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posted by mrpg on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:59AM   Printer-friendly
from the doesn't-it??? dept.

Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.

If you do the math, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed, milk-drinking people. The equivalent of the population of Pennsylvania (and then some!) does not know that chocolate milk is milk, cocoa and sugar.

[...] For decades, observers in agriculture, nutrition and education have griped that many Americans are basically agriculturally illiterate. They don't know where food is grown, how it gets to stores — or even, in the case of chocolate milk, what's in it.

[...] Upton and other educators are quick to caution that these conclusions don't apply across the board. Studies have shown that people who live in agricultural communities tend to know a bit more about where their food comes from, as do people with higher education levels and household incomes.

[...] In some ways, this ignorance is perfectly logical. The writer and historian Ann Vileisis has argued that it developed in lockstep with the industrial food system.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 17 2017, @02:26AM (33 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday June 17 2017, @02:26AM (#526761) Journal

    Agreed. The number is nowhere near that low. I'd guess at least a quarter of American adults should believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, based on other surveys of ignorance. Actually, reading some other arcles, I'm probably right, since 48% of people in this survey indicated they "don't know" where chocolate milk comes from.

    TFA notes other examples of food ignorance -- large numbers of Americans who don't know that hamburgers come from beef, half of middle schoolers don't know that beef comes from cows or that pickles are cucumbers, etc. (A few years back I personally witnessed a member of my extended family come to the realization that pickles are cucumbers. She was 22 and had just completed college.)

    I've been aware of this for years. An older friend of mine told me of a commercial on TV years ago that showed Italian peasants picking spaghetti off of a tree or something. Many of my friends' neighbors in the city thought this was a factual depiction of where pasta came from. At that point he resolved to move to a more rural area and grow a lot of his own food in his garden and get away from the morons (which is how I got to know him actually, since we both liked gardening).

    And need I point to all the polls about how many Americans believe in angels, astrology, etc.? Again, the only surprise to me here is that the number isn't higher.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by KGIII on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:06AM (11 children)

    by KGIII (5261) on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:06AM (#526779) Journal

    It pains me to admit that I am, technically, a scientist. In my defense, I am retired.

    What I want to ask, is what happened to reporting that whole, you know, confidence level thing? And, of course, the methods for establishing confidence.

    I'd like to ask someone to reproduce this, but it's not gonna happen. No, no... Nobody ever listens to a David. We shall just slap this down into the record books as being certain. 7 out of 100 people you see, with some slight variance but I don't have to account for that as I bet they didn't, will believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

    I am really, really fucking rural. As in, my milk comes from the neighbor's farm - and that milk is sold in the local stores. Well, for some definition of local. Not even a fucking five year old child, at least here, believes that.

    Alas, this begins a rant on soft sciences and reproducibility. I'll spare you the specifics and assume you're smarter than I.

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:54AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:54AM (#526796)

      There's no point in listing the confidence interval in a country that has no confidence in science at all. Doesn't matter how tight the confidence is, people still won't believe it because scientists haven't completely nailed down absolutely every possible angle, including the ones that Alex Jones just made up.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:18AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:18AM (#526809)

        We see it here every day, intelligent people searching for reasons to disbelieve science. I'm all for critical thinking, but confirmation bias is also a real problem.

        • (Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:05AM

          by KGIII (5261) on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:05AM (#526827) Journal

          I gotta go fishing in the morning(ish). Otherwise, that's a good effort to get a KGIII rant. I don't usually get angry, but the state of science education makes me angry.

          However...

          Do NOT think that my anger is only directed at one side of the political spectrum. Yeah, I'm gonna stop now, take my off-topic mod, and just go to sleep soon.

          --
          "So long and thanks for all the fish."
    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:55AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:55AM (#526798)

      7 out of 100 people you see, with some slight variance but I don't have to account for that as I bet they didn't, will believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

      Or rather, 7 out of 100 people (maybe, since you can't actually know that there weren't many people voting multiple times) will claim, in an online survey, to believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

      I agree that this isn't sound science, but it's par for the course for these idiotic surveys. If you can't verify the issue objectively, then this is just a waste of time. At least you can later find out election results, but you can't objectively determine what these people really believe, making this junk science.

      I'm as tired of it as you are, and tired of the media reporting on it as if it's valid science.

      • (Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:24AM (2 children)

        by KGIII (5261) on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:24AM (#526813) Journal

        I don't even care. I'll agree with their silly numbers. It's still bullshit! ;-) Ain't no way in hell - at least in my neighborhood - you can find even 1:100 people to say chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

        Trust me, you sure as hell don't want me to get started on my rant about the media and science journalism. It may well take months. ;-) I f*cking have a rant, maybe two.

