Cooking Up Risks: Benchmarking and Reducing Food Safety Risks in Large Language Models

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 1 Apr 2026] Cooking Up Risks: Benchmarking and Reducing Food Safety Risks in Large Language Models Weidi Luo, Xiaofei Wen, Tenghao Huang, Hongyi Wang, Zhen Xiang, Chaowei Xiao, Kristina Gligorić, Muhao Chen Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for everyday tasks, including food preparation and health-related guidance. However, food safety remains a high-stakes domain where inaccurate or misleading information can cause severe real-world harm. Despite these risks, current LLMs and safety guardrails lack rigorous alignment tailored to domain-specific food hazards. To address this gap, we introduce FoodGuardBench, the first comprehensive benchmark comprising 3,339 queries grounded in FDA guidelines, designed to evaluate the safety and robustness of LLMs. By constructing a taxonomy of food safety principles and employing representative jailbreak attacks (e.g., AutoDAN and PAP), we systematically evaluate existing LLMs and guardrails. Our evaluation results reveal three critical vulnerabilities: First, current LLMs exhibit sparse safety alignment in the food-related domain, easily succumbing to a few canonical jailbreak strategies. Second, when compromised, LLMs frequently generate actionable yet harmful instructions, inadvertently empowering malicious actors and posing tangible risks. Third, existing LLM-based guardrails systematically overlook these domain-specific threats, failing to detect a substantial volume of malicious inputs. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, we introduce FoodGuard-4B, a specialized guardrail model fine-tuned on our datasets to safeguard LLMs within food-related domains. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2604.01444 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.01444v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.01444 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Weidi Luo [view email] [v1] Wed, 1 Apr 2026 22:38:38 UTC (1,082 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)