Raw Milk

Raw Milk

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he only drinks raw milk.

In Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.

Drinking raw milk is “like playing Russian roulette with your health,” as the director of the FDA Division of Dairy and Egg Safety once said. To be clear, the CDC’s own study says raw milk is estimated to have caused three deaths from 1998-2018 while oysters cause 100 deaths every year. Weiss writes “for new consumers, raw milk is a symbol. … To drink (and especially to produce) raw milk is a way of breaking with convention and raging against the machine — the United States Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control, the FDA, doctors, PhDs, state regulators, and Big Dairy.”

Big Dairy.

The final and biggest blow to raw milk came when a federal judge ruled in favor of the Ralph Nader-founded advocacy group, Public Citizen, and banned all interstate sales of raw milk.

According to an FDA study relying on 2016 and 2019 data, 4.4 percent of Americans report consuming raw milk in the past year, although the number has almost certainly grown since then.

Sally Fallon Morell, the president of the pro-raw milk Weston A. Price Foundation, which lists 3,000 locations in America where one can purchase raw milk, said “I think Covid had a lot to do with [people’s newfound interest in raw milk]. A lot of people don’t believe everything the government says anymore.”