Over 16 million American adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows

Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

If you do the maths, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed, milk‑drinking people, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of US Dairy.

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 one in five adults did not know that hamburgers are made from beef.

In some populations, confusion about basic food facts can skew pretty high.

When one team of researchers interviewed fourth‑, fifth‑ and sixth‑graders at an urban California high school, they found that more than half of them didn’t know pickles were cucumbers, or that onions and lettuce were plants.

Four in 10 didn’t know that hamburgers came from cows. And three in 10 didn’t know that cheese is made from milk.

Today, many Americans only experience food as an industrial product that doesn’t look much like the original animal or plant: The USDA says orange juice is the most popular “fruit” in America, and processed potatoes ‑ in the form of french fries and chips ‑ rank among the top vegetables.

Source: The Washington Post