How now, brown cow?

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It was in the news recently that 7 percent of Americans think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.

Really?

According to The Washington Post, the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy did a survey of adults, mind you, and came up with those numbers. I kind of think they surveyed a bunch of smart aleck millennials who thought they were being cute when they answered the survey. But the Post is taking the results of the survey seriously and it is putting out there that Americans are basically illiterate about where their food comes from.

According to The Washington Post: “At the end of the day, it’s an exposure issue,” said Cecily Upton, co-founder of the nonprofit FoodCorps, which brings agricultural and nutrition education into elementary schools. “Right now, we’re 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.”

So, somewhere out there are people who really think baby carrots are carrots that have not reached their maturity. They’re really full grown carrots that have been cut and packaged and sold at a higher price than regular carrots. Perhaps somewhere out there are groups of people organizing a march to save the baby carrots from an untimely salad.

I don’t know if anyone has done a study on it, but I have to wonder where kids think chicken fingers come from. Or nuggets. The Washington Post said that many people don’t realize hamburger comes from cows. And many people don’t realize that not only is milk white and comes from cows of all colors, but it also is the starting point for ice cream, yogurt and cheese.

Rural residents seem to know more about where their food comes from because they’re not that many steps removed from it. But, According to the Washington Post, 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.

What does this say about society in general? If we don’t know something as basic as where French fries come from, how close to doom are we really? Are we so accustomed to chemicals in soft drinks that we just accept they’re everywhere and just blindly eat what comes from the drive-through? Are we really that stupid to think chocolate milk comes from brown cows? Maybe only 7 percent of the adults think so, but that’s still a lot of people.

Nutritionists and food-system reformers say these basic lessons about the origin of food are critical to raising kids who know how to eat healthfully — an important aid to tackling heart disease and obesity.

Meanwhile, farm groups argue the lack of basic food knowledge can lead to poor policy decisions.

A 2012 white paper from the National Institute for Animal Agriculture blamed consumers for what it considers bad farm regulations, the Post reported: “One factor driving today’s regulatory environment ... is pressure applied by consumers, the authors wrote. “Unfortunately, a majority of today’s consumers are at least three generations removed from agriculture, are not literate about where food comes from and how it is produced.”

I bet they don’t know where Bacon Bits come from either.

Can’t get much for a dime anymore

It hit me like a cup of ice in the face recently. Things cost a lot more than they used to.

Saturday was a warm day and I was at the Barbecue and Bluegrass festival, so I bought a snow cone. A cherry one. Sugar free. It was good. I paid $2 for it.

Two bucks for a little cup of ice and some flavored syrup? If I figured up the markup on that, it would probably raise my temperature.

Why I can remember — here’s where I go into geezer mode — when a snow cone cost a dime!

A teenage boy of driving age usually outfitted the trunk of his car with shaved ice, paper cones, and bottles of flavored syrup and drove up and down the neighborhood selling snow cones as a summer job. On a summer afternoon, it was hot and if you’d been working in the yard, or more likely back then sunbathing, a snow cone was a good thing. And if the guy selling them was cute, so much the better. You would ask for a rainbow snow cone, which took longer to make because he had to pump a stream of syrup from each flavor like stripes over the ball of ice. That gave you time to chat a bit.

He probably enjoyed the benefits of cruising slowly up and down the streets, checking out which cute girl lived where, but more than likely meeting their grubby little brothers with a sticky dime in their hands.

So the guy was probably making payments on his car, but gas back then was about a quarter a gallon. He had wear and tear on his car, tires, insurance, plus his supplies, and he still sold snow cones for a dime, while earning spending money or even feeding a college fund.

I never thought I’d live long enough to see a two-dollar snow cone. Ice cream cones used to cost a nickel for a scoop, but that’s a story for another column.

No more numerals!

Fooling around with math seems to be something that has gone on for centuries. Adults with children in school today try to figure out the Common Core method for teaching math. None of it makes any sense and the processes used in calculating are confusing.

I’m not particularly affected by Common Core math. If I need to figure something out involving numbers, I reach for my iPhone. It has a calculator app. I can do the basic stuff — adding, subtracting, making change at the grocery store. I can multiply and do basic division. It’s all I need to know. Anything above that is just showing off.

But one thing has me baffled. Why, after so many centuries, are we still using Roman numerals?

Back in the dark ages when I was in elementary school, teachers tried to explain the process of Roman numerals in math classes. Made about as much sense then as Common Core math does today.

The only use we have for them in modern times seems to be limited to sequencing the Olympics and Super Bowl Games, keeping track of monarchs and popes, and on movie sequels.

They used to be used on clocks — most people can figure out Roman numerals up to 12 — but not so much any more. Digital clocks have Arabic numerals on them, and some watches have little dots and marks where the numbers once were. My watch has a fake stone where each number should be. If it weren’t for digital clocks and watches displaying the numbers, a lot of people wouldn’t be able to tell time.

What’s the point of keeping this antiquated system alive? Doesn’t it make more sense to refer to Queen Elizabeth 2 than Queen Elizabeth II? Or for computer buffs: Queen Elizabeth 2.0?

Pope Francis is the first pope named Francis, and so far no one has stuck a Roman numeral I after his name. He seems to be progressive; maybe he will be not only the first Jesuit pope, and the first Francis, but the first pope to forgo Roman numerals.

It will be a good start.

A shade of a different color

I was paging through a magazine recently and came across an article about an exciting new color decorators are using to paint walls, and anything else that stands still long enough. The new color? Greige.

It’s apparently a mixture of gray and beige. It isn’t enough to have two nondescript, dull colors; someone had to go and mix them together and come up with greige.

Some time ago, taupe became popular. It looks sort of like greige. Wikipedia says it’s a combination of gray and brown.

According to Wikipedua, “taupe often overlaps with tan and even people who use color professionally (such as designers and artists) frequently disagree as to what "taupe" means.”

 Some people who claim to know say taupe is the color of a French mole. I don’t know about French moles, but I’ve seen a few American moles; they looked brown to me.

So now one can decorate one’s home in greige or taupe. Perhaps gray or beige or tan have become too passé to be considered in one’s living room. One must now redecorate in greige.

Before taupe came along, people who consider themselves experts in color created variations of white: eggshell, off-white, parchment, ad nauseam. No matter how you spread it, it looked like every rental unit in the country – white.

In the early part of this century I bought a car that looked beige. The salesman told me it was champagne. The Mazda website called it sand. This was years before we knew about greige.

Remember teal? It wasn’t blue and it wasn’t green, it was somewhere in the middle. It became a popular color.

What does it all mean? Why do we need to invent new colors, especially new nondescript neutral hues that all look like each other? Is it a marketing ploy to sell paint and fabric? Give a color a different name and people will think it’s new and they have to have it?

It’s tempting to say Henry Ford had the right idea when he said buyers of his Model T could have any color they wanted as long as it was black. According to the Web site Woot, it didn’t happen.  

However, Woot says, “It’s true that the Ford Motor Company turned black paint into a science, using 30 different types of black paint for different parts of the car’s exterior. But when the Model T first came on the market, customers could get almost any common color —except for black! Blue, gray, green, and red were all available, but not black. The first black Model T didn’t roll off the assembly line until five years later. Towards the end of the Model T’s life, six new colors were introduced, from Royal Maroon to Phoenix Brown to Highland Green. In between, it’s true, there was over a decade of monochromatic Model T’s. Some have said that Henry Ford made the switch to black paint because it dried faster, but history suggests it was just an efficiency issue: black paint was cheap and durable, and turning out only one color of car cheaper still.”

I wonder what he’d have to say about greige?