Food Demand Survey: Parsing ‘sustainability,’ counting cows

The key to food “sustainability,” consumers believe, has much more to do with food safety than with traditional environmental concerns such as global warming, according to Oklahoma State University’s most recent Food Demand Survey. Consumers responded to a question included in the survey about the importance of various factors in determining food sustainability. They indicated that “ensuring food is safe to eat” and “ensuring everyone has access to plentiful, affordable, healthy foods” are more important to sustainability than “being able to trace the food sold all the way back to the farm where it was produced” or “minimizing the impact of food production on global warming.”