Lab-grown meat, cultured meat, cell-based meat- what are they and what do they mean for the future of food? We explored this topic and talked about our research in a presentation for fellow linguists who also love to study the language of food. Our presentation was “Trailblazers”: Singapore’s Media Discourse of Lab-Grown Meat”, the feature talk for Bayreuth Food and Language Talks #BaFoLa on June 24, 2022. It was sponsored by the English Linguistics Department of Bayreuth University and organized by Dr. Sofia Rudiger. We presented on Singapore’s involvement in lab-grown meat and how the topic is made newsworthy in an analysis of articles from The Straits Times, Singapore’s flagship newspaper, from Jan 1, 2019, to June 15, 2022.
December 2020, Singapore was the first in the world to approve sale of lab-grown meat- cultured chicken bites from Eat Just, a California start-up. It took 2 years for the government to approve the cultured chicken for sale. This event generated a lot of news, both nationally and internationally. We began to take note of the media discourse, the seed to this presentation.
After the initial approval to sell lab-grown meat, the first commercial sale was served at the private members’ club restaurant 1880 in Singapore. Bite-sized chicken was served with waffles (Chicken and waffles) and on a steamed bun (Chicken bao) and priced at $23.
From the initial approval of the sale of cultivated meat, we start to see more and more of Singapore’s investments in food research. For example, the Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation was developed under A-Star, the Agency for Science, Technology and Research, which is a statutory board under the Ministry of Trade and Industry of Singapore. Grants such as the $25 billion Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2020 plan allotted money ($144 million) specifically for food-related research, including alternative proteins, sustainable urban food production, future foods and food safety science and innovation.
Why is Singapore interested in alternative proteins?
Why is Singapore in particular interested in future foods? As a small island-nation with little land for agriculture, Singapore imports 90% of its food, sourcing ingredients from 180 countries around the world. This global connection is a result of Singapore’s strategic maritime role as one of the world’s busiest ports with links to more than 600 ports! We can just look out our apartment window and watch for hours as busy port scene constantly changes with over 130,000 vessel calls a year.
At the same time, Singapore is vulnerable to changes in global food production. Halts in food supply, such as during COVID-19 or most recently, Malaysia’s ban on chicken exports to Singapore, have raised concern about Singapore’s food security. Concerns about climate change have also accelerated innovation in food production.
Singapore is working towards a national plan to bolster its food security. Known as “30 by 30”, the plan is to build up the island-nation’s agri-food industry’s capability and capacity to produce 30 per cent of its nutritional needs locally by 2030. To overcome land constraints, Singapore has turned to technology and innovative ways to increase food production, such as the development of cultured meat facilities.
How is an event constructed as newsworthiness?
We were curious to find out what made alternative proteins worthy to be considered news. After all, there are many other stories that could be reported on, e.g., the welfare of migrant workers, local housing market, homegrown celebrities, etc. The notion of ‘newsworthiness’ is what journalists assess to be worthy of coverage as news. We asked, how does Singapore’s media discursively construct an event as newsworthy, specifically lab-grown meat?
Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) (Bednarek & Caple, 2017)
We applied the framework of Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) by Bednarek and Caple (2017), which focuses on how news is reported in language and image. The Discursive News Values Analysis framework (Bednarek & Caple, 2017) has ten news values:
- Consonance
- Eliteness
- Impact
- Negativity
- Positivity
- Personalization
- Proximity
- Superlativeness
- Timeliness
- Unexpectedness
Several news values may be co-represented through one expression (such as Superlativeness plus Positivity). Our analysis also applied the Coding Manual developed by Bednarek and Caple available on the website: www.newsvaluesanalysis.com
Some of our findings:
- Positive terms (sustainable, clean, healthy) create a halo effect that elevates the perception of lab-grown meats
- News values of timeliness/novelty privilege scientific and technological advancements.
- News values of personalization reference ‘ordinary‘ people, their emotions, and experiences may be conducive to mobilization.
News values of both people + science may be because of how food is so culturally embedded and how these novel foods are lab-grown. The news reports imply that personal action needs to be taken, as science and technology cannot take care of food security on its own.
- Presence of government and institutions generally directed the angle of the news towards the “30-by-30” goal
- Sociocultural values: “innovation”, “novelty”, “trailblazers”
- Positive assessments of government officers (Prime Minister; Chief Executive of Singapore Food Agency; Minister for Sustainability and the Environment; Minister of State for Trade and Industry, and more) help construe news values of Positivity and Timeliness.
Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2017). The Discourse of News Values. Oxford University Press.