Time for “How Now Brown Cow” Studies

Generations of us who learned that rhyme never dreamed that brown bovines had a direct connection to chocolate milk. “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,” Caitlin Dewey reported in The Washington Post. “If you do the math, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed, milk-drinking people.”

“The equivalent of the population of Pennsylvania (and then some!) does not know that chocolate milk is milk, cocoa and sugar.” Could the confusion stem from their education? Dewey offers this tantalizing tidbit. “When one team of researchers interviewed fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders at an urban California school, they found that more than half of them didn’t know pickles were cucumbers, or that onions and lettuce were plants,” she writes. “Four in 10 didn’t know that hamburgers came from cows.”

“And 3 in 10 didn’t know that cheese is made from milk.” Let’s hope they figure it out before they get their college degrees. If they don’t get a handle on it, they could always major in gender studies.

Perhaps we’ll meet some of them at the Modern Language Association.