Purpose:
During my research of GMOs, I found a variety of opinions in relation to GMOs and proposed labeling systems. It seems to me that while many people may desire labels because they have "a right to know," they are not informed enough about GMOs to make knowledgeable decisions when it comes to buying products. Although I had already read many articles detailing public opinions of the use of GMOs, I was interested to see how students at St. Olaf College, a liberal arts college I might add, would respond in comparison to the general public.

Hypothesis 1:
Students that do not know what a GMO is (as noted by question one of the survey), are more likely to want labels on their food, even if they do not know what this means for them.

Overview:
I first decided to hand out surveys to people I saw throughout the day- friends, coworkers, and friends of friends. When choosing whom to interview, I tried to select for people of various ages and, more specifically, different majors of study. I asked respondents what major they were because I wanted to select for people coming from various backgrounds of study.

However, as I handed out more surveys, I came up with another target: seniors (still of various majors). I noticed that as I was looking over some of the surveys, there were a fair amount of seniors that had a strong opinion of GMOs (they did NOT want to eat them!) However, the number of students that actually knew what a GMO was before the survey was substantially less. This made me think about how many people were graduating with a liberal arts education, without knowing about something they were truly concerned about. I think that the emergence of GMOs is an important topic that students should be informed about at some point during their college education.

In total, I surveyed 29 St. Olaf College students: 23 seniors, and 6 others (junior, sophomore and first year combined).

Difficulties:

One problem that I had was that I had already discussed my topic and certain feelings I had about it with some of my close friends, so I was not able to use their answers or opinions because I felt they had been skewed through talking to me and learning about my research. However, I did accomplish my goal of getting a variety of majors.

I decided to do a non-random sample, simply due to the ease of obtaining data under the given time constraints, but for this reason, I am not able to extrapolate specific statistics of the St. Olaf College student populations; I may only comment. Students interviewed were required to sign an informed consent form and were assured while their answers would possibly be cited, no identifying information would be released. Although it would have been nice to have done more surveys, I felt that I did receive a lot of good feedback, and the answers were quite informative.

Conclusions:

As mentioned before, the data collected was taken from a non-random sample; a complete statistical analysis is therefore not possible. However, by looking at the data, one may infer a few general trends. While the number of college seniors who did and did not know what a GMO was seemed pretty balanced, there was an overwhelming number of students (19) who thought products should be labeled for GMOs (1 did not, and 3 did not know). The majority of students (18) said they would be less likely to buy a product if they knew it contained GMOs (2 would be more, 3 did not know or care); yet, most seniors (20) did not have a problem with buying hybridized foods (2 did, 1 did not know or care). Reasons for these answers are shown on a table of compiled answers.

In a similar survey (with many more participants), there was a great deal of opposition not noted by St. Olaf students (Raab and Grobe, 2003). Some arguments against labeling noted that it was "not cost effective," it was a "big burden to the taxpayer," "there are already enough regulations," it is "too expensive at this time without proof there is a problem," "we have to read enough labels," "too much red tape for farmers," "not sure we can trust labeling after going through all the expense," and "there's no way you can create a bureaucracy to enforce all this." I thought it was interesting that there did not seem to be any opposition from St. Olaf students to the price increases that would result from mandatory labeling. At the same time, there was hesitation when it came to choosing between GMO and no-GMO products if there was a difference in price.

In question number 5, I asked whether or not students had a problem with genetic engineering, as oppose to hybridized food, due to speed. The results were about half-and-half. This, to me, was the most interesting part of the survey. Basically, students want to know if they are eating GMOs, they would be less likely to buy foods if they saw they were made with GMOs, and when it came down to it, only about half the students really had problems with GMOs.

From this survey, it seems obvious why producers do not want to label their products that contain GMOs: it is not economically practical. Producers may agree that consumers have a right to know what they are eating, however, simply labeling products to say they contain GMOs is not necessarily 'informing' the consumer if he/she does not know what a GMO is. Uninformed people are more likely to want to buy foods that do not contain GMOs because they see it, among other reasons, as unnatural. While consumers may still not want to buy food containing GMOs after they learn more about them, producers would have a greater chance of selling their products (that contain GMOs) if they were able to first convince consumers that they were buying a better, more nutritious, harmless product that was produced at a higher rate of production (with less environmental impacts etc.).

Sarah Roach
Environmental Studies Senior Capstone, St. Olaf College, 2005