Raw Milk

Once widely banned, raw milk consumption is on the rise and states are repealing their bans. No one’s happier about that than the far right. How did we get here? NOTE: In the retelling of Pasteur’s early pasteurization, Aubrey misspoke! The culprit wasn’t lactic yeast, it was lactic acid bacteria. Sorry for the slip up! Support us: Hear bonus episodes on PatreonWatch Aubrey's documentaryBuy Aubrey's bookListen to Mike's other podcastGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks! Milk...

• 0:11Speaker 00

  I'm so curious how you're gonna make a real episode out of this.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  I know, we were talking yesterday and you were like, "I don't know how this is an episode." And I was like, "It's not just an episode, there's so much of it that I'm having a really hard time editing it down."

• 0:27Speaker 00

  I was at The Louvre with some people today and I was like, "I have to leave early because I'm recording a podcast." They're like, "What's it about?" And I said, "Raw milk." And there was like this long sign, so they sort of cocked their heads like a golden retriever. They're like, "Raw milk? You gotta leave for that? You're recording for like three hours on raw milk?" I'm here instead of The Louvre tonight, Aubrey. You better make it, you better make it worthwhile.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  He's a cultured masculine man.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  All right, you're probably gonna fact check this one.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that must be heated to 145 degrees for 30 minutes.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  It's shorter than that now, but yeah.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  I'm Michael Hobbs.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I'm Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com/maintenancephase, or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content.

• 1:14Speaker 00

  Same stuff.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Michael.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  Aubrey.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  I'm so amped.

• 1:18Speaker 00

  Just get into it. Just start, start whatever you need to tell me. Go.

• 1:22Speaker 01

  So today, we're talking about raw milk. I was gonna ask you if you've tracked the raw milk debate at all, and you were like, "I don't think there's an episode there." So I think that might be my answer to how much you've tracked it.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Because I mean, we talked about this with the honey, the like, Blue Zones honey shit, that like, because pasteurization, like, I think people think it's like a science word, but all it means is like, taking something up to a temperature and then like, cooling it down to kill the bacteria. It's not, it's not like a big scary, like, quote-unquote, "processing" thing, like the ultra-processed foods, whatever. It's like, the most basic shit.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Pasteurization is only heating a liquid to well below boiling temperatures in order to kill germs that can make you very sick. Pasteurization today lasts for less than a minute. You're raising the temperature of milk for a matter of seconds and it kills a ton of germs. It kills E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, Diphtheria, Strep. Fucking tuberculosis is in raw milk? Tuberculosis. On top of killing all those germs, it also extends shelf life pretty considerably.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  It's very funny to classify this as this unnatural process when it's like, people like figured, even if they didn't know the science, people like kind of figured this out like a long time ago.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Right. It's as unnatural as me like applying heat to other foods to cook them.

• 2:46Speaker 00

  I know.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  And I also think a lot of people don't know that prior to pasteurization, it was like a common step in recipes to be like, you use in milk, boil it first, baby.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Oh, I didn't know that, actually.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  People have been heating liquids to kill germs for like a thousand years before pasteurization. Really, really a long time.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  It's not like a Western concept.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  No, it's also not a Western concept. The like earliest record that I found was in the 1100s in both China and Japan.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  Right. It's like saying like, uh, don't give in to like Western bullshit. Eat like raw chicken breast.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  So on top of those existing pathogens in milk, we now have bird flu in milk.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Oh God, do we? I didn't even know that.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  Yep. When cows contract avian flu, their highest concentrations of the virus are in their mammaries.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Like the song from Cats.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Mammaries.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  Sorry. I'm cutting that. I'm cutting that. That's for you.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Thank you. The good news is that we know that pasteurization is effective in killing H5N1, which is the avian flu virus. As of last November, avian flu was in 505 herds of dairy cows in 15 states.

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  The USDA is no longer publicly reporting info on avian flu in cows.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  Love that.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  So who the fuck knows where we're at now?

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Love that.

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Feels so good. I feel so safe.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Sale of infected milk has also not been federally banned, like bird flu infected milk has not been federally banned because they are simply too busy firing everyone.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  I'm saving my we live in hells for later in the episode, but we truly do live in hell.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  When I started researching this, I really thought we were talking about sort of food poisoning level events.

• 4:32Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  That's part of it, but there can also be long-term and permanent effects from these pathogens. According to the FDA, listeria, which is one of the common pathogens in raw milk, listeria in pregnant people can lead to stillbirth and miscarriage.

• 4:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, listeria is really, really rough stuff. Yeah.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  E. coli can lead to HUS, which can cause kidney failure and tuberculosis. So there's a book that I read for this called Milk, exclamation point. That was a history of milk.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  That's such a good idea.

• 5:07Speaker 01

  Milk. Jeb.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Kudos.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  In that book, the book was great and I really loved reading this history of milk. And every time someone was like, what are you reading? I was like, this awesome history of milk.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Milk.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  People would just like glaze over. So in this book, they write, quote, "Bovine tuberculosis, a disease found in cattle, is transmitted to humans through milk. It attacks the glands, intestines, and bones. Children are particularly susceptible and are often kept in braces for years to keep their spines from becoming deformed."

• 5:46Speaker 00

  It's one of those like destructive diseases of like humankind. And it's like such a miracle that it's not a live issue anymore. It's such a huge advancement for humankind. And yet we have all these grifters just being like, was that really good? Let's bring it back.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I think in this way, a lot of the raw milk stuff kind of follows a similar path to a lot of the anti-vax stuff. Which is just like, I haven't personally seen a child with tuberculosis. How bad can it be?

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  The CDC has conducted a number of reviews on foodborne illness outbreaks linked to dairy products. One of those covered a 13-year period. This was from 1993 to 2006. They covered all 50 states. The study's authors concluded that raw milk was linked to 150 times more outbreaks than pasteurized milk.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  No way.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  They also found that states where raw milk sale was legal had twice the incidence of foodborne illness outbreaks.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Related to dairy versus states where raw milk is restricted or banned.

• 6:51Speaker 00

  That's crazy because also, raw milk is not that big of a market. So if they're having these like huge outbreaks, that means that it's a small number of people, but much more likely to get sick.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Milk consumption overall has been trending downward in the US since like the 70s, right?

• 7:08Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  People are no longer, I mean, you can sort of see it culturally, right? Like when we were kids, there would be like families where you'd be like, your drink to go with dinner is a glass of milk.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Is that not true anymore?

