This story is going to reveal how you think psychologically. Because you’re either going to be optimistic that you are smarter than millions of people or disappointed because so many people can be so misinformed. And if you actually did believe this, well then, you learned something today.
Anyway, in a survey from the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy, it showed that 7% or 16.4 million American adults thought chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
Now this raises a couple questions that I would ask to anyone who thought that. One, have any of these people ever seen Hershey’s chocolate syrup at a supermarket or have seen it poured into milk? And two, if they think chocolate milk comes from brown cows, what exactly do they think strawberry milk comes from? There is no such thing as a pink cow so that doesn’t make sense.
But many point that this leads to a bigger issue. When we pick up our milk (which can come prepared in chocolate) we don’t necessarily think about where it comes from. The Washington Post cited a study from the Department of Agriculture in the 90s that said 20% of people didn’t know that hamburger meat was beef.
And considering what is needed to happen for our meat and milk to go from the farm to the supermarket to our homes isn’t crucial for educational testing purposes, it’s not exactly something that’s taught in schools. And that is a big concern. While this may not be such a big deal, it shows how nutritionally ignorant we are as a society to not be aware or all too concerned about where our food comes from and what we’re putting in our bodies. If people don’t even know the basic tenets about agriculture, they probably don’t know or even care if a farm were to use drugs to make animals bigger or put pesticides on the vegetables that could potentially harm people who ingest them.
Anyway, even if you are lactose intolerant or don’t drink milk or even have never been told where milk comes from, at least some common sense could be used to realize that all the milk that comes out of a cow is white. Otherwise, you may not want to drink whatever it is that’s coming out of the cow.
[Washington Post/Photo: Brown Cow Organics]