How now, brown cow? Many think you are chocolate milk’s source
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 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. One Department of Agriculture study, commissioned in the early 1990s, 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.
Experts in ag education aren’t convinced that much has changed in the intervening decades.
Educators are quick to caution that these conclusions don’t apply across the board. Studies have shown that people with higher education levels and incomes tend to know a bit more about where their food comes from.
But 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 3 in 10 didn’t know that cheese is made from milk.
Recent years have seen a movement to reverse this gap, with agriculture and nutrition groups working to get ag education back into classrooms.
Groups like Food Corps, the National Agriculture in the Classroom Organization and the American Farm Bureau Foundation are actively working with K-12 teachers across the country to add nutrition, farm technology and agricultural economics to lessons in social studies, science and health. The USDA Farm to School program, which awarded $5 million in grants for the 2017-2018 school year on Monday, also funds projects on agriculture education.