• 7:19Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Is it all like monster energy now? Is that what the kids are doing?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  It's all oat milk for these soy boys. So milk consumption overall has been trending downward for like 50 years, but raw milk consumption appears to be on the rise.

• 7:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  According to analysis from the University of Delaware, consumer data showed a 21% increase in raw milk sales from 2023 to 2024.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Since that's a relative statistic, I'm assuming that's from like a very low baseline.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  Yes, it is a low baseline. So an analysis of two pretty large scale and nationally representative FDA surveys in 2016 and 2019 gave us a pretty good window into what raw milk consumption looks like. 4.4% of American adults said that they had consumed raw milk in the last year and 1% reported consuming raw milk weekly.

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Okay, that is like, thank God, like blessedly small.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Totally. It's a small number of people, but then when you're like 150 times the likelihood of illness outbreak, like woo.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  On the thing about like milk consumption falling in general, I do a thing where if I'm getting like a brownie or a cookie at like a cafe, I will order like a glass of milk. With it, because like a cookie and milk is hella good.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  It used to be that that cafes and stuff would have like listed on the menu, a glass of milk. But now they don't even know like what to charge me. Oftentimes they'll just like, give me a glass of milk.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Wokeness has gone too far, Michael.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  I love it. I'll take some free milk with my cookie.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  There are a lot of claims from Maha types currently about pasteurization, making milk less nutritious. But the science just doesn't bear that out.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Also, how much nutrition do you fucking need from milk?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Surely losing out on some B12 is like worth it to not get sick.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  So a 2011 systematic review looked at 40 studies. Pasteurization decreased the amount of vitamins E, C, and some B vitamins and folate. And it increased the concentration of vitamin A. So on its face, it looks like it's true that pasteurization can reduce the amount of some vitamins in milk. However, those vitamins exist in raw milk in very small quantities.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  A couple of four examples. Pasteurization reduces the amount of vitamin C in milk, okay. But a full pint of raw milk contains 0% of your vitamin C for the day.

• 10:02Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Vitamin E, that same full pint of raw milk gets you to 3% of your recommended daily allowance. Pasteurized milk gets you to 2%.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Also, you know this from the last episode that I'm a vitamin E truther. You should be worrying less about vitamin E than you should about fucking tuberculosis and like listeria, like bugs in your juice.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Maha types also argue that pasteurization kills off like enzymes and probiotics and all kinds of stuff. Overwhelmingly, those things are pathogens. The things that they're like, oh no, it's killing this off. Right. Those are things that will make you sick. I'm so sorry.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  By probiotics, I mean tuberculosis.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Diphtheria.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  Most things you eat don't have like live probiotics in them. Again, like the probiotics thing is also kind of weird. It's like, you just don't need to think about this that much.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  And now, Michael.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  Opry.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  We're gonna get in the Wayback Machine. And we're gonna talk through the history of the raw milk debate, particularly in the US.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  We're gonna start with the birth of a man named Louis Pasteur.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  We sure are.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  Wait, are we actually?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  We're gonna talk about Pasteur for a minute.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  I'm kind of an expert, because like, I'm in France right now, so like, I can just-

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Oh my god, tell me-

• 11:07Speaker 00

  I'll just walk us through this part. Do you want me to like, do this part?

• 11:09Speaker 01

  I'll just close my notes. You tell me about pasteurization and about Louis Pasteur.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  I speak three words of French, so like, I'm actually qualified to do this part. The thing is, that's actually why I'm here. The, the French government heard me pronounce Pret à Manger.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  And they were like, "That's so good. We're inviting you as a diplomatic trip to this country."

• 11:28Speaker 01

  You're such a fucking, you're such a little troll.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Even for me, I struggle to pronounce like, English words. I get it.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  French is like, a particularly bad area for me.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  So, as you mentioned, Louis Pasteur was a 19th century scientist and chemistry professor from France. He was working at the dawn of germ theory, kind of catching on. In 1864, he took on a distiller as a client. This distiller makes beet alcohol, alcohol, out of beets.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  The distiller wanted help figuring out why his alcohol kept turning sour so quickly.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Pasteur helped identify the culprit, which was lactic yeast, and found that heating the beet juice for just a few minutes before fermenting it killed that yeast and allowed it to last longer.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Beets by Dr. Pasteur? Boom.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, it's so bad, and I liked it so much.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  I thought you would.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  The spark is still alive, by god.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  We've still got it.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Pasteur figured out pasteurization, and mostly applied it to wine and beer. Alcohol, one of the main uses of pasteurization early on. It was other scientists who figured out the application to milk. In 1882, a scientist named Robert Koch argued that while scientists had previously seen tuberculosis as resulting from just one germ, he identified three different tuberculosis germs.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  One was a rare form spread by birds.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  To bird kilosis.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  He found that there was another germ that spread TB from person to person. That one was much more common. And there was a third kind that had not previously been identified, which was TB that was spread from cows to people through milk. It's not until a German chemist named Franz von Zachslet came along.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  As the resident pronunciation expert, you need me to do it?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you so much.

• 13:38Speaker 00

  We get a lot of feedback on how good my pronunciations are, how like accurate and precise they are.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  Denialment.

• 13:42Speaker 00

  I can do it.

• 13:46Speaker 00

  Perseverance.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Franz von Zachslet was the first to suggest that pasteurization be used for milk. And that wasn't until 1886, which was 22 years after Pasteur applied it to alcohol, right?

• 13:59Speaker 00

  It took him a while to like figure it out. Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Totally. Also, part of the reason that we call it pasteurization is by all accounts, Louis Pasteur was like his own hype man.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  He's like, you know, I'm the guy that did this, right? You guys should just like name it after me.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Around the same time, pasteurization becomes a big public health issue, or not pasteurization per se, but milk sanitation, maybe, milk safety, becomes a big public health issue for a few reasons beyond just the TB of it all. One is that more people were moving to cities. And that meant that rather than maintaining small herds of dairy cows for small communities that were more geographically dispersed, there were more centralized dairies with larger herds, producing larger amounts of milk and sometimes pooling milk from multiple sources. First of all, if you have a larger herd, there's more opportunities for those cows to all get TB.

• 14:54Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  If you're pooling milk from multiple sources and one of those sources is contaminated and the others are not, you pool it all together and surprise, now it's all contaminated, right?

