Support for GMO Labeling a Left-Wing Phenomenon?

Much has been written about whether aversion to biotechnology and GMOs has ideological dimensions rooted in the left.  I've written about this before, as have many others (this paper in Food Policy extends the discussion to a whole host of food regulations beyond biotechnology).  Most of the studies I've seen (including my own data) suggest only small differences in the left and the right in terms of beliefs about safety of eating GMOs.  However, as I previously argued:

“One distinction, which I think is missing, is the greater willingness of those on the left to regulate on economic issues, such as GMOs, than those on the right. Stated differently, there are questions of science: what are the risks of climate change or eating GMOs. And then there are more normative questions: given said risk, what should we do about it? Even if the left and the right agreed on the level of risk, I don’t think we should expect agreement on political action.”

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of this difference in willingness to regulate comes from a new paper by John Bovay and Julian Alston in the Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. They look at precinct-level voting data on the Prop 37 mandatory labeling initiative in California in 2012. One of the best predictors of support for Prop 37?  The share of people in the precinct voting for Obama. Here's a telling graph from their paper.   It's an almost perfect positive, linear relationship. 

The authors went on to use these results to predict what would have happened in other states if they'd had an opportunity to vote on Prop 37 (I should note we did something very similar in a paper on for votes on California's Prop 2 related to animal welfare in 2008).  Bovay and Alston found the following:

“Projections using our estimated model imply that a majority of voters in only three of fifty states (Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Vermont) plus the District of Columbia would have passed Proposition 37 had it been on their ballots in 2012”

Millennials' Food Values

I've given a couple presentations recently on food trends, and in each instance I was asked whether the so-called Millennial generation thinks differently about food issues than older generations.  I haven't spent a lot of time delving into this question because a lot of the willingness-to-pay research I've been involved with over the years suggests demographics don't tend to explain a lot of the variation in willingness-to-pay.

But, given the interest in the subject, I thought I'd take a quick look at some of the data from the monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS) I've been running for over three years now.  In particular, I pulled the data we ask on so-called "food values."  The question shows respondents 12 issues (randomly ordered across surveys) and asks respondents which are most and least important when buying food.   Respondents have to click with their mouse and drag four (and only four) items in the “most important” box and then do the same for the “least important” box. 

A scale of importance is created by calculating the proportion of times (across the entire
sample) a food value appeared in the most important box minus the proportion of times it
appeared in the least important box. Thus, the range of possible values for a food value is from -1 to +1, where a higher number implies more importance (a +1 would mean the particular food value was placed in the most important box by 100% of respondents). This is a zero-sum scale, and it only reveals relative importance (e.g., how importance taste is compared to price) not overall importance.   

Ok, so here's a graphical illustration of the food values by age group (I've pulled the data over time, so each age group has several thousand observations, yielding margins of error of around +/- 0.025 importance points).

Except for the oldest group, there is agreement in ranking at the top: Taste>Safety>Price.  In the middle-range of importance, there is far less agreement.  Both the 18-24 year old group and the 25-34 year old group could be considered Millennials according to most definitions I've seen.  The Millennials place less relative importance on nutrition than the 55 and older crowd.  However, the top four issues (taste, safety, price, and nutrition) are way more important than the other issues regardless of the generation under consideration.

The Millennials place less importance on appearance but more relative importance on naturalness, animal welfare, convenience and environment than do older generations, particularly the 65 and older group, which compared to the other age groups, places the lowest importance on naturalness, animal welfare, and environment.  There is a big divide when it comes to the importance of origin: the 65 and older group places quite a bit more importance on origin than do people who are 24 years and younger.  

The biggest gap is for origin (there is a 0.30 spread on the -1 to +1 scale) between the youngest Millennials and the oldest group.  The next biggest gap is for naturalness (there is a 0.22 spread on the importance scale) between the oldest group and the 25-34 year old Millennials.  The most agreement is for "fairness."

It might also be instructive to compare all this along another demographic category: gender (margin of error here is +/- 0.014).  

Women place more relative importance on safety, animal welfare, and naturalness than men. Men place more importance on convenience and novelty than women.  The biggest gap is for animal welfare (a 0.19 point difference on the -1 to +1 scale) and then convenience (a 0.16 difference).  

Media Review in the AJAE

A few months back, I tried to convince my good friend, Bailey Norwood, to take on the job of book review editor for the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.  In typical fashion, Bailey said he'd only do it if he could do things his own way.  He wanted to expand the content of what gets reviewed to include documentaries and other forms of media.  

His plan has come to fruition.  The journal just released the first three reviews.

In the first, Nicole Olynk Widmar discusses the wickedly funny paper by Andrew Keeler, which pokes fun at nonmarket valuation methods (and in the processes raises some serious and thought provoking issues).  

