Producing safe food and rebuilding social trust

The food safety crisis highlights the advent of the risk society. The collapse of the realistic and trust structures generate panic, making the risk society one of China’s characteristics. The coronavirus outbreak constitutes a concentrated manifestation of this risk. At the structural level, when dealing with food safety problems, the setting up of CSA social enterprises are one of the important ways of social self-help and shape the way social response to food safety crisis is structured and layered. In this process, the important sociological questions we need to ask are whether or not people’s trust can be rebuilt and if so how to rebuild it? To that end, the mutual interaction of market and social mechanisms form a major basis in the process of re-establishing trust.