Despite a year of food scares and non-stop headlines about E. coli in fresh produce, American consumers aren’t re-thinking their acceptance of food with biotech ingredients.

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 Internationall Food Information Council, based in Washington, D.C. (www.ific.org).

The council has surveyed U.S. biotech attitudes for 10 years, Danielle Schor, council senior vice president for food safety told the ABIC public forum at the University of Calgary on 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 is the hit taken by Americans’ confidence in their food supply. 

Even so, Americans didn’t adopt a kneejerk reaction against all potential food controversies. While the number of Americans who said they have concerns about biotechnology rose to 6 per cent from last year’s 3 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 that 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. 

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 esponses jumped to 46 per cent.