WASHINGTON D.C. — Who knew chocolate cows were a thing? According to the Washington Post, 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.
With the math worked out, that’s around 16.4 million people, or, the equivalent of the population of Pennsylvania and then some. For the record, chocolate milk is just milk, cocoa, and sugar.
But the Washington Post says the more suprising think about the figure is that it isn’t higher:
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.
One Department of Agriculture study, commissioned in the early ’90s, found that nearly 1 in 5 adults did not know that hamburgers are made from beef. Many more lacked familiarity with basic farming facts, like how big U.S. farms typically are and what food animals eat.
Cecily Upton, co-founder of the nonprofit FoodCorps says:
“At the end of the day, it’s an exposure issue. Right now, we’re conditioned to think that if you need food, you go to the store. Nothing in our educational framework teaches kids where food comes from before that point.”
For National Dairy Month, which is June, NACO has been featuring a kindergarten-level lesson on dairy. Among its main takeaways: milk — plain, unflavored, boring white milk — comes from cows, not the grocery case.
