Food Safety and the Paradox of Development: Governance, Commodification and Environmental Health in China

• In Event: Putting Sociology to Work for a More Equitable Global Health

Abstract

China effectively overcame hunger, yet in this very process of development, new crises have emerged. The country now faces some of the world's highest rates of cancer mortality, chronic respiratory disorders, and diabetes, compounded by an intractable food safety crisis that has generated major scandals from the 2008 baby formula disaster to cooking oil contamination in 2024 and the mass poisoning of preschool children in 2025. What are the structural roots of this crisis? Why does it persist despite dramatic state intervention? And what does it reveal about the nature of development itself? Drawing on government document analysis, policy review, discourse analysis, and long-term ethnography of food safety governance conducted primarily from 2013 to 2017 with follow-up investigations into the present, the paper develops three arguments. First, it traces how the contemporary food safety crisis, qualitatively different from earlier incidents of unhygienic food handling, is a structural consequence of the entanglement of state-making, scientism, and the commodification of food within China's market-based development trajectory. Second, drawing on ethnographic research with government officials in Henan and Guangxi, it shows how regulatory responses reproduce the same entanglement, as bureaucrats manage career risk through responsibility-shifting rather than addressing structural causes. Third, building on Polanyian political economy, it situates the food safety crisis within a broader theorization of “slow death”, the continuous, gradual decline in health produced by unsafe food, environmental contamination, and social inequality that resists episodic crisis-management governance. The paper contributes to development sociology by centering food safety as a lens for examining the contradictions of development, extending Polanyian frameworks to environmental sociology, and demonstrating that China's entangled crises of food, health, and environment hold lessons for developing countries undergoing similar processes of commodification and regulatory capture.

Author

• Li Zhang, Amherst College