Countless Americans Believe That Brown Cows Produce Chocolate Milk

Debbie Waumsley/Pixabay/IFLS
If you visit the Innovation Center for US Dairy's website, the question that's asked more often is whether chocolate milk comes from brown cows!

The answer is simple: any flavored milk comes from any cow, but it just contains (what else?) flavoring and sweeteners.

Unfortunately, this message doesn't seem to be clear to the American public, since a survey commissioned by the Center has discovered that a whopping 7% of Americans still believe that chocolate milk comes directly out of brown cows.

If you do the math, that's 16.4 million people worldwide who believe that chocolate milkshake can potentially be drunk directly from a cow's udder, as Food and Wine reports.

The nationally representative survey becomes more alarming. 48% of respondents admitted that they weren't certain about where chocolate milk comes from. In case this is true for people across the entire globe, this would mean that 154,272,000 potential voters are not confident enough to guess "cows?".


Stilton does not come from blue cows, by the way. Pexels/IFLS
Unluckily, this isn't the only case of Americans being misinformed about where food comes from. As a study in the early '90s found, 20% of adults did not know that hamburgers are made of cows' meat.

Also, Innovation Center for US Dairy's study discovered that 37% of people secretly drank milk straight out of its container in the fridge, in really poor etiquette. Another 29% use their kids as an excuse to buy chocolate milk so that they drink it themselves.

Finally, the survey of over 1,000 adults reports that 95% of Americans keep some cheese in their fridge. Let's just hope that they don't think blue cheese comes from blue cows!