do people notice food labels? [View all]

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/11/do-people-care-where-their-meat-comes-from.html



Starting Saturday, companies that sell meat in grocery stores will have to label where the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered. It used to be enough to know that you were buying a hamburger or a steak. Since 2009, meat companies have also had to provide some vague information about origins—for instance, that a product came from North America. Now, you’re about to discover the whole life story of the animal you’re about to eat—and often you’ll learn that it came from abroad.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that meat is part of an increasingly complex global supply chain. The total number of U.S. cattle is the smallest it has been since the nineteen-fifties, partly because of high feed costs and drought. The number of ranchers has been declining, too. On average, they are in their late fifties; fewer young people are interested in the tough, often unprofitable line of work. But Americans are still eating plenty of meat, and it has to come from somewhere. Mexico’s abundant forage has given it a comparative advantage, and cheaper transportation—in Mexico, in Canada, and elsewhere—has made it more economical to ship cattle long distances.

The labelling rule, set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, applies only to grocery stores (and not in restaurants and other food-service establishments). The rule also carves out exceptions for food that has been processed—including meat that has been cured and smoked. Still, it will make meat more similar to other products, whose labels increasingly indicate whether your coffee is Fair Trade, whether your shirt was sewn under good working conditions, and whether your tomato was grown within two hundred miles of your grocery store. All this attention to labelling raises a question: How much do people care about it?

Those in favor of country-of-origin labels often cite a 2003 study, published in the Journal of Food Distribution Research, in which seventy-three per cent of people surveyed said they would pay an eleven-per-cent premium for steak with country-of-origin labelling and a nineteen-per-cent premium for a steak labelled “U.S.A. Guaranteed.” And a 2012 study by Boston Consulting Group found that eighty per cent of Americans surveyed said they would pay up to sixty per cent more for products labelled “Made in the USA.” But while people may say that they prefer products labelled with some desirable attribute, a growing body of research calls into question whether people’s behaviors fall in line with their intentions.