Food Safety in the News, 2019–2026: Attention, Geography and Tone of Global Food-Safety Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how food safety was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 94,346 de-duplicated food-safety articles, and set that coverage beside 16,598 research papers (2015–2025) and 3,301 patent families on the topic. Six results stand out: Attention. Food safety took a 40.89% smaller share of news in 2020 than in 2019. Its share rose 1.37-fold from 2023 to 2024, to 7.36 per 10,000 articles, close to the 2019 level (7.41). Setting aside a loading artefact, the largest monthly share was October 2024, the month of the E. coli outbreak linked to McDonald's Quarter Pounders, at 11.33 per 10,000. Geography. The United States holds 51.52% of located food-safety news, close to its weight in the index (lift 1.06). India holds 18.56% (lift 1.41). Indonesia (2.43) and New Zealand (1.91) are the most over-represented countries. Within India, Telangana (4.84), Kerala (2.58) and Andhra Pradesh (1.56) lead; within the United States, New Mexico (3.82), Virginia (3.36) and Arkansas (2.5). Shifting attention. Indonesia's food-safety coverage rose 10.67-fold as a share of its news between 2023 and 2025. France's share fell by about half (6.48 to 3.12). Tone and urgency. 55.6% of food-safety articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 73.7% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Measurement. 19.02% of raw matches for food-safety vocabulary were scientific abstracts, repeated marketing and training pages, or figurative uses. A bulk load of archived articles on 14 February 2025 doubles that month's share and must be set aside. Research and invention. Food-safety papers grew from 1.95 to 3.2 per 10,000 papers between 2019 and 2025 (1.64 times). Patent families published per year rose from 114 in 2015 to a peak of 669 in 2021 and 408 in 2024; 91.8% of family filings were in China.