        --
        "So long and thanks for all the fish."
        • (Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:26AM

          by KGIII (5261) on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:26AM (#526817) Journal

          *can't*

          Stupid marijuana.

          --
          "So long and thanks for all the fish."
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by frojack on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:08PM

          by frojack (1554) on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:08PM (#527102) Journal

          Post rants on your soylent journal.
          Then you can just say See My Journal.
          Read your own journal 6 months later and see if you still believe it. If so leave it alone.
          Rinse Repeat. Can be quite Therapeutic.

          --
          No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:20AM (3 children)

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:20AM (#526831) Journal

      Oh, I get all your criticism and agree. A lot of these studies are crap from a stats standpoint. On the other hand, plenty of other studies over the years have shown the considerable ignorance of people about basic food source stuff. So this study sounds plausible, and even if it isn't accurate, other similar misconceptions are likely widespread.

      I didn't see a link to an actual study with detailed results. It would help if someone posted a link.

      • (Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:10AM

        by KGIII (5261) on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:10AM (#526854) Journal

        Yeah, I am really skeptical. I am a scientist, I guess. I'm really a mathematician who used the scientific method to model traffic. So, I admit I am biased with regards to the soft sciences. If someone has a link to the paper, I am more than happy to rip into it, as soon as I have the time.

        I'm going to guess, and this is a hunch, that it was a self selected survey. That's not science. I sometimes get bored and fill those out. In the comments section, after filling them with trash, I tell them to sanitize their inputs. This has not had any meaningful results, but it amuses me. I am easily amused.

        I should still be sleeping.

        --
        "So long and thanks for all the fish."
      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:14PM (1 child)

        by frojack (1554) on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:14PM (#527110) Journal

        So this study sounds plausible,

        Actually, it will probably turn out that this "study" was a troll, published to see how many people would be suckered by some totally bogus claims made in the name of "Science", and therefore duped into outrage even though they themselves do not know a single person who believes the brown cows nonsense.

        But hey, thanks for playing along! Their internet gullibility study is coming along nicely.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:52PM

          by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:52PM (#527207) Journal

          Please message me when you discover proof that this "study" was a "troll." I'll be waiting.

          I think it's much more likely to be a poorly designed "study," like the vast majority of such studies in most disciplines these days. By the way, who exactly other than this thread is claiming this is a SCIENCE (with a capital S)? It's a poll. Yes, there are more and less statistically valid ways of taking polls, but rarely do I consider a public poll to be "Science."

          What I do know is that time and time again, polls have shown large numbers of Americans believe in all sorts of nonsense. Would I be surprised if this was yet another sort of nonsense Americans believe in? No, not at all. Nor would I be "outraged." At most, I'd view it as "par for the course." Would I be surprised if this poll was completely bogus and had incredibly bad methodology that makes the results meaningless -- or that a better survey found the belief much less widespread? No, not at all.

          But what you're arguing is about the percentage of people who belief in Bigfoot vs. the Virgin Birth of Jesus vs. Lizard people run the country vs. Ancient Alien Astronauts vs. chocolate-producing cows. Are you seriously arguing the last one is THAT much less plausible or that much more nonsensical so we should immediately discount a poll as wrong?

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:15AM (8 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:15AM (#526784)

    Yup.

    I've had people, apparently intelligent people, ask me where duck eggs come from - like from special chickens? Lord knows what they'd have thought if I'd given them an emu or ostrich egg.

    I had one woman who confidently asserted that she had no problem with dairy, but could never eat veal. When I gently, patiently explained to her that veal is a byproduct of the dairy industry, I unleashed horrified realisation on her. The simple idea that milk = lactating cattle = calves = surplus calves = veal had just never crossed her mind.

    I had someone demand that I farm according to vegan rules. How I farm without any functional pest management strategy (even IPM involves keeping livestock, please note - usually poultry) was never clarified.

    And on, and on ... I could write a book called Dumb Shit City Folk Say.

    • (Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:22AM (3 children)

      by KGIII (5261) on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:22AM (#526811) Journal

      Go on?

      I am /technically/ a farmer.

      I have just about 1.5 acres of garden, a bit under 2000 acres of woodlot, and 400 acres of blueberries. Also, I have chickens - but they're assholes. I also didn't invite them. They come from the neighbor's farm and decided to live on my lawn. I built them a house and call them my refugee chickens - it's a long story and, trust me, you don't want to get me started.

      Seriously., tell me some more shit city folk say. I promise to giggle at the appropriate times. ;-)

      --
      "So long and thanks for all the fish."
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:29PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:29PM (#527038)

        Your refugee chickens do make me curious.

        As for more dumb shit city folk say?

        I recall the one who warned me that my having farmland on a slope meant that all the nutrients would be leached out of it by runoff rainwater. He was totally unable to explain the existence of 100 foot trees on my property in light of that.

