Abstract: At present, food safety has evolved from a traditional public health management issue into a modern risk characterized by high uncertainty, systemic nature, and global reach. It directly endangers the health and lives of the general public, posing a severe challenge to public safety and social stability. The criminal law protection system is the ultimate means of social defense, and its sophistication directly reflects the ability of a country to govern systemic risks and the level of law civilization. This paper, grounded in the risk society theory, systematically traces the evolution of China’s criminal law safeguards for food safety from inception to refinement revealing the underlying paradigm shift in criminal policy from post-incident retribution to risk prevention. Through a comparative legal lens, it examines the diverse approaches of major civil law and common law jurisdiction in risk allocation, liability principles, and sentencing configurations. This article critically examines the institutional achievements of the current system in tightening the criminal network, diversifying protected interests, strengthening deterrent penalties, and enhancing coordination between administrative and criminal enforcement. Moreover, it deeply analyzes the system’s structural challenges, including misaligned legislative values, imbalanced penal structure and function, regulatory blind spots, and inefficient administrative-criminal enforcement mechanisms. Building on this foundation and integrating theories of risk allocation justice and positive general prevention, this paper proposes classifying food safety crimes under crimes against public security, establishing a diversified penal system centered on qualifying penalties and multiple-fine penalties, expanding the scope of criminalization including negligent dangerous offenses and possession-based crimes, and optimizing the coordination mechanism between criminal and administrative enforcement through digital empowerment and public interest orientation. These systematic and forward-looking improvement pathways aim to provide robust intellectual support and feasible solutions for constructing a more scientific, rigorous, and efficient criminal law governance system for food safety within the context of a risk society.

Key words: risk society; food safety; criminal law safeguards; achievement review; problem analysis; pathway outlook