An Empirical Analysis of United States Consumers' Concerns About Eight Food Production and Processing Technologies
Abstract
For a representative sample of US consumers, we analyze ratings
of concern toward eight food production and processing
technologies: antibiotics, pesticides, artificial growth hormones,
genetic modification (GM), irradiation, artificial colors/flavors,
pasteurization, and preservatives. Concern is highest for pesticides
and hormones, followed by concern about antibiotics,
genetic modification, and irradiation. We document standard
relationships between many demographic, economic, and attitude
variables and the average concern level. Our main contribution
is identifying three clusters of technologies that engender
similar patterns of concern ratings among respondents and estimating
models that correlate key personal and household characteristics
to these underlying technology concern factors. We
find that several individual characteristics that yield little explanatory
power for average ratings have discriminatory power for
explaining concern across different technology clusters.
Citation
AgBioForum, 8(1) 2005: 40-49.