"Across many policy spheres, researchers have noted the increasingly scientific governance of global affairs. One common explanation is that science has become a kind of modern secular religion. Drawing on interviews with members of the US food policy network, I offer a more conflict-driven view; the USA is engaged in a self-consciously hegemonic project to institutionalize its preferred model of science-based regulation in international food safety law and standards, and to marginalize the European ‘precautionary' approach. I demonstrate the ideological labor policy actors must perform to purify science from interest and error, reframing the American project as a kind of global leadership toward technical progress."

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