• 15:05Speaker 00

  Right. We saw this with mad cow as well.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  When you have like basically one big bucket full of juice, if like one cow in the juice bucket has a problem, then like the whole bucket has a problem.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Not until the early 1900s that pasteurization really starts to catch on as a public policy. In 1907, a group of public health advocates started proposing a ban on selling raw milk in New York City.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  1907.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Oh, seven.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  People have like known this is bad for like more than 100 years and we're just like doing it anyway.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  When you were like, is there an episode around this? I was like, don't get me started on the 1907 campaign, Mike.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Jesus Christ.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  The person leading the charge on that effort was a guy named Nathan Strauss. Is this someone who you have come across?

• 15:53Speaker 00

  No.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  So this guy was the owner of Macy's and the owner of Abraham and Strauss, which was one of the biggest department stores in New York City throughout much of the 20th century.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Strauss became really involved in public life. He started doing a bunch of like philanthropic work. He worked as an elected official. One of Strauss's main concerns was the public health threat of raw milk. As early as 1858, the New York Times was reporting about the dangers of what they called swill milk.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  The city was going through wave after wave after wave of disease outbreaks at this time. Yellow fever, cholera, like really gnarly shit.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Also, they should leave raw milk legal, but make them call it swill milk.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Dude, the reporting on swill milk from this era goes so fucking hard. I'm gonna send you, this is from that 1858 piece. I'm sending you a quote.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  The health commissioners agreed with the mayor that the swill milk nuisance must be abated. I love swill milk nuisance.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  It's so, there's so many like metal turns of phrase in this.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  Early next week, they will convene the board of health and unless all the signs fail, will operate with energy and firmness to purify the city of the stables where the disgusting stuff is manufactured, which by a scandalous and lying courtesy, we have for years called pure orange county milk and under stringent penalties prohibit its use. If the board of health has any. This certainly is one of them. That the business of making and selling swill milk is detrimental to the public health. No sane man, not even a city inspector, can any longer doubt. It's so fascinating that they're selling it as pure Orange County milk. Which is like, the same sort of thing that they do now, is like they rebrand this like, basically like dirty milk. Like, that's what we should be calling it.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  As something that is like, sounds slightly virtuous and like, clean and natural.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  This same piece goes on to accuse swill milk farmers of making, quote, diseased libels upon the fair name of cows.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Well, they have tuberculosis.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  They also say that they'll have to, quote, "show cause before the board why their work of death should not be discontinued."

• 18:13Speaker 00

  More of this, yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Metal!

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Also, this is how I feel like genuinely like the FDA should talk about like people who sell raw milk.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  All of that is to say Strauss was not alone in his belief that raw milk was a culprit. This reporting happened 50 years before the New York campaign, right? So like, it was a well-known and widely believed thing for decades that raw milk might have a role here. But it hadn't been regulated in any meaningful way, right?

• 18:42Speaker 00

  So it is almost like a cigarette allegory where it's like, we knew this was bad, but we didn't do anything. We did like weird half measures for ages?

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yep. So in 1907 Strauss proposed an ordinance to require all milk to either be pasteurized or what was called certified. Certified milk producers would just test their herd way more frequently. They would be held to higher food handling standards. And they would submit their milk for certification from a commission of physicians.

• 19:15Speaker 00

  So they're getting it upstream. It's like, make sure the milk is clean so you don't have to pasteurize it, is like the, the attempt.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  Right, but like, even if you do that, you're like, that, none of that guarantees that there's not gonna be E. coli in your milk.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Again, it's like getting more at the TB of it all.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Like, what's even the downside of pasteurization at this point?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Part of it honestly was consumer demand. People were like, pasteurized milk tastes weird, it tastes And at that point, it was cooked, right? Like, we pasteurize milk now for way less time.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  So people are like, dude, raw milk tastes dope. This stuff tastes bad. I don't want to drink the stuff that tastes bad.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wonder if it tasted closer to like how UHT milk tastes now? Because you can definitely like tell the difference.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  During the campaign, Strauss told a story. This has haunted me, haunted. I am going to send you this quote from "milk!" Exclamation point.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  Milk.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Milk!

• 20:08Speaker 00

  The island was being used as an orphanage. And in order to ensure that children had a steady supply of good, clean, fresh milk, a dairy herd was maintained there. But between 1895 and 1897, while the 3,900 children were being fed supposedly safe raw milk, 1,509 of them died. Holy shit.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  So like 40% of the kids died.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  In response to this frightening statistic, Strauss built a pasteurization plant on the island. He made no attempt to change the children's diet or improve the orphanage's hygiene, just pasteurized the milk. The mortality rate declined from 42% of the children to 28%. Honestly, 28% still sounds real bad. I thought they would have a way better happy ending to this.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Right, it sounds way bad, but it is a 14% reduction.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Right, which is like a lot of kids.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Just from heating up the milk a little bit for a short period of time.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Despite that, like, really visceral, really heartbreaking example, the 1907 campaign failed, and so did a second attempt in 1909. The ban didn't pass until 1910. And again, it's not a full ban. It's just like, you can only sell it if it's certified, right?

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  In the meantime, New York got scooped by Chicago, who beat them to the punch and became the first city to ban raw milk in the US.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  They did that in 1909, but Chicago's implementation was held up for more than five years.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  For the same reasons that the New York ban didn't pass.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  It's also funny, like, thinking about how ambitious this policymaking was compared to so much policymaking now. I mean, you're basically requiring an entire sector to, like, add on this very expensive process. It's good. Like, I think much more of this kind of ambitious policymaking should take place, but now it's like, anything gets proposed that has any effect on businesses. It's like, decades of litigation. It's like, it's so hard to do this stuff now.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  It's really remarkable how, how sort of gutsy the public policy

• 22:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  work was. And also, it did take like 50 years of knowing better.

• 22:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And it took a super rich dude putting like, all of his money and political

• 22:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  capital into making this thing happen.

• 22:27Speaker 00

  That does feel more American now. Now it feels American.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  There we go. We got there. We got there. We did it, folks.

• 22:33Speaker 00

  The only good things that happen are because like, rich people want them.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  So, by 1917, which was just 10 years after Strauss's first campaign on raw milk, 46 major US cities required pasteurization.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 22:48Speaker 01

  From there, those city ordinances became state laws. It was a dance sensation, sweeping the nation. And people get more accustomed to pasteurized milk and what it tastes like, right? By the 80s, 1980s, a commanding majority of states have either heavily restricted or outright banned sale of raw milk.

