How now brown cow?

A survey that may or may not have been conducted by the ghost of H.L. Mencken – the survey was commissioned by an outfit called the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy – found that “seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.”

Really. This is udderly ridiculous.

Do these folks ever wonder why there’s no polka-dot or chocolate chip milk coming from Holsteins? Do they think that Galloways are the source of Oreos? Or are they canny enough to recognize that cookies don’t come from cows.

It’s not just milk that brings out our inner ignoramus.

One Department of Agriculture study, commissioned in the early ’90s, found that nearly 1 in 5 adults did not know that hamburgers are made from beef. (Source: WaPo)

Well, if we hang on for a bit, the 1 in 5 may be proved correct. I recently had a not bad fake hamburger. Not a veggie burger, mind you. A fake burger. (It tasted like a well-done hamburger. Not juicy and dripping a bit of blood, but once you threw a pickle and ketchup on it, it tasted just fine.) And then there’s pink slime…

But the real question is whether those 1 and 5 who didn’t know hamburgers are made from beef actually know that beef comes from an honest to goodness animal.

The problem is that most of us are generations removed from the farm.

One set of my Irish great-grandparents worked in textile mills when they came to Amerikay. The other pair came over and bought a farm. A dairy farm. But none of their offspring were farmers. My grandfather Rogers fled the farm for the big city of Worcester, as did his brother Jim. They ran a saloon. The other brother fled the farm for Hammond, Indiana for some reason, coming home only for his mother’s funeral. My great Aunt Lizzie stayed on the farm, but commuted by trolley from rural Barre to the mill-town of Ware, where she worked as a bookkeeper.

My German grandparents fled Europe – and the farm – for Chicago, where my grandfather opened a butcher shop.

My grandmother did have a garden at the family’s lake house, 50 miles or so outside of Chicago, where she grew vegetables, including the nastiest wax beans – a.k.a., “vax beans”. The area where the lake house sat was more rural than resort-y. There was a duck farm down the road and a cornfield across the road. I seem to remember my father and uncle picking corn for dinner. (Surely, they paid the farmer…)

I had a little second-hand farm experience, but most of us just plain don’t grow up on farms, or anywhere near one. So we never experience things like just-picked vaxed beans and chickens running around with their heads cut off. Literally.

Thus we end up with lack of basic food knowledge:

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. Four in 10 didn’t know that hamburgers came from cows. And 3 in 10 didn’t know that cheese is made from milk.

My German grandmother made her own pickles, so I knew all about cucumbers. But I understand that someone might be confused. Even though both items are green and pimply. (Plus I’ll cut some slack because for some reason it’s sticking in my mind that my husband didn’t get grapes/raisins or plums/prunes. And he had a PhD from Harvard.)

But how could you not know that onions and lettuce are plants?

Then again:

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.

For the record, the Macintosh apple is my personal most popular fruit, followed by cherries. As for top veggies, while I do love potatoes, I’ve gotta go with broccoli, asparagus, and peppers.

Not sure while it’s all that important. What’s the difference if someone thinks that chocolate milk doesn’t come directly from a brown cow? Maybe they grew up well after the era when we watched our mothers mix Nestle’s Quik into white milk, hoping she stirred it well enough to get all the lumps out. (Or better yet, got to watch our mothers make chocolate milk with Hershey’s syrup, which tasted a lot better than choco milk made with Quik, what with the possibility of a lump of grainy mix in it.)

But I guess that it’s good to know this kind of stuff in a general knowledge sort of way. Or because it might help us become more aware of things nutritional, and thus stop kidding ourselves that a potato chip counts as a vegetable.