40% of consumers cautious about food production areas over radiation fears via The Mainichi

About 40 percent of consumers who pay attention to production areas when purchasing food do so because they want to avoid radiation-tainted food, a survey by the Consumer Affairs Agency has shown.

According to the survey, 3,531 out of 5,176 respondents said they care about or tend to care about which production regions the food items come from when shopping. Asked why they do so, 40.9 percent of them said it is because they want to purchase food free from radioactive materials.

Of the latter group, 86.1 percent said they are particularly conscious about production areas whey buying “vegetables,” followed by “rice” at 67.3 percent and “seafood” at 63.4 percent. Asked which production areas they hesitate to buy food from, 69.5 percent answered Fukushima Prefecture and 53.3 percent said the entire Tohoku region — Fukushima, Iwate and Miyagi prefectures.

Regarding the government-set standards for radioactive materials in food, only 28.2 percent said the standards are “at a level that is safe enough for those who keep consuming such food throughout their lives.”

[…]

The online survey, conducted on Feb. 14 and 15, covered consumers aged in their 20s through 60s in the disaster-hit prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, Fukushima and Ibaraki, as well as in such major consumption areas as Saitama, Chiba, central Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe.

Read more at 40% of consumers cautious about food production areas over radiation fears

Reference Consumer survey on radiation contamination of food via Consumer Affairs Agency (PDF in Japanese)