research

Ever since the early 1990s claims have been made that GM food would be just as safe as conventional food, and that it's only because of campaigns of (mainly European NGOs) that consumers would just be to scared to eat it. Consumers who would be informed properly would not avoid GM food. To prove this point Douglas Powell, a Canadian scientist wanted to see whether consumers would prefer GM or conventional sweet corn. In to their scientific paper in the British Food Journal (105: 700, 2003) they described that the bins were "fully labeled" - either "genetically engineered Bt sweet corn" or "Regular sweet-corn", and they explain in detail how they made sure that buyers would not be biased, for example by regularly refilling the binsto the same level. The study itself is rather simplistic: giving consumers the choice in one shop for a few weeks to buy one or the other product without any controls or repetions, and without any control over what information the shop personal might give out already leaves a lot of room for improvement. One might wonder whether biologists are the best suited scientists to study shopping behaviour. In the end Powell et al. found that in a farm shop in Canada GM sweet corn even out-sold the conventional.