Dairy Trivia

• Americans eat the equivalent of 10 acres of pizza (and Mozzarella cheese) every day.

• Just ate spicy food? Milk is better than water for cooling your mouth. A protein in milk called casein cleanses the taste buds.

• Cheddar cheese was first developed in the town of, yes, Cheddar Gorge, England, more than 400 years ago.

• A gallon of milk weighs 8.59 pounds.

• A cow has four stomachs and 24 teeth.

• The most common breed of dairy cow in the United States is the Holstein; Jersey cows produce milk with the highest butterfat content.

• An average cow produces about 350,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.

• Plastic milk bottles were first introduced in the United States in 1967.

• McDonald's and Wendy's introduced single-serve plastic milk containers in the summer of 2004.

• The tradition of making Swiss cheese in 200-pound wheels began in the Middle Ages, when the Swiss government taxed cheese makers on the number of pieces they produced, rather than according to the total weight of the cheese they made.

• To get the same amount of calcium provided by 8 ounces of milk, you would have to eat 2 1/4 cups of broccoli, six and three fourths oranges or six slices of wheat bread.

• If you open the refrigerator in 96 percent of all households, you'll find a container of milk; 94 percent of all households have cheese.

• Total cheese per capita consumption was 31 pounds in 2004.

• Forty percent of all cheese is served at restaurants and cafeterias.

• An average dairy cow weighs 1,400 pounds and consumes about 50 pounds of dry matter (e.g., hay, grass, grain) each day.

• The average cow drinks from 30 to 50 gallons of water each day - about a bathtub's worth.

• Cows have an acute sense of smell, and can smell something up to 6 miles away.

• Most cows chew at least 50 times per minute, and spend 10 hours a day chewing their cud in order to aid in digestion.

• Cows arrived in America with the Jamestown settlers in 1611.

• Tank trucks for transporting fluid milk were first introduced in 1914.