In a world besieged by "fake news" and questionable data from non-scientific polls, the conclusion of a 2017 web survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy is still a head-scratcher. The survey found that 7 percent of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. If the data is correct, that would mean that about 17 million Americans are woefully ignorant about agriculture and food production.
How now, brown cow?
- This isn't the first study to underline Americans' lack of understanding about where their food comes from. For the record, chocolate milk is made from milk (from cows of any color), cocoa, and sugar.
- A 1993 Department of Agriculture study found that one in five respondents did not know that hamburgers are made from beef.
- In 2011, when researchers interviewed grade-schoolers at an urban California school, they found that more than half of them didn’t realize that pickles were cucumbers, or that onions and lettuce were plants.