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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 frojack on Saturday June 17 2017, @07:14PM (1 child)
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
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?