ABSTRACT
This chapter adopts the Foucaultian approach of discourse analysis and examines food education teaching plans, bills and reports, arguing that the realness of food is problematised after a series of food safety scandals in Taiwan. Proposed as a solution to food safety issues, food education establishes its discursive object and speaking subject on the originality and realness of food. First, the ‘original taste’ of food is defined as its object to distinguish the real from the fake. By problematising the loss of food’s original taste and the eater’s inability of appreciating food, food education discourse promotes the practice of tasting to address the proliferated invisibility, uncertainty and riskiness of ‘fake food’. The last part of this chapter examines the conditions and criteria that define the possible position of speaking subject, arguing that farmers are qualified to speak of real food because of the closer relationship with food and their lives as a manifestation of truth.
