So this story made the rounds last week claiming that 7% of Americans think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Unbelievable right? I thought it was quite literally unbelievable. The obvious conclusion was that 70 out of 1000 Americans will troll an online survey if they feel like they can get away with it.
However, this story made its way onto every news site from Breitbart to WaPo to CNN and maybe 1 in 150 comments questioned the validity of the survey. Mostly people just wanted to get off a political hipshot. Am I looking too deep into this? Has anyone on this board actually encountered a person who thinks this?
Can’t see the article with the ad blocker but if I was asked to answer a poll about where chocolate milk came from and one of the choices was Brown Cows I’d pick that one. If they used a poll I’m surprised only 7% of the people answered that way.
I’m surprised that the number is that low, too. I mean, on something like a political poll, I’ll play it straight (though there are those who troll political polls, too), but a poll like this exists for the sole purpose of making a joke, so I might as well make a joke.
The CNN article says the “research” was put out by something called the Innovation Center for US Dairy. I went to their site (http://www.usdairy.com/), and I don’t find the report. I Googled “site:usdairy.com chocolate brown cow” and didn’t find anything.
This organization does appear to generate some real research, but I’m guessing the report everyone is talking about now was the work of some of the less serious minds there.
I have now been to about 7 different sites that reference this supposed research, and I find no link to the actual survey or results.
I find a Food and Wine articlefrom 6/1 that points to Undeniably Dairy, which seems to be an arm of the Innovation Center for US Dairy.
The Undeniably Dairy home page has a link to an infographic that makes the claim that 7% of us think chocolate milk comes from brown cows. That page provides no cite for the claim. It does, helpfully, point to an articleon today.com. The today.com article in turn references the Food and Wine article that linked to the Undeniably Dairy page.
It’s the circle of [del]liiiiiife![/del] bullshiiiiiit!
There’s an article on the dairygood.org website about the study, and in the comments, some people asked the same question (Were people being serious? Where is the survey?) and here is the reply:
Thanks. I saw that page, but I didn’t drill down into the comments. I should have, since the comments section is usually where you get the real science.
So, it was intended to be fun, we can’t have the results or methodology, but it was totally, totally valid.
I don’t for a minute doubt the survey. In fact, I have an adult cousin who thinks all dogs are male and all cats are female. She thinks dogs inseminate cats, who give birth to a litter of mixed puppies and kittens.
We had this discussion, about where various kinds of milk come from, some years ago. Even then, TriPolar was assuring us that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Little Nemo gives a plausible account of how a segment of the population has come to believe that.
When my brother’s children were little, they would often prepare chocolate milk (using Nesquik syrup) when visiting my parents’ house. (Actually, they still have chocolate milk, even though one is 23 and the other is 18 years old.) I regularly offered to make them my special “white chocolate chocolate milk” but strangely they never took me up on the offer. (The scam was to leave out the chocolate syrup entirely.)
