On Feeding the Masses

Chinas food safety system is in crisis. Egregious scandals, as varied as the sale of liquor laced with Viagra and the distribution of fake eggs, reveal how regulatory practices have been stretched to their limit in the worlds largest food production system. On Feeding the Masses focuses on the oft-cited but ultimately overlooked concept of scale to identify the root causes of Chinas regulatory failures in food safety. The politics of scale framework highlights how regulators disagree on which level of government is best suited to regulate (the scale of governance), struggle to address multilevel tensions (multidimensional scale integration), and fail to understand how policies at one level of government can affect other levels of government in unexpected and costly ways (scale externalities). Drawing from over 200 interviews with food safety regulators and producers, the study provides one of the most comprehensive accounts of Chinas food safety crisis to date.