16 million Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows

NZ Farmer - Seven per cent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

If you do the math, that works out to 16.4 million misinformed, milk-drinking people, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of US Dairy.

The equivalent of the population of Pennsylvania (and then some) 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. They don't know where food is grown, how it gets to stores - or even, in the case of chocolate milk, what's in it.

One Department of Agriculture study, commissioned in the early '90s, found that nearly one in five adults did not know that hamburgers are made from beef. Many more lacked familiarity with basic farming facts, like how big US farms typically are and what food animals eat.