How raw milk went from hippie to MAGA

Photo: Natalie Behring/Getty Images

Days before Thanksgiving, Mark McAfee received calls about the voluntary recall of his farm’s raw milk after a batch distributed to stores in California tested positive for genetic material containing the bird flu virus. “Can I pinch myself?” McAfee said. “This is actually happening.” His disbelief was not born of stress, but happiness. “I have an educational opportunity to share the science I know to help people and humanity,” he said.

McAfee and his family run a business outside Fresno called Raw Farm, which produces 80,000 gallons of raw milk each week, more than any other dairy in the world. Despite the setback from bird flu, McAfee said demand has increased about 2 percent per week this year as raw milk peaks. His clients include the NASDAQ-listed chain Sprouts Farmers Market and Erewhon, the Los Angeles-based food company of the stars. (Whole Foods sold its milk until it got out of the unpasteurized business in 2010.) He lists a range of famous customers, from Danica Patrick to Sylvester Stallone to Patrick Dempsey.

While filming a documentary about raw milk released earlier this year, former vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan told McAfee that her vice president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., drinks his milk when he is home in Malibu. As Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has said he will put an end to the “aggressive suppression” of raw milk – most likely starting with lifting the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on interstate sales.

For decades, raw milk was a cultural symbol of the flower child. “It was a very unremarkable, strange group of people,” McAfee says. “Movie stars. Down-to-earth people. A pseudo-hippie thing.” But the product has moved from the kitchen tables of California health fanatics to the agenda of the next Republican administration, thanks in part to Kennedy’s rise.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a daily raw milk drinker, has joined nine fellow Republicans in introducing a bill to legalize interstate commerce in unpasteurized milk. MAGA youth voter organization Turning Point USA is selling a “Got Raw Milk” T-shirt. Infowars moderators scream about how bird flu is a conspiracy to take away raw milk. On his show, Joe Rogan condemned the government’s “war on raw milk” and explained how countries like France are doing well with higher raw milk consumption: “They seem pretty darn healthy, and they’re not fat. As for Kennedy, he says he no longer touches regular store-bought milk.

According to a 2022 FDA survey, raw milk drinkers are still a relatively niche group: 4.4 percent of American adults drink it once a year. But that number appears to be growing. Market research from NielsenIQ shows that weekly sales of raw milk have increased by up to 65 percent compared to similar periods last year. It’s obvious that it’s not just conservatives who drink raw milk, even though federal health officials warn that doing so increases the risk of foodborne illness. (In New York, where raw milk can only be sold on the farm where it is produced, many drinkers in the city rely on the Pennsylvania Amish, who break the ban on interstate travel by selling it in exchange to houses in the City gives away “donations.”) Advocates point to the milk’s creamier taste and tout alleged health benefits; They say it strengthens the immune system or prevents asthma.

Actual public health officials disagree with these claims: “Raw milk does not cure or treat asthma or allergies,” the FDA says. “Pasteurization was one of the great public health achievements of the 20th century,” says Marion Nestle, a molecular biologist, nutritionist and professor emeritus at New York University. Simply heating milk for a short time kills dangerous bacteria such as salmonella, listeria and E. coli. If you, as a healthy adult, drink raw milk that is contaminated with these pathogens, it can make you sick. If you are a child or someone else with a weakened immune system, this can pose a far greater threat. The CDC strongly discourages parents from giving their children raw milk. The FDA states that raw milk has no additional nutritional benefits compared to pasteurized milk. As for the asthma claim, the FDA says raw milk advocates “misused” a key study to support false evidence that raw milk prevents the disease.

In recent months, an uncertain threat has emerged from the H5N1 bird flu virus. Dr. Richard Webby, an infectious disease expert and director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Influenza Studies, says there is an unclear but increased risk of bird flu infection when drinking raw milk. “My gut feeling is that humans are probably a little more resistant to this virus than other species, but we just don’t know the answer,” he says. “But to see what this virus is capable of and to take that risk yourself is, in my opinion, crazy.”

Although for some conservatives who have turned to raw food, it may be about taking the risk. McAfee notes that the pandemic has created a “paradigm break” for many Americans, causing them to distrust public health advice that goes beyond lockdowns and the coronavirus vaccine. “There was a renewed interest in 2020 during the COVID-19 crisis,” he says. As Republicans embraced raw milk, a number of conservative-minded young media figures—“Tradwives,” influencer bros—began rejecting foods containing vegetable oils and other processed foods. The party that a decade earlier rejected Michelle Obama’s push for healthy foods in schools pushed for a return to ingredients her grandparents might know. Kennedy summarized this idea in his campaign merch earlier this year, selling T-shirts that read “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” — even though he’s not a fan of Trump’s McDonald’s order.

McAfee has claimed that Kennedy’s transition team asked him to serve as a consultant on raw milk standards, but he is currently preoccupied with more pressing issues. Three days after his initial recall, testing found genetic fragments of bird flu (not the virus itself) in a second batch of raw milk from his farm that was delivered to the Erewhon and Sprouts Farmers Market. On Monday, the California Department of Food and Agriculture announced that all Raw Farm operations would be “quarantined.”