• 23:09Speaker 00

  We're, we're in like, the modern era where like, you basically can't get raw milk unless you like, go to great hassle.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  That's not true. It's not yet impossible. Because, um, while states have taken action at the state level, the FDA has not taken federal action.

• 23:24Speaker 00

  Ah, okay.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  So it is still legal to sell raw milk across state lines.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  So even if you live in a state where it's not legal, you could mail order raw milk. Like, I'm in Portland, I could drive across the river to Vancouver, Washington.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  That's sort of what we're talking about at this point. So, we're gonna spend a little time now talking about like, what got the FDA to finally take action? And that's a story that starts in the 70s and 80s with one of the biggest dairies in California and in the country. Altadena.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  It's funny that the thing that got them to take action was not like the deaths of many children.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  We'll get there, don't worry.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  It's weird.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  If you've been to a grocery store in California in the last like 50 years, chances are they sold Altadena dairy products. Altadena remains one of the biggest dairies in the country. In the seventies and eighties, they were also one of the largest dairies selling certified raw milk. So they're doing the certification process, right? And they're selling raw milk. According to the LA Times, Altadena was subject to dozens of recalls in the space of like 10 years.

• 24:35Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Not only for products that they sold retail, but also because they supplied raw milk to other producers, who then made things like queso fresco with it. And that would then get recalled.

• 24:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  In the case of that contaminated queso fresco, that caused the deaths of 22 Angelenos.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Through all of this, Altadena defended itself and denied any responsibility in every step along the way. Every case. Their owner was out in the press constantly referring to Altadena's raw milk as, quote, "the cleanest milk in the world."

• 25:14Speaker 00

  By clean, we do not mean it doesn't kill kids. We mean something else.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  The owner is also alleging in the press that this is all a conspiracy against raw milk, which like,

• 25:24Speaker 00

  well.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  It kind of is.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Isn't it like there's a scientific consensus that your product is dangerous? Then like, yeah, it kinda is one.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Right, like a flu shot is a conspiracy against the flu.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Right, a bunch of parents got together just because we killed kids.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  I should also say, um, this dude no longer owns Altadena. Altadena's still around. It's no longer owned by like total crackpots.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  So like, if that's where you buy your milk, don't worry, it's not going to like a raw milk truther anymore. And they no longer sell raw milk. They're not doing that anymore.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  So this all comes to a head in 1987, when two Altadena court cases finally make kind of a meaningful dent in Altadena's reputation and in their ability to sort of do what they're gonna do. One is the Paul Telford case. A 66-year-old man named Paul Telford was undergoing radiation for lung cancer, and his doctors had him on a liquid diet. Altadena Certified Raw Milk advertised itself as safe and clean and pure. So he was drinking it regularly for the few weeks leading up to his death.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Altadena argued in court that cancer killed him, but at the time of his death, he had infections caused by both Salmonella and Listeria.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  I also the idea that somebody like that needs like more vitamins, more than they need, like milk free of pathogens is insane.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Yes. As a result, for the first time ever, Altadena faces a court judgment finding them liable for Telford's death. Like yay, they were found liable. Boo, they were ordered to pay 40 grand to Telford's family.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  Oh, God, yeah. You could just like kill five or six people a year and just pay, pay that out and keep making your product.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Right. It's such a small amount. In today's dollars, that's around 113 grand. The other lawsuit that is sort of making its way through the courts around this time was filed as impact litigation by a consumer watchdog group. That watchdog group is Public Citizen.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Founded by Ralph Nader.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  Nader is like a really like influential guy on consumer safety stuff.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So Public Citizen filed suit against Altadena. They co filed with the Gray Panthers. Do you know about the Gray Panthers? It's like a seniors advocacy group and I fucking love the name. It makes me so happy.

• 27:54Speaker 00

  I thought it was gonna be like, like a combination of like Black Panthers and like a bunch of white people, so they were gray.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  You were just color mixing in your brain. The suit argued that Altadena was making false advertising claims. They were marketing their raw milk products as quote, "safe, healthy, wholesome and pure", and as suitable for vulnerable populations like babies and sick people.

• 28:19Speaker 00

  That's insane.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  The court ultimately ruled in favor of Public Citizen and the Gray Panthers, and they find Altadena liable.

• 28:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  That ruling prompted a federal court to sort of force the FDA's hand.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  We've talked about this in the past, that the FDA can only regulate interstate commerce.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Things that happen within the state fall at the state level. So back in 1973, the FDA had strongly considered a ruling that only pasteurized milk could be shipped across state lines, which would have effectively banned interstate commerce of raw milk. They consider it again in 1985, but that's during the Reagan administration.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  And you know those fuckers aren't passing new regs, right?

• 29:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  The public citizen ruling addressed the FDA directly and said, basically, look, like, you can do what you want, but, quote, "There is no longer any question of the fact that raw milk is unsafe."

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  So they now have, like, judges saying publicly in high-profile cases, like, "Come on, jokers, nothing about this is safe."

• 29:24Speaker 00

  This is literally like why we have a government, so that you can't just, like, sell a dangerous product to people.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  Yes, and you can't just be like, I don't know, regulation just sort of isn't our thing.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  It's literally like, what you're trading off is like, a slight inconvenience to a corporation versus the deaths of children.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Yes!

• 29:39Speaker 00

  It's not even like a hard trade-off, yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Following the FDA ban, following this sort of proliferation of state bans, people like, pretty immediately try to find workarounds, and they're successful.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Great.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  In doing so. Of course they are.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  How do I keep doing this thing that kills kids?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  One of those things, one of the more popular workarounds, is something, something called a milk club.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Which is essentially like, an underground railroad for listeria.

• 30:10Speaker 00

  When you put it that way, it's less appealing.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  There are like, a bunch of organizations that get really into milk clubs. One of them, a person named Liz Reitzig, who is one of the big popularizers of milk clubs, who also was a supporter of the "raw milk freedom riders."

• 30:32Speaker 00

  That's so good. I'm basically Rosa Parks. I want them to be able to kill kids. I'm essentially Gandhi.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  It's like staggering. Mother Jones describes the raw milk freedom riders as quote, "A caravan of self-described frustrated mothers who wanted the repeal of federal raw milk laws."

• 30:51Speaker 00

  But it's like the same framing where it's like, oh, these are just like concerned mothers.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  It's Mumsnet, but for diphtheria.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  As opposed to like people who are just like anti-science freaks.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  In addition to milk clubs, there's a workaround called herd shares. So the idea is you're not buying raw milk, you're paying to lease a cow in a dairy herd, and then the dairy delivers raw milk as a byproduct of the cow you fake own.

