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 AthanasiusKircher on Saturday June 17 2017, @01:14PM
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].