They vote!! They vote?????

The last time I had such a nutty idea, I was in kindergarten.
But, the US Dairy Innovation Center surveyed American adults (yes, adults) only to find that  7% of those surveyed were certain that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That’s 1 in 14 for those of you who are also numerically challenged.

And, since I am a Phanatic, I can put it like this. The equivalency of the adult population of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has no clue that we need cocoa and sugar (the sugar is much less critical) and not brown cows for our chocolate milk. (You have to wonder from where they think their wine comes.)

Of course, the dairy lobby just thinks it’s because adults are agriculturally illiterate,  as opposed to folks like me who wonder what these folks have been doing since they entered the first grade. (I mean, I know we all daydream, but these folks have been in deep freeze way too long.)

And, when you listen to some of the commentators reacting to the report, you’d think they were attempting to whitewash the findings- not. Because these folks (Like Cecily Upton of FoodCorps) state that folks from agricultural communities or those with college degrees (which also generally means higher incomes) are not so obtuse.  Really, Ms. Upton?  Your explanation only means the percentage of the rest of the citizenry is even MORE deluded.

So, you probably won’t be surprised at their proposed solution… Bring the genesis of food into the school curriculum. I dunno… I’m not even going back to when I went to school, but only to the educational experiences of my youngest (who left high school less than a decade ago)- and, as opposed to his elder sisters who were schooled in SouthCentral Virginia (where farms really existed), he only grew up in an urban environment. When he [and his classmates] learned about the agricultural crops of the 50 states, their economic engines, and those of the nations of the world, all items part of the curriculum.

I don’t think we need to promote Amazon (now about to be the owner of Whole Paycheck…Oops, I meant Whole Foods) with our meager educational dollars. Just make sure we cover the concept better when we talk about major crops, industries, etc.

And, stop telling the kids that french fries are a vegetable! (You do notice from the chart below that we eat more of them than tomatoes (not tomato sauce), lettuce, and carrots COMBINED!)
But, I guess this finding is still an improvement. Because 20 years ago, 20% of the adults had not a clue that hamburgers are made from beef. (Maybe that’s because they fear McDonald’s had a secret recipe?)

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