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Oh, I love that. We're not buying it. We're like subscribed.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  That all brings us to our contemporary context.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Nightmare.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Interestingly, the, the current sort of landscape around raw milk laws is that frankly, a lot of blue states allow the sale of raw milk and a lot of red states ban it outright.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Is it illegal in Oregon?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  You can buy raw milk, but only directly on the farm from a farmer with a herd of three cows or fewer.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Oh, weird.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Because, well, that's because of transmission of bovine tuberculosis.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  A smaller herd can't transmit it as much, right? That there's a fewer opportunities for the disease spreading. Yeah. Washington and California both have legal raw milk retail sale. You can go to the grocery store and buy raw milk.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Really?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  In Washington and California.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  It's at gas stations next to the Cratom.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  I mean, honest to God.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  One-stop shop.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  It's so, whoa.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Just like the sketchy things aisle.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  You know, Arowan sells it in California, because of course they do, and it's 13 bucks.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  The, the funny thing is, I think you could actually do a thing where you're like, look, you want raw milk, we don't want raw milk. Why don't we compromise? And we come up with some sort of process where like, we'll bring it up to a certain temperature, but like it won't be brought up to. Boiling. How about that as like a compromise? And like, they just don't know what pasteurization is. And they're like, yeah, that sounds pretty reasonable. As long as you don't bring it up to boiling. It's like, yeah, actually, you know what? We can meet in the middle on this.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  No, you treat it like it's a new discovery. We found a totally non-chemical way.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  To sanitize milk. It's like perfectly natural.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  And actually, it dates back hundreds of years. So it's an ancestral way of keeping milk safe.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  That's good.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  You could use the like paleo bullshit language as a way to sell heating milk to kill germs.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Just call it like a deliberate sunshine.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Milk sunning.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  We're basically sunning the milk.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  The milk has gotten red light therapy.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Just like the kind you put on your balls.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  The only, like, my only hopes for America now, because everything is just like on fire, is just like, let's just, how can we lie to these people to get the outcomes that we want? Because they're so dumb ultimately.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  In 2007, we were at a national high point of raw milk regulation. Just four states allowed for retail sale of raw milk in grocery stores.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Say their names. Who was it?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I don't remember which four states. I didn't look into which ones in 2007. It does, by the way, it does seem like California has always been a state that doesn't ban it, which I'm like, fucking California, man.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Gwyneth is too big to fail.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  In recent years, a number of states have repealed those bans and allowed for the sale of raw milk. Today, many coastal states allow retail sale of raw milk. California and Washington, a number of Western states, most of New England, all allow for retail sale of raw milk.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  So how, in less than 20 years, have we seen such a backlash to pasteurization and a rollback of those state bans?

• 34:36Speaker 00

  Right.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  The story of how we got here starts with the founding of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  I was gonna ask about this, if they're gonna make a little cameo.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Oh, it's not even a little cameo.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  It's like a protagonist.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  It, not protagonist.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Anne.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Antagonist. Is that a drag name? Has someone?

• 34:57Speaker 01

  So Mike, what do you know about the Weston A. Price Foundation?

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Well, I know of them from a previous show research.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  It's like the dumbest like woo woo ant that you can possibly imagine, but also with like a ton of power.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Woo woo ant is such a great description of the vibes at Weston A. Price. There's like a patina, there's like a hippie aesthetic.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  To some of the things that they produce. So here is, I'm gonna send you their mission statement.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Which I think I was gonna send you in the seed oils episode, so we're coming full circle. Cause I know I have it in my notes. I'll just do it from memory.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  The foundation is dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet through education, research, and activism. It supports a number of movements that contribute to this objective, including accurate nutrition instruction, organic and biodynamic farming, pasture feeding of livestock, community-supported farms, honest and informative labeling, prepared parenting, and nurturing therapies. Specific goals include establishment of universal access to clean, certified raw milk, and a ban on the use of soy formula for infants. Well, it goes really nuts at the end there.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  They're also leaving out of this mission statement, like, how much of their whole thing is about animal fats? And like, fat is actually good for you, and you should be eating meat fat, and like-

• 36:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Keto kind of elements.

• 36:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  So that mission statement has like, a fair amount of curb appeal, if you're not a partisan, or if you're like, a little left-leaning. Here's a little glimpse into the issues currently listed on their website.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Ooh, okay.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Say no to cell towers in your neighborhood.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Oh, I love this, okay.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Bird flu in raw milk? Our founder reveals the lies underlying the latest attack on raw milk.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  Ooh, they're debunking you from an hour ago. Aubrey in shambles.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Weston A. Price Foundation destroys fat activists.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  And they also have a section called "Main Health Topics." Here are some of their main health topics. Cod liver oil, our number one superfood.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Why butter is better, nature's healthiest fat. Vaccinations, the most important decision parents will ever make.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  I wonder where they come down on that. I wonder what decision they think is best.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  And then the last one is just, "Soy alert!" exclamation point.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  The funny thing is, they sound like some sort of like 1910's grandma. They're gonna give you a Werther's and measles.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  The foundation is named for Weston A. Price. Do you know who Weston A. Price is? I did not.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  I looked this up, but I forgot.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  He's a dentist from Cleveland.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Who authored a book called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration that was published in 1939. Price traveled to more than a dozen countries to observe the health and diets of different societies. His argument was that the dental and physical health of non-industrialized.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Excuse me, hiccup. Is your fucking beans for breakfast?

• 38:05Speaker 01

  I only have beans to blame.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  They make me all that I am.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  His argument was that the health of non-industrialized communities was superior to the health of industrialized communities.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Laughably false, but okay.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  He says that the culprit for Americans' health woes was, quote, "foods of modern commerce."

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  What we now call processed and ultra-processed foods. Here is a synopsis of his conclusions from a piece in The Atlantic. I apologize for making you read something from The Atlantic.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  I hate you.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  I know. I know you do.

