove 280,000 residents from coastal areas, including 100,000 on Long Island and 95,000 in New Jersey; killed three people; knocked out power to at least 1.7 million homes, and disrupted the lives of millions of residents from North Carolina to New England. Downgraded to 'Storm' But at 8 P.M., the National Weather Service downgraded the hurricane to a tropical storm when its winds fell to 50 miles an hour over New England. At midnight, the storm was at the northern tip of Maine.

''Scary,'' Cheryl Gagliano said yesterday in Hampton Bays, L.I., where the wind was howling, the trees were whipping back and forth and all the shades in the house had been pulled down - except the one for peeping out. ''My husband was just wondering if the roof might go.'' The roof did not go, Mrs. Gagliano said later, but the basketball hoop did. In other areas, however, preparing for Hurricane Gloria was like the storm before the calm, as the metropolitan area battened down its hatches, taped its windows, evacuated its beachfronts and prepared for what forecasters had been calling ''possibly the worst hurricane of the century.'' In parts of New York City and some suburban areas, the preparations proved far more dramatic than the hurricane itself, which roared through quickly, followed by incongruous blue skies.

The Soviet Foreign Minister met with President Reagan today and was reported to have proposed a 50 percent reduction in the offensive nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. A Reagan Administration official said the minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, had outlined a formal Soviet negotiating plan after giving Mr. Reagan a long letter from the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. First Clear Indication Today's developments were the first clear indication that the Soviet Union would offer a comprehensive plan to reduce offensive weapons since the Geneva arms talks resumed in March after 15-month hiatus. The Administration has repeatedly attributed the impasse in Geneva to Moscow's failure to submit such a plan. Mr. Reagan and Mr. Shevardnadze conferred for two hours in the Oval Office, then met for an hour over lunch in the State Dining Room.

Hurricane Gloria's path along the Northeast coast was destructive to property, but lives were spared in part because technological advances provided a picture of the storm's every movement in plenty of time for residents to take adequate precautions. If the forecasters seemed to have gone too far in predicting the power of Gloria, that was, in some measure, a matter of perception, because its fury swept some areas and spared others. But it was also a matter of reality. The storm was in fact slightly less powerful than expected, reflecting deficiencies in the ability to predict a storm's path despite great strides in satellite and radar observation of these huge atmospheric disturbances.