        Then the fellow who asserted that farming is stupid work for stupid people, and when I started to explain how modern farming is very far removed from what his great-grandpappy did just shut it all down with handwaving about Monsanto and the Devil Frankenfood.

        Speaking of devils and evil, there was one (actually, come to think of it, more than one over the years) who intimated that I was evil for driving a truck. And got very offended when I pointed out that even if you fit their rinky-dink grocery getters with towbars, they couldn't credibly haul what I haul, where I haul it. And even then, burning more fuel for multiple round trips.

        Then of course the usual self-righteous vegan screaming (well, maybe more screeching than screaming) about how I'd never eat meat if I had to kill the animals myself. No shit, that really got thrown in my face. I invited that one to come to our personal use slaughter day.

        Along the same lines as the foregoing: "Don't you feel like a cannibal?" No. No, I really don't.

        Or the one who wanted me to get rid of all my guns because ... some poorly articulated political reasoning about baby-killing. But was avowedly just fine with my hunting invasive pests with a longbow and broadheads.

        I could go on, but the stupid burns. I need to go wash it off my synapses with some coffee.

        • (Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:25PM

          by KGIII (5261) on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:25PM (#527198) Journal

          The closest I get to that is going down to the lake to watch the tourists wreck their boats and trucks while they try to navigate the boat ramp.

          --
          "So long and thanks for all the fish."
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @09:33PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 20 2017, @09:33PM (#528736)

          Or the one who wanted me to get rid of all my guns because ... some poorly articulated political reasoning about baby-killing. But was avowedly just fine with my hunting invasive pests with a longbow and broadheads.

          Has a toddler ever killed someone with a longbow?

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:10AM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @05:10AM (#526829)

      Calves could be grown before slaughter. That would make them normal beef, not veal.

      Vegan farming is easy enough. Use a greenhouse. Use doors and air filters to keep out the pests. Done carefully, this also eliminates fungus and other pathogens. If you do the red/blue LED lighting, you can choose a harvest date that will bring a high price.

      The duck eggs from chickens are more difficult. I don't know what counts. You could print "DUCK" on them and/or incorporate as a business called "Duck". You could create a breed of chicken called "duck", or perhaps a breed of duck called "chicken". A little GMO work might help. You could also just jam duck eggs into chicken butts, then soon afterward have duck eggs come from chickens.

      It works for chocolate milk too. Some dairy cows are in fact brown. Use those. If you want it 1-step, try a cocoa IV. If cows won't tolerate a cocoa IV, maybe a bit of GMO work will get you chocolate milk.

      • (Score: 2) by KGIII on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:13AM (1 child)

        by KGIII (5261) on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:13AM (#526855) Journal

        A chicken butt is a multipurpose hole called a cloaca.

        There will be a quiz.

        --
        "So long and thanks for all the fish."
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:29PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:29PM (#527114)

          My turtles have the same thing!

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:48PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:48PM (#527047)

        "Calves could be grown before slaughter. That would make them normal beef, not veal."

        This is true. However, it depends upon a wide range of factors, such as how big is the beef raising market this year? It fluctuates like a whiplash.

        "Vegan farming is easy enough. Use a greenhouse. Use doors and air filters to keep out the pests. Done carefully, this also eliminates fungus and other pathogens. If you do the red/blue LED lighting, you can choose a harvest date that will bring a high price."

        Sure. You can do this. Just a few things to point out:

        First is capital costs. I actually considered a greenhouse operation, and it is incredibly expensive. Bearing in mind that your truly hermetically sealed greenhouse (because you don't want soil-borne pathogens and pests in your vegan greenhouse) will need a good, load-bearing floor (probably a concrete pad), and double glazing (because otherwise the heating costs will kill you) with integrated ventilation systems and decontamination zones in airlock style doors, plus decontamination for the growth medium, the costs become stupidly high. The ROI is insane. And that's not even counting maintenance.

        Next, pollen. If your plants are wind-pollinated, it's a bit easier (although either labour or energy intensive) but if they aren't self-pollinating (which many crops are not) you're going to have people running around with brushes manually pollinating flowers. The more valuable crops require cross-pollination, more often than not, especially for a good yield.

        Next, labour. Do you have any idea what kind of labour is involved in managing that sort of crop? Unless you're running a gigantic Caterpillar or John Deere across a field, it's utterly back-breaking stoop labour of the worst kind. Never mind the insurance load for dozens of people wielding razor-sharp sickles, their wages will be incredibly high. You'll price yourself right out of the market trying to keep that up.

