People vastly underestimate how much gene-altered food they are already
consuming; lean toward wanting greater regulation of such crops; and
have less faith than ever that the Food and Drug Administration will
provide accurate information, the survey found.

The poll also confirmed that most Americans, particularly women, do not
like the idea of eating meat or milk from cloned animals — a view that
stands in contrast to scientific evidence that cloned food is safe. The
FDA recently said it is close to allowing such food on the market.

Overall, said Michael Fernandez, executive director of the Pew
Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, which sponsored the survey,
Americans are “still generally uncertain” about genetically modified
and cloned foods.

“How the next generation of biotech products is introduced — and
consumers’ trust in the regulation of GM foods — will be critical in
shaping U.S. attitudes in the long term.”

In the five years since Pew began plumbing American attitudes toward
genetically engineered food, U.S. acreage in such crops has grown
substantially. Today, 89% of soybeans, 83% of cotton and 61% of corn is
genetically engineered to resist weed-killing chemicals or to help the
plants make their own insecticides.

Because most processed foods contain at least small amounts of soy
lecithin, corn syrup or related ingredients, almost everyone in the
United States has consumed some amount of gene-altered food.

That quiet revolution has been punctuated by occasional high-profile
problems, including the 2000 finding of StarLink corn, unapproved for
human consumption, in many food products and the recent revelation that
the U.S. long-grain rice crop has been contaminated with an
experimental variety of gene-altered rice.

In this year’s survey, conducted by the Mellman Group, only about
one-fourth of the 1,000 adults polled thought they had ever eaten
gene-altered food, an indication that Americans have “very little
in-depth knowledge of the topic,” according to a Pew summary.

Support for marketing genetically modified food has remained flat since
2001 at 27%, with opposition dropping from 58% in 2001 to 46% this year.

The proportion of Americans who say they “don’t know” if gene modified
foods are safe has shrunk since 2001, while the “safe” and “unsafe”
camps grew by about 5% each: 34% believe they are safe, and 29% say
they are not.

Of those who claim to have at least a rudimentary sense of how
engineered foods are regulated, 41% say they would like to see more
stringent rules, and 16% say there is already too much regulation.

Consuming cloned animals — addressed in the poll for the first time
this year — was a hot-button issue. Among those who said they had no
objection to eating genetically engineered foods, 34% were comfortable
with animal cloning, while 51% were not.

Religion played a big role in those opinions. Among those who said they
attend religious services only “a few times a year or less,” 30% were
comfortable with animal cloning, and 54% were not. Among those who
attend weekly religious services, 17% were comfortable with cloning,
and 70% were not.

Asked which sources they trust “a great deal” for information about
gene-altered foods, “friends and family” ranked highest, at 37%. Only
29% named the FDA, continuing a steady drop from 41% in 2001.

The least trustworthy source, garnering 11%, was the news media. But remember, you read it here first.