The relation between stigma and acceptance of food product- take chewy starch food as an example

In 2013, the maleic anhydride (MA) was illegally added into starch to prepare chewy Taiwanese traditional foods. MA may cause adverse effects to kidney of rodents but the effect on human is uncertain. After a series of reports on the MA adulteration appeared on TV and newspapers, the consumers were of great concerns of potential health effects and dissatisfaction toward to governments, and led to dramatic drop in sales of the traditional foods in Taiwan. This study aimed to investigate whether the stigma existed after the MA-tainted starch incident and how stigma affected the acceptance of chewy food with path analysis. Methods and material：In this study, I adopted the questionnaire to collect data associated with the attitudes of study subjects aged from 16 to 45 in Taiwan. I defined stigma as the negative psychological status which was production of social amplification of food risk. In addition, I assumed the stigma would affect the acceptance both directly and indirectly, and risk/ benefit perception would served important mediators between trust in government, trust in food industries, dose-response sensitivity and acceptance of current chewy food. I used several scales from previous studies, namely: the stigma scale revised from Kasperson et al.(2001) and Peters et al.(2004), the risk perception scale from Kirk et al.(2002), the benefit perception scale from Saba and Messina (2003), dose-response sensitivity scales combined Kraus et al.(1994) with Slovic et al.(1995), trust scale from Siegrist et al.(2012), and I also developed the acceptance scale by integrating the consumption intention, behavior and acceptability attitude of chewy starch food. I validated the questionnaire by Cronbach’s alpha, test-retest reliability and factor analysis by SPSS in pretest stage. In this study, 714 subjects were recruited by path analysis using Lisrel to figure out the association in the proposed model. Results：(1) The respondents shown higher level of food stigma, higher perceived risk, lower trust toward risk managers. (2) The stigma had both direct and indirect effect to the chewy food acceptance, and stigma was the most important variable in the model. (3) The benefit perception was the second influential factor to predict the acceptance. (4) Dose-response sensitivity had significant effect on the perceptions and affected acceptance indirectly. (5) Trusts were important in the model but not directly affect the acceptance, and trust in industries was more important than trust toward government. (6) Among the background variables, age has negative relationship with dose-response sensitivity and food acceptance; income and age were significant negative associated with the trust in risk managers; expertise made the stigma level and dose-response seneitivity different. Conclusion：Stigma did appear in Taiwan and had a significant positive correlation to risk perception, negative correlation to benefit perception, and posed a negative effect on chewy food acceptance. Stigma had direct effect to acceptace and would affect risk perception with other variables like the dose-response sensitivity, trust in government and affect acceptance indirectly. Benefit perception was one strong determent which would be affected by the trust in industry. For further application, to emphasize the benefit aspect of foods, to increase the trust toward risk managers, and not to create negative affects may increase the acceptance of foods after food safety incident. Limit：This study cannot exclude the potential effect of the incident of gutter oil and other food incidents. It may need more studies to confirm the model by controlling the time effect.