Brown cow? How, now?
Years ago my niece, then 7, had chickenpox, and the family promised her she would pull through just fine. She wasn’t quite sure. Ever one to stir the pot, I slipped surreptitiously to the kitchen and took an egg from the refrigerator. Then I sat next to her on the couch and gently slid the egg behind her.
Maybe a minute later I reached in, pulled out the egg, held it up and exclaimed, “Look! Becky laid an egg!” Everyone laughed – with the single exception of her 3-year-old sister, Renae, who opened her eyes wide and screamed in horror.
After her parents had explained about Uncle Dave’s warped sense of humor, her mother asked, “Renae, where do you think eggs came from?”
Still somewhat hysterical, she replied, with certainty, “Giant Eagle!”
This is a cute story when it involves a person who also believes every city has a gang of misfit friends who ride in the Mystery Machine with a huge Great Dane to catch villains wearing rubber masks.
But when a similar story breaks involving a large percentage of so-called adults … ruh-roh!
As reported in “Food and Wine” magazine June 10, a study commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy posed this question to a random group of 1,000 U.S. adults: “Where does chocolate milk come from?”
Presented with a choice between brown or black-and-white cows or “I don’t know,” 7 percent answered, “brown cows.” Forty-eight percent answered, “I don’t know.” That may be even more disturbing. Extrapolating the data nationally, we might expect that roughly 64 million Americans ascribe to alternate dairy facts.
Suddenly, the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election make sense to me.
I guess we can add these respondents to the already vast pool of nincompoops who believe that U.S. moon landings were faked on a Hollywood soundstage or that Big Oil suppresses technology that allows the internal combustion engine to run on water.
But really, shouldn’t we have seen this coming?
Back in the ’90s, a U.S. Department of Agriculture study of more than 2,000 adults in Indiana, Michigan and Missouri revealed 20 percent of participants did not know hamburger is ground beef. I guess the “ham” part of the word tricked them.
Yet, I can sympathize. Until I was in my teens, I didn’t know that ham salad was made from ham. My mom made what she called “ham salad” by ramming chunks of bologna, sweet pickles and longhorn cheese into a meat grinder and cranking its handle, then mixing the result with homemade mayonnaise.
It may also explain, in large part why, in some restaurants, the list of ingredients for a gyro sandwich includes not lamb, but “gyro meat,” as if that spiced, cooked flesh wrapped in a pita pocket was carved from the carcass of a massive horned beast hunted and slaughtered by a party of plainsmen lead by buckskin-clad Gyro Bill.
Chocolate milk from brown cows? It’s not like we hadn’t been disabused of this notion 30 years ago.
In the 1980s, Hershey ran a 30-second TV spot asking, “Where do you think really chocolaty chocolate milk comes from? A chocolate cow? In a chocolate field? On a chocolate farm? Near a chocolate stream?”
Apparently, the same adults who now believe brown cows give chocolate milk saw this ad as kids but turned off the TV before the announcer intoned,” Wrong! Really chocolaty chocolate milk comes from where you’d expect it to come from – Hershey, the chocolate people!”
Fine, but it doesn’t explain where chocolate comes from, does it?
Which is from the Chocolate Berry Tree that grows on top of Sugar Mountain in Candyland.
Mom told me over ham salad sandwiches.