        Next up, environmental load. Because let's not pretend, even if you got the greenhouses donated, volunteer labour on some kind of vegan CSA basis, and free NPK inputs because you have compromising pictures of important people, that any of this resembles a sustainable approach. You can't even handwave about fish ponds, because vegans don't do fish captivity, or mason bees because lots of vegans won't even eat honey (I know, that one's controversial, but you're basically halving your market there). But let's ignore all that. You're sucking down energy faster than Al Gore's jet, on land that is no longer available to wild growth or animals, and annihilating microorganisms in large batches, and even then you STILL have to transport inputs, crops and people back and forth to keep your thing going.

        But yeah, sure. Vegan farming's totally a thing.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:30AM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:30AM (#526789)

    At that point he resolved to move to a more rural area and grow a lot of his own food in his garden and get away from the morons

    And need I point to all the polls about how many Americans believe in angels

    Your friend made the wrong move. The people believing in angels are much more concentrated in the more rural areas, because rural dwellers are more religious than urban dwellers.

    The sad fact is that there's utter morons anywhere you go in this country. You're not going to get away from them by moving to any particular region, though you might find a slightly lower concentration if you get out of the South.

    The last election should be proof enough that most people in this country are complete morons. How else do you explain us winding up with two such horrible choices?

    • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:34AM

      by t-3 (4907) on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:34AM (#526846)

      [pedantic] actually they're much more concentrated in urban areas due to simple math, [/pedantic] your point is otherwise valid tho

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by mhajicek on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:48PM

      by mhajicek (51) on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:48PM (#527016)

      Rural areas have a lower concentration of stupid people because they have a lower concentration of people.

      --
      The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:31AM (2 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:31AM (#526872)

    To all those folks who think chocolate milk comes from brown cows: I have a cousin who'd like to sell you all a nice dish of mountain oysters, with a big loaf of sweetbread to serve it on.

    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:37PM

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday June 17 2017, @12:37PM (#526938) Journal

      Is sweetbread a product of the Sugarloaf region?

      Enquiring minds want to know.

      Please provide a reference to an organ of the state.

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:22PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:22PM (#526955) Journal

      To be fair, "sweetbread" is ambiguous. Generally two words or hyphenated, "sweet bread" can refer to stuff like "pan dulce" and other sweetened breads from the around the word.

      If you're referring to the glands, it's almost always "sweetbreads" with a final "s." No one would ever say "a big loaf of sweetbread" and be referring to the glands.

  • (Score: 1) by Pax on Saturday June 17 2017, @09:37AM

    by Pax (5056) on Saturday June 17 2017, @09:37AM (#526876)

    half of middle schoolers don't know that beef comes from cows or that pickles are cucumbers, etc. (A few years back I personally witnessed a member of my extended family come to the realization that pickles are cucumbers. She was 22 and had just completed college.

    Well. cucumber is ONE type of pickle.. onion, gerkin and beetroot to name a few......

  • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:53AM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:53AM (#526921) Homepage Journal

    The spaghetti hoax was a BBC April Fools' Day joke from 1957. [youtube.com] It supposedly documented the spaghetti harvest in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland.

    And, yes, the average person is as dumb as a bag of hammers. And that's just the middle of the bell curve - half of them are dumber than that.

    The problem is exacerbated by crappy education. Someone of average, or even below-average intelligence should be literate and numerate, and know basics facts of life. However, the US currently seems to have the philosophy that failing kids is bad for their self-esteem or something, so the US has lots of high school graduates who should have failed primary school. Other countries have other problems, but watching this happen in the US is just sad - this is how a first-world nation turns into a banana republic.

    Before anyone chimes in on the political from, no, Hillary! and Trump aren't part of this process; they are just evidence of how far it has already progressed.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:14PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:14PM (#526951) Journal

      Actually, since my friend never lived in England, I don't think he was referring to the BBC hoax, but rather a derivative of it, like this commercial [youtube.com] which aired in the U.S. Although the commercial actually says that spaghetti does NOT actually grows on trees, lots of people apparently wondered.

      I suspect the cause of the "chocolate cow" thing might be related to something similar, considering commercials like this [youtube.com].

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:32PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday June 17 2017, @04:32PM (#527040) Homepage
    The spaghetti harvest: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/1/newsid_2819000/2819261.stm
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
  • (Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:25PM (1 child)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Saturday June 17 2017, @08:25PM (#527133)

    > pickles are cucumbers

    Nb: Outside of US, pickles just means pickled veg. Pickling is the process of preserving food by storing in water with lots of salt, vinegar and sugar. I don't know what a gherkin is, is it a cucumber? But I rarely eat them, only in weird American fast food type places.

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:41PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday June 17 2017, @11:41PM (#527202) Journal

      Yes, I know. "Pickle" in the U.S. means that too. I pickle various vegetables myself all the time, using both your brining method as well as fermentation methods (which generate acidity from bacteria growth, rather than vinegar). But in the U.S. without other context the word "pickle" generally refers to a pickled cucumber.