What is ‘real food’? A discourse analysis of food education in Taiwan

Abstract

This research adopts Discourse Analysis as its method to analyze the growing discussions of food education after a series of food safety scandals in Taiwan since 2010. By examining the proposed food education bills, local projects, textbooks, lesson plans and news articles, this research aims to explain how food education as a discourse problematizes food in its own way and identify the subject position and knowledge different from nutrition education, thereby contributing to the field of sociology of food.

In the discussions of real food following the food safety scandals, the taste of food is deemed the key to the distinction between real and fake. The food education discourse advocates the need for the public to know the ‘original taste’ of food that is deemed gradually replaced by its simulation, the artificial flavorings and additives, which are deemed the cause of the numbed tongues incapable of appreciating real food. The training of the sense of taste is therefore promoted. Fake food is perceived as an impersonal mechanical reproduction of real food, the original handcrafted work of art tightly connected with the producer’s personal life. With their more intimate relations with food and everyday life, the farmer and the traditional market vendor who were once deemed uneducated are now legitimized to share their knowledge of food, and the farm and marketplace are used as the classroom outside school.

Comparatively, the dominant discourse of nutrition education considers food as exchangeable in the standardized format of the nutrient composition. It evaluates the cost-benefit of food in the language of bookkeeping and accounting, establishing a strict training and certification system to authorize only qualified experts to provide objective dietary advice. The above two heterogeneous discourses compose Taiwan’s landscape of food education in a broader sense.