Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 19.1.
Questions Americans asked when they fi rst heard about the spinach recall
Topic of Question
% of All Questions
What caused the problem?
39%
What caused the contamination?
26%
Where did the contamination originate?
12%
Other source of contamination questions
1%
What was affected?
38%
Was frozen spinach contaminated?
3%
Was canned spinach contaminated?
2%
Was fresh spinach contaminated?
1%
Was packaged spinach contaminated?
2%
Was organic spinach contaminated?
< 1%
Which brands/effective dates did it affect?
10%
What other foods are affected?
2%
Where was the spinach being sold?
9%
Was the spinach that I purchased affected?
5%
Was the spinach that I had eaten affected?
3%
Other product(s) affected questions
1%
Health/safety questions
8%
What are the symptoms of illness?
3%
Does washing eliminate contamination?
< 1%
Does cooking eliminate contamination?
< 1%
A/O health/safety mentions
4%
When will the problem be over?
5%
When will spinach be safe to eat?
5%
Other questions
Can this be prevented from happening again?
3%
Why didn ' t we receive more timely information?
3%
Other miscellaneous questions
5%
Note
: 586 total responses; 446 respondents gave one or more responses.
As might be expected, signifi cantly more of those who ate spinach before the recall
(73%) reported that they had been interested in news stories about the recall than those
who did not eat spinach before the recall (44%;
2
(1,
N
= 1034) = 25.72,
p
0.001).
Similarly, more than half (52%) of those who ate fresh spinach before the recall said
that they had closely followed the news stories about the recall; this was true of only
one-third (36%) of those who had not eaten spinach (
χ
<
2
(1,
N
= 1019) = 92.30,
χ
p
0.001). In addition, compared to those who were not spinach consumers before
the recall, signifi cantly more of those who ate spinach reported that they had searched
the Internet to fi nd information about the recall (9% vs. 14%, respectively;
<
2
(1,
χ
N
= 1037) = 7.07,
p
0.01). There were no signifi cant differences in the percentage
of people who reported having watched the news to specifi cally hear about the recall.
<
Knowledge about the Details of the Recall
Most Americans reported having been aware of the recall, having heard a fair amount
about it, having been interested in news stories about it, and having talked about it
