My husband and I will frequently joke with our kids about where things come from, telling them that horseradish comes from actual horses or chocolate milk comes from brown cows, for example. (Don’t worry. We always tell them the truth.) Little did I know, however, that millions of ADULT Americans really do believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Seven percent of American adults, to be exact, which is approximately 16.4 million people or, as the Washington Post reports, the entire population of Pennsylvania plus some change.

Did these people’s parents forget to let them in on the joke? Or …? Because I honestly thought it was LITERALLY impossible to be this stupid.

The sad part? That’s not all your fellow citizens don’t know.

The Department of Agriculture conducted an Agricultural Literacy survey in 1993, and according to the data collected, 1 in 5 Americans didn’t know hamburgers were made of beef. Instead, respondents thought they came from pigs. In fact, of all the questions the subjects answered, only 56% of respondents correctly answered questions about plants in agriculture, only 69% correctly answered questions about animals in agriculture, and only 59% correctly answered questions about general agricultural processing.

WHAT THA FUCK IS GOING ON?

Naturally, the Department of Agriculture recommended we get some agricultural knowledge up in that school curriculum following their analysis of the survey results, but clearly, with 16 million Americans still thinking chocolate milk comes from brown cows, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that recommendation either wasn’t heeded or was and proved ineffective.

CHOCOLATE COWS? PIG HAMBURGERS? How can anyone be this out of touch with basic reality? I mean, we have Google now and everything.

We’ve got a serious problem here, not least of which is the fact that we have to VOTE with these people.

Take some initiative and pick up a book, brown cow people. You’re sinking this ship and taking the rest of us down with you.