Sometimes, even in these dark days, you feel a momentary twinkle of optimism. Then you find out that 7 percent of fully grown Americans believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That works out to be some 16.4 million people. This is not a joke, but is instead a statistic from an online survey by the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy.
While you might be surprised, given recent decisions made by the American public, that this statistic isn’t higher, that’s still a lot of people who don’t understand that there is chocolate syrup in their chocolate milk. It’s also in keeping with the grand tradition of Americans knowing nothing about their food: As the Washington Post points out, an early ’90s study found that 20 percent of American adults didn’t know that hamburgers are made from cows. Here is where I admit that one of my own relatives told my dad she doesn’t eat meat, only hamburgers. Clearly, it’s time for the back-to-basics organic-food movement to pack up its bags.
