Identifying Mechanisms That Generate Food-Safety Problems and Designing Governance Pathways in Open Food Systems

In the context of open platforms, flexible employment, and intelligent technologies jointly reshaping the food system, food safety risks have dispersed from supply chains composed of a few fixed enterprises to multi-actor, multi-interface scenarios such as platform delivery, live-streamed sales, shared kitchens, small and micro businesses, and mobile stalls, making food safety increasingly resemble a common-pool resource. Traditional food-safety governance theories require further revision. Redefining food-safety governance as the management of food-safety information as a common-pool resource, this study, based on China’s Weibo search data, government supervision announcements, news media, and publicly available web materials, collected 202,227 raw text entries, including 197,330 Weibo posts and comments, and 4897 government announcements, media reports, and other public web materials. After basic cleaning and topic relevance screening, 106,097 screened sample records were obtained, serving as the scope for targeted retrieval and manual material selection. Guided by eight theoretical dimensions, 23 subcategories were formed through computational exploration and manual contextual verification, and representative empirical materials were selected for analysis and presentation. Drawing on the two dimensions of the non-excludability of the food system and the rivalry of food-safety information, this paper interprets functional subtractability as the specific manifestation of the latter in the context examined and uses the materials to propose a mechanism chain explaining the generation of food-safety risks: the entry of numerous operators into the market allows them to share existing market reputation and safety environment foundations, while the appropriation of information can directly translate into commercial benefits. This may foster opportunistic behaviors such as the externalization of compliance costs, product-quality and identity deception, and the monetization of information used to attract online attention. Possession and interception behaviors spread along the multi-interface supply chain, potentially exacerbating fragmentation of safety information nodes and dilution of responsibility, resulting in a shortage of real, verifiable, and actionable effective information. The scarcity of effective information may further exacerbate the collective-action dilemma among multiple actors; compliant operators find it difficult to demonstrate their adherence, and inferior quality supply infiltrates the market, potentially intensifying adverse selection pressures, and driving the repetitive reproduction of food safety risks in open systems. Based on this interpretation of the mechanism, the core of food-safety governance in open contexts is no longer merely repairing the information asymmetry in individual transactions but maintaining the collective provision of food-safety information under multi-actor open and mobile conditions. Drawing on CPR governance theory, it is proposed that governance should focus on the generation, disclosure, verification, feedback, and accountability of food-safety information, constructing a multi-actor co-governance framework with clear boundaries, matched rules, effective supervision, traceable responsibilities, and a nested structure, to address the institutional challenges arising from the diffusion of risk sources, decentralization of governance actors, and the complexity of accountability chains in open contexts.