Organic Food Preference: An Empirical Study on the Profile and Loyalty of Organic Food Customers

Abstract

Eating habits in the world have shown some phases over time. In the last century, the sole aim was to feed oneself, however, later in time, food industry has been affected from industrialization trend, and agriculture turned into a sector in which large-scale food products are produced and consumed primarily based on their being cost effective. In parallel with this trend, one of the major challenges in agriculture is to increase efficiency. As a result of this challenge, two types of food production have arousedone being the conventional method and the other method utilizing genetic engineering which emerged in the last decade. Conventional method is the oldest and the most widely used technique. According to Knorr and Watkins (1984) conventional agriculture is defined as “capital-intensive, large-scale, highly mechanized agriculture with monocultures of crops and extensive use of artificial fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, with intensive animal husbandry”. However, heavy reliance on synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides is said to have serious impacts on public health and the environment (Pimentel et al. 2005). Therefore, as people are becoming more environmental conscious, this method is being questioned and tried to be developed during the last decades. The second technique, called as genetically modified foods (GM foods or GMO foods), were first put on the market in the early 1990s (wikipedia.org). These food products are derived from genetically modified organisms, (GMOs), which are obtained by using advanced techniques of genetic engineering. Currently, genetic modification is mostly applied to soybean, corn, canola, cotton seed and sugar beet and the application area is observed to expand everyday. Naturally, genetically modified foods are not without advantages and disadvantages. The biggest advantage of using genetically modified foods is the ability to grow faster and bigger crops. In addition to that, weaknesses against certain types of disease and insects might be eliminated by genetic modification (hubpages.com(1)). Moreover, higher crop yields are thought to make food prices decrease and therefore lead to less starvation in the world. Besides these advantages, GDOs have also disadvantages, such as their tendency to make harm to other organisms (such as in the case of monarch butterflies which are poisoned by GMO corns), possible damages to environment in the long run, possible health