Brown Cows and Chocolate Milk
open.substack.com
If you’ve spent any amount of time talking to farmers about consumers, you’ll often end up fielding complaints about how little the average consumer knows about how food arrives on their plate. This can take several forms, such as frustration about not knowing the role of gestation crates (to restrain the sow from stepping on her piglets) or conventional growers irritated about how consumers wrongly think organic food means there were no pesticides used in its production. But one of these gripes truly animates exasperation among farmers — that 7% of consumers think chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
  • @StrayCatFrumpEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    I, for one, am personally inclined to completely dismiss this statistic as either engineered by survey designers or made up completely… Why does the dairy industry desperately want us to think consumers are this dumb?

    The liberal paradigm in general benefits (i.e. serves to better protect capital and state) by convincing us that other working-class people are stupid and cannot be trusted. That way we don’t turn to each other and form movements for our collective betterment, but instead turn to the authorities—our oppressors—and beg them to take care of things for us, thereby surrendering absolutely all of our power. The “people are stupid” mythology is absolutely rampant in our society, quite intentionally.

    Just sit back and trust “the experts”—your “betters”—and everything will be okay. Maybe if you’re lucking you’ll get to go to the voting booth every once in a while and submit your protest to management, but if you don’t get heard, it’s probably because you, too, don’t know what’s good for you, and should just shut up and trust the system. 😒