Ignorance of Frankenfoods
I was reading yesterday about a Pew study on attitudes towards genetically modified foods. Americans are largely against this technology, with 46% opposing its use compared to 27% in favor. The interesting part was that respondents are not well informed about the fact that they are already eating GMFs. According to the press release, 26% believe they have eaten GMFs and 60% believe they have not. However, according to this Los Angeles Times article about the report, genetically modified foods are widespread in the American diet. "Today, 89% of soybeans, 83% of cotton and 61% of corn" are genetically modified to resist pests or tolerate weedkillers.
Given that people are afraid of this technology, it’s surprising that they are so wrong about how much they are being exposed to it. I would speculate that people think that these foods are harmful, and the fact that they don’t ever hear about anyone being harmed means that they assume that no one is being exposed to them. If GMFs actually were harmful and were in widespread use, people would be aware of problems. It’s interesting that the absence of such reports is apparently taken to indicate low levels of use rather than a reduction in judgments of harmfulness.
This fits into the article I mentioned last week about inaccurate perceptions of risk. Maybe our lives today are so safe that there’s no real harm in misjudging risk. It might be that other factors such as social signaling are more important.
Hal,
A freestanding '10-second' solution is probably impossible: the closest approach would be a very highly trusted 3rd-party's certification (Consumer Reports?) but that still requires a significant effort to verify the credibility of the 3rd party initially. The establishment of non-profits funded by vested interests (on both sides) and the exertion of political influence on government regulatory bodies worsen the signal-to-noise ratio to the point where such a verification may be too challenging for the median consumer to bother with.
Failures of certification are particularly troubling because they are likely to lead people to rely on hearsay from acquaintances:
http://www.organicconsumers...* 40% of respondents falsely thought that tomatoes genetically modified with genes from catfish would taste "fishy";* 31% mistakenly believed that eating genetically modified fruit could modify a person's genes;* 43% falsely asserted that ordinary tomatoes don't contain genes, only those that are genetically modified have genes.
The larger issue here is, how do we help the layman who doesn't want to spend more then ten minutes (ten seconds would be even better) thinking about the problem? How did you commenters come up with your contradictory information about the risks of GM foods? Doesn't it bother you that someone else came up with a completely opposite understanding?
I see this over and over with these kinds of issues. I have little confidence that studying the available information as a lay person is any way to go about solving the problem, largely because it appears that the results of this process are either completely random, or else subject to very significant biases (so that whatever my predispositions and prejudices may be on the issue, my "study" will simply leave me more confirmed than ever that I am right.)