China's protracted food safety crisis of the last 20-odd years has rightfully received a great deal of attention from social scientists. Studies have explored the effects on social relations and cultural practices of food. Others have shown how food safety anxieties have informed the emergence of “alternative” food networks promising safe fare in the form of “ecological” foods. Scholars looking for causes behind the food safety scandals have pointed to factors such as the delocalization and marketization of food supply chains, the growing social distance between producers and consumers, the industrialization of food production and processing methods, and the country's reliance on large numbers of often poorly educated and economically disadvantaged small-scale producers. Political scientists have highlighted corruption, authoritarianism, local obstructionism and bureaucratic fragmentation whereby responsibility for overseeing the country's food safety has been spread between numerous, overlapping authorities. John Yasuda, in his book Feeding the Masses, builds on and extends the insights of his fellow political scientists and other social scientists and integrates them into the most comprehensive and thought-provoking analysis of the topic to date.

Yasuda's argument centres on what he calls the “politics of scale,” by which he means the “conflicts that emerge when policy communities operating at different scales […] are forced to integrate to develop a unified regulatory system” (p. 4). The main problem, according to Yasuda, is not one of self-serving local officials wilfully disregarding directives from above because they are beholden to the food industries. Rather, food safety legislation, institutions and methods developed at the national scale often are incompatible with food production, processing and distribution practices at provincial, county or township scales. Moreover, because of China's increased reliance in recent decades on interregional, interprovincial and international food trade, problems that emerge in one township may quickly spread to other scales. Food safety governance has failed to keep apace with a rapidly changing food system, giving rise to situations in which scale politics may emerge.

The study is based on meticulous, up-to-date research. As clearly laid out in an appendix, this includes hundreds of interviews conducted with regulators, producers and other food system actors during 15 months of fieldwork over a seven-year period from 2009 to 2016. Yasuda presents this material selectively across 11 short, argument-driven chapters. There is a tendency toward abstraction throughout the book, and while I understand the author's decision to avoid description for its own sake I would have appreciated the inclusion of more extended examples to add depth and specificity to the discussion. Minimally, the kinds of boxed case studies deployed to good effect in chapter four (on the export sector) might have featured throughout the book.

What the book lacks in descriptive richness it makes up for in analytical rigour and clarity. Yasuda divides the food system into three sectors: the “domestic sector,” the “export sector” and the “Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) sector.” The export sector is regulated by a centralized authority in a top-down fashion, closely monitored to meet with global standards. The small CSA sector has emerged through bottom-up initiatives to supply well-heeled urban residents with “ecological” foods from nearby villages with production regulated by systems of trust. Yasuda argues that both sectors operate well at their respective, restricted scales but are difficult to roll out as models across the more complex domestic sector dominated by small-scale producers and economically constrained consumers. Meanwhile, state-backed attempts to improve food safety in the domestic sector with the help of dragonhead enterprises and farmers’ cooperatives that might vertically integrate supply chains and provide training to small-scale producers have failed to improve food safety because of a lack of attendance to the problems of integrating production across scales.

In response, the author looks beyond China for models in polities that share similar challenges of scale to those of China. In contrast to China's “unitary” but “fragmented” system of (food) governance, the European Union's federalist, “multilevel” system has succeeded in coordinating diverse local and national systems of governance and production within an overall, shared framework. Yasuda's celebration of the EU's food governance as a model for China over, for example, the CSA model is based not only on arguments about governance, however, but also in the conviction that one cannot “turn back the clock” (p. 214) to locally based farming systems and that “ecological” farming would not meet China's demand for food. In making this argument, the author indexes but does not adequately engage in wider debates about food security, farming systems, environmental sustainability and farmer livelihoods.

This ground-breaking study will appeal to multiple audiences. Yasuda's analysis of the failures of China's food safety governance contributes to debates on Chinese politics and speaks to wider, comparative studies of governance. Scholars and students of Chinese studies and food studies will find in this book an excellent overview of China's current food system. Policy-makers in China will hopefully chew over Yasuda's insights into the politics of scale even if, as the author points out, they may find his suggestions for a more “federalist” approach to food safety governance politically difficult to swallow.