“Bacon wrapped cancer”: the discursive construction of meat carcinogenicity

In 2015, the World Health Organization published a report on the carcinogenicity of red and processed meat, attracting intense interest from both the general public and the scientific community. This study combines corpus approaches, Systemic Functional Linguistics and discourse analysis to investigate and compare scientific and animal rights movement reactions to the IARC 2015 report. Scientific reactions are exemplified by three research papers published immediately after the report; responses from animal rights campaigners are investigated through an analysis of texts taken from the website of the nongovernmental organization PETA. The aim is to explore how discourse not only describes, but also constructs meat carcinogenicity, in texts produced by two discourse communities (scientists and animal campaigners) which, for entirely different reasons, have an important stake in this issue. Qualitative (close reading) and quantitative (corpus-based) methods are combined, focusing on vocabulary, grammatical metaphor, and Appraisal (Martin & White, 2005). The results show a high level of hybridity, discursive erasure (Stibbe, 2012), and some substantial differences in the discourse reactions to the IARC report by the two sources, reflecting the ideologies and ethical assumptions they espouse in their approach to the announcement that red and processed meat can cause cancer.