Calgary — Despite a year of food scares and non-stop headlines about E. coli in fresh produce, consumers in the U.S. aren’t re-thinking their acceptance of food with biotech ingredients.
Those attending the 2007 Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference’s (ABIC 2007) public forum here at the University of Calgary earlier this week heard that while confidence is waning somewhat in the food supply, biotechnology is far down the list of concerns.
That, however, is as long as those ingredients come from plants, not animals. But even animal biotechnology is gaining support, says the latest survey released by the International Food Information Council, based in Washington, D.C. (www.ific.org).
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The council has surveyed U.S. biotech attitudes for 10 years, Danielle Schor, council senior vice-president for food safety, told the ABIC forum Sunday. This year’s survey, released last week, was based on 1,000 web-based interviews, weighted for age and education to be nationally representative. The results are said to be accurate within +/- 3.1 per cent.
Leading the headline list this year was the hit taken by Americans’ confidence in their food supply. The number of IFIC survey respondents who were “very confident” in their food dropped to 15 per cent in 2007 from 21 per cent in 2006. Those “somewhat confident” increased from 51 to 54 per cent, “not very confident” held at nine per cent and “not at all confident” rose from zero to two per cent.
Even so, Americans didn’t adopt a knee-jerk reaction against all potential food controversies. While the number of Americans who said they have concerns about biotechnology rose from three to six per cent, biotechnology was still seventh on their list of concerns, and far below their worries about diseases and contamination in their food, and food handling and preparation.
The best news, said Schor, is that the American public actually appears to be worried about the issues it should be worried about, and not worried about issues that aren’t a scientific concern.
Said Schor, a registered dietitian and food safety specialist, “I don’t wake up in the middle of the night worried about biotechnology. I wake up worried about E. coli on produce.”
When Americans were asked what food they had taken steps to avoid during the year, they once again showed that their heightened concern about food safety wasn’t spilling over into all their food choices, Schor said.
Sugars and complex carbohydrates such as starches topped the list at 54 per cent of respondents in IFIC’s 2007 study, followed by fats, oils and cholesterol (38 per cent), animal products (21 per cent), salt (15 per cent), fast foods and snack foods (14 per cent), spices (two per cent) and processed and refined foods (two per cent). “Artificial additives” ranked four per cent, but none of the respondents said they avoided biotech foods.
The reason, Schor believes, is that Americans have placed great confidence in the USDA to ensure that biotech foods are safe, and to ensure that foods are properly labeled if a biotech ingredient introduces a new risk or changes the food’s nutritional profile.
Still, animal biotechnology has a steeper acceptance curve to climb, Schor said. Only 22 per cent said they’d favour the use of cloning in food production.
Even there, however, government support swayed many respondents. When told that cloning would only be allowed with government support, favourable responses jumped to 46 per cent.
Farm Business Communications is reporting from the Agricultural Biotechnology International Conference Sept. 23-26 in Calgary. Click here for full coverage of the week’s speakers and events, courtesy of Country Guide.
