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 mathematics, 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.

But the most surprising thing about this figure may actually be that it isn’t higher.  For decades, observers in agriculture, nutrition and education have complained that many Americans are 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.  As one expert in the field commented, “We are conditioned to think that if you need food, you go to the store. Nothing in our educational framework teaches kids where food comes from before that point.”

One Department of Agriculture study, commissioned in the early ’90s, found that nearly 1 in 5 adults didn’t know that hamburgers were made from beef. Many more lacked familiarity with basic farming facts, like how big U.S. farms typically are and what food animals eat.

People who live in agricultural communities tend to know a bit more about where their food comes from, as do people with higher education levels and household incomes, but otherwise nothing much has changed.   Today, many Americans only experience food as an industrial product that doesn’t look much like the original animal or plant.  The USDA says orange juice is the most popular “fruit” in America, and processed potatoes — in the form of french fries and chips — rank among the top vegetables.

” Nobody knows nothin'” when it comes to food and its origins.  But the past 20 years have seen the birth of a movement to reverse this situation, with agriculture and nutrition groups working to get agricultural education back into classrooms to teach kids how to eat healthfully, an important aid to tackling heart disease and obesity.  (An edited and summarised version of an article by Caitlin Dewey,  food policy writer for Wonkblog, tinyletter.com/cdewey.)

My comment: And the article doesn’t even mention sugar, an agricultural product that causes widespread bad health and which, in the US is even added to ready- made soup (sold in shops owned by Whole Foods, which claims to be a health food purveyor). It’s hard to avoid either sugar or salt or the sort of gunk put in Big Macs, which has been scientifically devised to trick your brain into thinking you are getting tasty nutrition.