Then, Marco Palma briefly reviews a National Geographic article on the "Science of Delicious".

Finally, David Just takes a critical look at the documentary film, Sugar Coated.  The most surprising thing I learned from the review is that two of my co-authors, Helen Jensen and Jutta Roosen, appeared in the film!

Food Bug Zappers

In chapter 10 of Unnaturally Delicious, I wrote about a variety of food safety innovations.  Frank Yiannas, Walmart's vice president for food safety told me a bit about some of the technologies and efforts he's been involved with.  But, first on Walmart itself:

“I started by asking about the size of Walmart. More than 120 million Americans (more than a third of the U.S. population) shop at Walmart every week. Does the sheer scale of the operation make the U.S. food system riskier? If Walmart has an outbreak, multitudes would be sickened. Yiannas replied: “One out of every four dollars spent on food are spent at a Walmart. We can make a big difference. Large organizations like Walmart result in a safer food system.” He points out that when Walmart makes a change, it affects the whole system.”

He went on to tell me about how they're ensuring rotisserie chickens are properly cooked.  

“To address this problem Walmart turned to the power of information technology and Big Data.28 Now all stores are equipped with new handheld sensors that are used to check cooking temperatures of every single batch. The sensors automatically record and send the information to the web in real time. During the month that health inspectors checked Walmart chickens ten times, the company recorded 1.4 million temperature checks. Whereas earlier inspection methods relied on taking a small sample of readings to check for compliance, Yiannas said the new approach is “N = all.” In other words, Walmart employees check every single chicken. Moreover, Walmart no longer has to wait on a report from an inspector or third-party auditor to learn the outcomes. Yiannas can check at any time during the day to see which stores are doing what they should to meet food safety standards. The troves of data can be exploited to find out which stores, which equipment, and which employees are doing better. Perhaps most important, it might just stop you and me from walking out the door with an undercooked chicken.”

I also talked to Kevin Myers, the senior vice president of research and development for Hormel, who was involved in implementing a relatively new technology to help ensure safe meat: high pressure processing.  

“High-pressure processing (sometimes also called pascalization after the seventeenth-century scientist Blaise Pascal, who studied pressure) allowed Hormel Foods to sanitize both the meat and the package it comes in. The process is particularly well suited for ready-to-eat foods because it takes place after the product is packaged and eliminates potential contamination which could occur after cooking and before packaging.

Myers said the process works by placing the packaged food in a chamber and submitting it to extreme levels of pressure. Have you ever jumped off the diving board at the deep end, only to have your ears hurt as you approached the bottom of the pool? That pain is caused by the pressure exerted on your eardrums by the water above you in the pool. At a depth of about ten feet, your ears are feeling about 4.3 pounds per square inch (psi) of pressure. If you could somehow swim to the deepest point in the ocean (about thirty-six thousand feet down), you’d feel more than 15,600 psi. Well, you wouldn’t actually feel anything because your body would be crushed well before you reached that depth. According to Myers, Hormel’s high-pressure processing system applies 87,000 psi to food products. That is five and a half times more pressure than would be felt at the deepest depth of the ocean.”

All that pressure is enough to kill bacteria and other pathogens without adversely affecting the food itself.  Here's a photo of a high pressure pasteurization machine provided by Avure Technologies, which is finding applications of high pressure pasteurization for a wide variety of foods.

There is more in the chapter on Walmart, Hormel, and on innovators working on new, rapid food safety testing devices.  

What Consumers Don't Know about GMOs

Yesterday the Journal of the Federation for American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) published a paper I co-authored with Brandon McFadden from the University of Florida.  We surveyed a representative sample of over 1,000 US consumers and probed the depth of their knowledge about GMOs.  

We asked questions about the number of genes affected by different plant breeding techniques, prevalence of use of GMOs for different crops and foods, true/false questions about genetics and GMOs, knowledge of the length of time biotech crops have been grown, regulatory approval times for GMOs, views on public policies directed toward GMOs.  Before and after asking these questions, we asked respondents to rate their self-assessed knowledge of GMOs and to indicate their belief that GMOS are unsafe or safe to eat.  

The overall finding is 1) consumers, as a group, are unknowledgeable about GMOs, genetics, and plant breeding and, perhaps more interestingly, 2) simply asking these objective knowledge questions served to lower subjective, self-assessed knowledge of GMOs (i.e., people realize they didn't know as much as they thought they did) and increase the belief that it is safe to eat GM food.  

The implications are two fold: 1) using consumer opinions about GMOs to guide public policy is problematic given the low levels of knowledge, and 2) using something like the Socratic Method may as effective at changing safety beliefs than simply providing information.