• 38:47Speaker 00

  It says, "In the conclusion of Price's book, he suggests a common theme in the diet he observed across the world. The healthy primitives ate plenty of meat, seafood, and fats. Americans would be wise to adapt their own diets accordingly," Price warned. Shortly before publishing the book, he'd gone to the Rutland State Fair in Vermont and had sat for an hour observing the crowd. Three out of every four people he saw there, he said, showed signs of prenatal injury due to poor maternal nutrition." He's like eating a turkey leg at a fucking state fair, just being like, "That guy's fucked up. That guy's fucked up. Your mom fucked up." Just like judging people on no information.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  That is absolutely

• 39:28Speaker 00

  What does that even mean?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Why I included that part about the state fair. Allow me to introduce this part where he just sits at a state fair and goes, that guy's fucked up, huh?

• 39:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, look at that overbite. That's because your mom didn't eat enough butter.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  So like, of course, this is like, just like an aggressively racist way of talking about shit.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Right.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  He is also a dentist and not a physician,

• 39:49Speaker 00

  And not a doctor.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  Which is a different fucking thing.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  Also, I will say, like, when I worked in human rights, I did a lot of work on, like, developing countries. And oftentimes, you read, like, nutritional reports and, like, in poor countries, people are often eating, like, 1,900 calories of, like, white rice in a day because you can't afford protein. You can't afford, like, fat. Like, it's just not factually true that people in, like, poor Southeast Asia are eating tons of, like, meat and seafood and fats. Those are, like, rich people food.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  The book didn't make much of a splash when it was first published. I can't imagine why it would.

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  But it was influential with two people who matter most, and those are the co-founders of the Weston A. Price Foundation.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  One of them is a credentialed person, the other one is not. We're going to talk first about the credentialed person. Mary Enig had a master's and a doctorate in nutritional science, so she is credentialed, but her views are extremely fringe. She passed away in 2014. She was a big critic of vegetarianism.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  Oh, good. I love this. The vegetarian dunking always comes along with this weird animal fat thing.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Among other things, Mary Enig once argued that coconut oil could effectively treat HIV and AIDS. The other co-founder is the one who is still with us. Sally Fallon-Moral is her name. She is not the credentialed one. She has a bachelor's in English from Stanford and a master's in English from UCLA. And take it from a literary arts major from Brown University. Knock that shit off. You're not a nutrition guy. She co-authored a book called The Contagion Myth. Why viruses include ...quote unquote coronavirus.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Are not the cause of disease.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Our entire show is just leading up to this thing where all of these people just come out against the fucking germ theory of disease.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Michael, you're not asking the questions that matter, which is if germs and viruses don't cause disease, what does? And the answer is 5G.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Oh, wait, is it literally?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  It is.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  Oh, my god. I thought she was gonna do some like imbalance of humors type shit, but this is, this is very innovative.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  In the 90s, she read Weston A. Price's book and it really resonated with her. As a result, she started feeding her kids a high-fat diet with lots of animal fats in it. She starts feeding her kids raw milk. She says her children don't have any health problems at all. And she credits that diet for things as, like, even for like, her kids not needing braces. She's like, it's the animal fats, that's why.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  Or maybe she's decided not to give them braces. They're like, Mom!

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Their teeth are fucked up.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  It's kinda mean.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  One of the biggest priorities of the foundation is raw milk. They don't usually call it raw milk. They call it real milk. Weston A. Price Foundation spins off something called the Campaign for Real Milk.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Which, no joke, to this day, has a blog post called "The Vendetta Against Altadena."

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Again, the whole real milk thing, it's like, what do you think pasteurization is?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Real milk is only warm once, and that's when it comes out of a cow!

• 43:13Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  It doesn't get warm again later.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  They're all like catastrophizing about like this extremely minor thing.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  This is a quote from the website of the Campaign for Real Milk, under the header, "Raw Milk Safety."

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Okay, it says, "Real milk, milk that is pasture-raised, full-fat and unprocessed, is an inherently safe food. That's because raw milk contains numerous bioactive components that kill pathogens in the milk, prevent pathogen absorption across the intestinal wall." And strengthen the immune system. No other food that we consume contains a built in safety system like the one in raw milk. Dude, this is like the, the most density of bullshit I think we've ever had.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Would you like to know what their source for this is? It is one case study from 1984.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  It's like, it's a sheer balls to say like, not only is raw milk not bad for you, but it's actually super good for you. It's actually the only food that's this good for you. You're basically encouraging people to drink like a shitload of it.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  So in 2007, they also founded something called the Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund. And from what I can tell, this is the most effective arm in their raw milk work.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  The fund provides legal support to farmers, presumably farmers aligned with their organizational values.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  The defense fund also set a goal, quote, "to make raw milk sales legal in every state."

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  They sort of put out the word that they're providing legal support and legal defense funds to farmers.

• 44:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  In that process, they start elevating those dairy farmers in the press.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  And that is where we start to see a real uptick in more mainstream coverage of raw milk fights.

• 45:06Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  When a raw milk dairy farmer is found to be in violation of a state or local ban, or when raw milk tests positive for really dangerous pathogens, they then kind of court media and push the story as like, "An injustice. Look at how our federal government is attacking these small farmers."

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Who are just doing things the way we've always done things.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Don't pay attention to the mortality rates.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  And they frame it as like really devastating evidence of governmental overreach, right?

• 45:42Speaker 00

  Ah, so they're identifying- Raw milk farmers and then kind of pitching them to the media as like salt of the earth. Family farmers who are being trodden upon by government overreach.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, like the legal attack doesn't necessarily make headlines in and of itself.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Right.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  It makes more headlines to have people kind of wilding out and we have a couple of people who have kind of wilded out about raw milk.

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  So I want to spend some time talking about two of their biggest rising stars of the raw milk world.

• 46:13Speaker 00

  I'm like a raw milk influencer. I'm like so popular.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I'm like, then cool as.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  It's just like me puking in the toilet.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  One of those is someone named Mark McAfee, who is from the San Joaquin Valley in California. In 2000, he co-founded what was then called Organic Pastures Dairy Company, which was renamed in 2020 to Raw Farm USA, all caps.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  And now the logo is just two AR-15s in a.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  I mean, there's a lot of like distressed American flag graphics happening. Yeah, it's very much like aesthetic by Christian Odige.

