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.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:04AM (4 children)
Most dairy cows are Holsteins though - which are black and white.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 17 2017, @03:54AM (3 children)
Do you know what "though" means? 93 % of cows can be non-brown.
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Saturday June 17 2017, @06:26AM (2 children)
90+% of US dairy cows are holsteins, and I very much doubt that 70% of the rest are brown. More likely, of the 10% left, 7% are brown. Unless 70% of the remainder are brown, there is not a 7% likelihood of your chocolate milk coming from a brown cow. Also, due to the way distribution networks work, the likelihood of purchasing chocolate milk coming from a brown cow is probably much lower than the actual percentage of brown dairy cows.
(Score: 2) by Bobs on Saturday June 17 2017, @02:31PM (1 child)
Ahh, but if you average the color of a black and white cow, you get a brown cow.
They were just overthinking it!
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Monday June 19 2017, @10:24AM
Given how much of the milk is Homogenized, then there's a non-zero chance that chocolate milk contains milk from a brown cow.