The greater awareness of the negative environmental and health-related externalities of the large-scale food industry is directly responsible for the diminished confidence of the quality of its products.  The declining health and safety of the food industry represents a consequence of the changing relationship of scale and quality due to the emergence of new threats to health and safety. Scale as a signal of credibility is no longer sufficient to guarantee these qualities, however. Hence, the continued emphasis on scale now represents a limitation to improving health and safety. Instead, further quality innovation demands the development of a costly signal appropriate to the extant social context.

Mass-produced food- the rise and fall of the promise of health and safety