Friday, June 30, 2017
Brown milk comes from chocolate cows
If I heard about the story, then everybody heard about the story.
Seven percent of Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
Although I'm quite aware that most Americans -- that is to say the 99 percent who don't farm or ranch -- are sometimes (perhaps often) confused about exactly how food is raised, I gotta tell ya that the brown milk story set off my bullshit detector.
A lot of media outlets fell for it, and I'm sure a lot of Americans did too.
Fake news.
Oh sure, there was "a survey" done. But neither the group sponsoring the survey (Innovation Center for US Dairy) nor the group that conducted the survey (Edelman Intelligence) will release the questions asked or any details of the survey other than dates of May 7-9 and 1,000 people surveyed from all 50 US states.
So, top secret questions. Headline making answers. What could possibly be wrong with this picture?
For the publicized result to hold true something like 18 million Americans would have to believe that all brown is chocolate, period, end of story. Brown car? Chocolate. Brown house? Chocolate. Brown dog? Chocolate. Brown feces? Chocolate.
I'm quite comfortable in having a very high level of certainty that people aren't that stupid.
I'm even more certain, however, that there are a HELL of a LOT of people who are filled with enough bitter malevolence that they think it's perfectly fine to invent, perpetrate, and pass along such garbage.
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Well, I'm more cynical than you. I think that seven percent is too high, but I would believe something north of one percent. Which would still be a fair number of people. As to your last paragraph, I totally agree.
ReplyDeleteBTW, thanks for the post.
Paul L. Quandt
Thanks for stopping by and commenting Paul.
DeleteI dunno. After occasionally haring "man on the street" interviews done by various people on various topics, the ignorance of many Americans today is astounding. They might know some pop-culture stuff, but history, current events, economics, civics or science seem to have all been classes they skipped.
ReplyDeleteMany probably do not even know that milk comes from cows.
But, most are probably sure that it should be free and they are entitled to it.
I tend to agree. Pop culture is all that a significant percentage know, as that is all they care about.
DeleteHhmm, what age group?
ReplyDeleteI would bet that 75% of four year old kids think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
It is my experience that people from cities are profoundly ignorant of where food comes from. My sister Martha had a friend who could not understand why people were upset over 500 tons of ground beef were destroyed, as it may have been contaminated with e coli. This Boston gal said, " What difference does it make, all they have to do is make more at the factory ?"
ReplyDeleteIt is does happen to be true, we need to clone the Dean's True Moo chocolate cows. True Moo whole molk chocolate milk is so good, I an not entirely sure it should be legal!
ReplyDelete