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  McAfee founded his farm in 2000. By 2007, his products were in 300 stores in California.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Just fucking room temperature, just on the shelf, just festering.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  To their credit, they do refrigerate it.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  But then why do they refrigerate it? These people don't even believe in bacteria? Why are you refrigerating it? Have like bright green fucking mold floating on it, you fucking weirdos.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  McAfee also had a mail order business that he said brought in about $80,000 a month. Now, you might be thinking, this is after the FDA ban. How on earth is he selling mail order raw milk across state lines? And that is, he is labeling it as pet food, not for human consumption.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  That's like those people that were selling like fish antibiotics on Amazon.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Much like Altadena before them, Raw Farm USA has faced a lot of lawsuits and regulation. First up, that labeled as pet food thing didn't last very long. He was doing that in 2007, talking about it in the press in 2007. In 2008, they did face federal criminal charges for that.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. God.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  In 2023, federal prosecutors charged that Raw Farm USA had once again been shipping raw milk across state lines.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  So as a result, they're now in a consent decree.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Until 2028, the FDA can conduct audits and unannounced inspections. But as we know, the FDA, a shell of its former self.

• 48:24Speaker 00

  Oh, so you just order raw milk in the fucking mail? It takes like a couple of days in like the back of a van to like get to you.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  The farm has had many recalls. The most recent was in December for bird flu in their milk.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  When McAfee was asked for comment on the bird flu recall, he gave comment to Mother Jones. Here is how he responded to their request for comment on the bird flu recall.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Trace the money, he wrote in an email in which he also denied bird flu could be a threat to his business or his customers' health. We don't think avian flu causes things to be unsafe. You may think I'm some kind of crazy person, but show me one person who's ever gotten sick from raw milk with avian flu. Viruses don't exist in raw milk. They die off quickly. Fearing viruses is ridiculous, he says. He holds that only people lacking strong microbiomes and good immune systems need worry. Of COVID, for instance, he says, I got it and it was mild. I'm a raw, I'm a raw milk drinker. It didn't hardly faze me. I can't argue with science, Aubrey. He got COVID and he drinks raw milk.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  Show me one person who got sick from COVID and it wasn't mild. He's saying only people without good immune systems need to worry. That's a lot of fucking people, dude.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  He's the guy with the turkey leg at the state fair being like, your mom, your mom drank too much wine.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Pointing at people being like fetal alcoholism.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  He's also very clear on his view of where the demand for raw milk is coming from. He told CBS News, quote, "People are seeking raw milk like crazy. Anything that the FDA tells our customers to do, they do the opposite."

• 50:15Speaker 00

  Yep, that sounds about right. That sounds like we're dealing with the dumbest fucking people in the country who are also running it, by the way.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  To your point, McAfee is currently rumored to be in consideration for a role at HHS.

• 50:28Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Under RFK Junior.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  That's always the fucking epilogue to these people now.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  The good news is that he does think bird flu is, quote, "a huge scam."

• 50:35Speaker 00

  Oh, good.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  That was backed by pharma companies, quote, "to create fear and produce a new vaccine after COVID closed up."

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Just say fucking birds aren't real. Get to the fucking point. Let's just-

• 50:48Speaker 01

  Birds are fake dinosaurs. We all know this.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  God, why not?

• 50:52Speaker 01

  There's another sort of rising star named Amos Miller, who is an Amish raw milk dairy farmer in Pennsylvania.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Pennsylvania allows for sale of raw milk. You just have to have a permit. And the core of the issue with Amos Miller is he's like, "Fuck your permit! I'm never getting a permit!" So like, it is legal to do what he is doing.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  He just decided to do it in the illegal way?

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Right. So the permit-

• 51:20Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Requires dairy farmers, raw dairy farmers, to regularly test their milk, their water, and their herd. It's pretty fucking reasonable. Permit holders can't, however, produce raw yogurt, kefir, or fresh cheese. I am guessing that that was the problem. He'd have to stop selling some of his products.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  It's also such garbage that you can just fucking sell this dangerous product with a permit. It feels like these people have all been coddled by like, these weird carve-outs. For what? For what reason are we doing this? It's so weird.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Pennsylvania's Attorney General has also charged that Amos Miller has also been illegally shipping raw milk across state lines through what he calls a buyer's club.

• 52:04Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  That has led to this kind of wild, protracted face-off between Miller and regulators. He and his attorney really seem to be like leaning into the controversy on a bunch of this. His attorney, while they had a court case in progress, wrote that Pennsylvania's Secretary of Agriculture thinks he's, quote, "the food pope of the world."

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Right, he is kind of the food pope of America.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  This guy thinks he's in charge of this issue. Yep, that's how a government works.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Amos Miller is extremely public about his alignment with the Weston A. Price Foundation. He publicly talks up the foundation. He cites them as kind of a cornerstone of his analysis and as a flashpoint of his politicization around this issue. He has been a sponsor of their annual conference where, fun fact, the keynote speaker has been RFK Jr.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Of course. I'm amazed it took us this long to get to him, honestly.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  For all of those reasons and more, Amos Miller has made a great candidate for right-wing stardom. Part of what happens is that these guys start going hard on raw milk publicly. Weston A. Price then boosts the media stories that they're in. Right? And there's this sort of like symbiotic relationship of they keep grabbing headlines and Weston A. Price keeps boosting them.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Once we've got these couple of rogue dairy farmers in the headlines, those are now news stories that podcasters can pull up.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  That YouTube reaction channels can start to react to. And it becomes a topic of conversation that otherwise wouldn't necessarily be a topic of conversation, right?

• 53:51Speaker 00

  It then becomes a circular thing where like,

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  Then you get the stories where like, oh, the movement for raw milk is getting bigger. And then that then feeds into the next round of people who are like, oh, maybe I should be trying this. And then you get the next round of stories saying, oh, there's a lot of raw milk people around.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  We have had a wave of raw milk endorsements from high-profile people, many of whom are friends of the show. Paul Saladino has encouraged feeding raw milk to infants.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Yep, great stuff. I mean, he also says that they should like eat raw livers and stuff. So at least he's consistent.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Joe Rogan says he's a raw milk drinker. I watched a whole clip of him talking about it at length and he switches pretty quickly from raw milk to whole milk as the language he uses. So I think he doesn't know what we're talking. Like, I genuinely think he doesn't know.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  He's someone who you could go on his show and be like, they need to heat up the milk, Joe. Easy, easy.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  He also talks in the fucking clip. He's like, uh, you can pretty well tell when milk has gone bad. Like, I just sniff it before I drink it. That tells you if it's safe or not. And you're like, we're not talking about sour milk, Joe?

• 54:58Speaker 00

  You can't smell listeria, Joe. That's not the same thing.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  It's odorless.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Oh, my God. Again, these people don't believe in like microscopic things that could cause diseases.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Turning Point USA sold a shirt that said "Got Raw Milk" on it, referencing a very timely "Got Milk" reference in 2025, first of all. And second of all, it did have an illustration of a bull on it.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Because now we're at the place where it's like, do you, do you know where milk comes from?

