Digital Construction and Audience Reception of Toxic Food Risk in a YouTube Documentary on Indonesian Tofu Production

Digital media increasingly shape public understandings of food risk by connecting everyday consumption with social and environmental concerns. However, the relationship between the construction of food risk in digital documentaries and its subsequent interpretation by audiences requires further explanation. This study aims to examine the digital construction and audience reception of toxic food risk in a YouTube documentary on Indonesian tofu production. The data comprised 144 timestamped documentary segments and 1,093 YouTube comment entries retrieved through the YouTube Data API v3 on July 1, 2026. The study used an interpretive qualitative approach combining multimodal pragma-semiotic analysis with Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. The findings showed that the documentary constructed food risk through cumulative pragmatic escalation and multimodal materialization. The two processes transformed tofu from a familiar everyday food into a toxic risk sign that connected consumption with production conditions framed as risky, worker and environmental exposure, and structural responsibility. Responses within the sampled comment corpus extended the documentary’s framing through contamination anxiety, ecological recontextualization, and structural critique. The interaction between documentary representation and comment-based interpretation produced discursive scaling from the food product toward production conditions, worker exposure, environmental burdens, economic constraints, and institutional responsibility. The findings support the conceptualization of digital food risk as a layered and interconnected process involving framing, materialization, transformation, and comment-based recontextualization. The contribution to Food Studies lies in a food-systems perspective that connects everyday consumption with the social, environmental, economic, labor, and institutional conditions of production.