Food Safety Concern
In recent years, the terms food safety and risk have attracted more attention, due to many reports and news coverage about food illness events around the world. Food safety concerns, especially regarding meat, have particularly increased in European countries and North America after specific food safety events. Additionally, Chen and Wohlgenant (2006) found that meat consumption responds to health information to a greater degree in current years and that it affects the demand of meat products strongly when price and other factors are left aside. The research also found that consumers` preferences are not impacted by factors such as price and incomes as much due to the forming of personal habits, but consumers would decrease consumption of particular food products when they perceived food safety problems. Further, meat safety issues in one region of the world may have an impact on other regions where the safety event did not take place.
Awareness of CWD, a disease that affects cervid (deer, elk, moose) populations, may produce similar effects on the risk assessment and consumption of venison. If this can be determined, there will be several implications for the market of game meat and for policy concerning management of CWD, and possibly other similar diseases. If consumers’ food preferences are shown to be affected by their risk assessment of CWD, this will mean that in areas with a higher prevalence of CWD, the market demand for game meat and recreational hunting would likely be reduced.
To collect data on risk attitudes and perceptions, an internet-based survey was given to a market research firm. The survey contained questions on risk attitudes and preferences in general, as well as more specific questions on CWD and venison. The respondents who answered questions in the survey indicating they were concerned about CWD showed higher levels of risk perception than those who did not. This is consistent with logic, as those who are concerned about the disease are likely to do so because they see it as a risk to the health and safety of both people and the animals themselves.
Read more about this topic: Chronic Wasting Disease
Famous quotes containing the words food, safety and/or concern:
“There is such a thing as food and such a thing as poison. But the damage done by those who pass off poison as food is far less than that done by those who generation after generation convince people that food is poison.”
—Paul Goodman (1911–1972)
“Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
“our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)