• 55:28Speaker 01

  God damn it.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  It's not even like, do you believe in bacteria? It's like, walk me through what you think milk is.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  It's when you squeeze almonds, Mike.

• 55:34Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Thomas Massey, that same Republican from Kentucky, has introduced a bill to overturn the FDA ban on interstate raw milk sales. Goop herself says that she puts raw cream in her coffee each morning, and she says she gets it from Mark McAfee's farm.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  God, not that I expect any better from Quinn, but like, Jesus Christ.

• 55:57Speaker 01

  She acknowledged to the cut that some of the claims around raw milk are quote unquote pseudoscience, but she also said, is someone going to invest in getting a data set around raw milk?

• 56:10Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  It's not gonna be the dairy industry, right? And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? If the dairy industry was like, you can do less work, sell more products at a higher price point across the fucking country, do you not think Altadena would be jumping at the opportunity?

• 56:28Speaker 00

  And also, you're paying for the raw milk. It's also a business. It's not like big business versus like small farmers. It's all big business.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  And also, like, who's gonna get the data set? We've had the data set since the fucking 1800s, my guy.

• 56:41Speaker 00

  This is like, this is also like RFK Jr. being like, we're finally gonna see whether vaccines work.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  On top of that, there has also been considerable uptick in pro-raw milk discourse.

• 56:53Speaker 01

  On Gab and Rumble and Infowars and a couple of Infowars podcast hosts have talked about it. One of them, Owen Schreier, said in his podcast, The War Room, quote, "They say, 'Bird flu in milk, bird flu in milk.' Oh, it's the scariest thing. They'll just make raw milk illegal. That's what this is all about." And I'm like, them is Trump and RFK Jr.

• 57:23Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  And even under Democrats, no one was reaching further than the FDA Interstate Commerce Ban. No one was saying it's totally illegal to sell raw milk in the United States of America.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  There's some things to think about in terms of like, why raw milk has taken off now? After so many years of such successful regulation of it. There are a couple of things. One is that as in the turn of the 19th to 20th century, the dairy industry has been changing. In recent decades, more and more independent and family dairy farmers have disappeared. They've been bought out. They've been overtaken by large-scale corporate dairy farms. And if small farmers are trying to compete with the margins of huge dairy farms, they can't, right?

• 58:14Speaker 00

  Right.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  So instead, they're going to look for ways to signify that their milk is different and better. This is part of the reason why some small dairies have started putting their milk in glass bottles, because it looks like a heftier and more prestige-y kind of product.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  There are a number of dairy farmers that I read interviews with who are like, "Look, I don't believe that GMOs are any kind of issue, but we absolutely label our milk as being GMO-free, because people will pay more if there's a GMO-free label on it."

• 58:46Speaker 00

  And people are, I guess, willing to pay more for milk they think is like, fucking has so many vitamins or some shit.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  On top of that, in recent years, there has been more new research to misinterpret. The biggest example of this is that in the late 90s, there was a Swiss epidemiologist who started to look into something called the farm effect. It is this sort of sometimes observed, sometimes not effect where some kids raised on farms appeared to develop allergies and asthma much less than kids raised in other settings, right? So they published their first study on this in 1999 and they found that local kids who lived on farms did indeed appear to have lower rates of allergies. This is just in Switzerland, right? That's all we're talking about here.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Studies since then have been considerably more mixed, but there's definitely like enough evidence to keep looking. The farm effect appears to be most observed and in some, like it might even be exclusively observed in Western European farms. So I'm like, well, there's a lot of differences there.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  And also that doesn't have anything to do with milk specifically. That's just like, that could be many different things.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  They start looking into farm milk. Essentially what they're talking about when they talk about farm milk is milk that is produced on the farm. But in that research, they didn't track whether the farm milk was raw or not.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  Cause they might be just like pasteurizing it themselves.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Right. Or they might be doing what lots and lots of farmers have been doing for hundreds of years and boiling or scalding the milk. Even though they have not been able to certify what portion of that is raw versus pasteurized versus boiled or scalded milk, raw milk folks have seized upon this and been like, aha, I knew it. It's the milk.

• 1:00:37Speaker 00

  Dude, even for them, this is thin.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  It is really thin.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Farms in other countries have kids who may or may not be drinking raw milk have fewer allergies.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  Genie with me.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  There's like five leaps you have to make to think that's evidence of anything.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Your kid's gonna get asthma, so as a result, don't let him get asthma. Instead, give them a listeria.

• 1:01:01Speaker 00

  Kill him quicker.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  On top of the dairy industry stuff, on top of that new Research, one of the big boosts that appears to have taken place with raw milk consumption is COVID lockdowns and the amount of anti vax and anti-science.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Uh, sentiment that that kicked up. Mark McAfee has talked about what a boom in sales they experienced during and after 2020.

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  Raw milk and sort of the rhetoric around raw milk dovetails really nicely with a number of other right wing projects and conspiracies. So, one of the biggest boosters of raw milk has been a number of tradwives, right? Which is like part of this project around cultural nostalgia and like a throwback to a time with much more misogyny.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  And also like everything else on TikTok, it's like mostly people faking it.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  I'm so sorry. You don't think Nora Smith woke up to a sick toddler and was like, I need to make cough drops from scratch?

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Right. Like the, the whole thing is just like, it's like those morning routine videos that we were talking about that are like completely faked. It's just everyone is like faking the lifestyle that they're living. And this is just like one of the other fake lifestyles that you can pretend that you're doing.

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  I will say some folks on the right go so far as to contend that dairies are injecting chemicals into pasteurized milk.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  They call it, quote, "state-approved milk."

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  What?

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Fiat currency.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  That's just like, everything you eat is state-approved. There's like health inspections at restaurants on some level, it's state-approved.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  I'm a rebel. I don't eat your state-approved USDA inspected beef.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Have fun getting poisoned. Have fun getting fucking listeria.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Genuinely, and like, I mean, I do think that is sort of the question that we're grappling with here is like, what are the risky decisions that we let people make?

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  We allow people to drink to excess. We allow people to smoke. We give them lots of warnings about it, but they're allowed to do it. We allow people to eat like steak tartare. You know what I mean? Like shit like that. But we also like, don't let people use like, uh, a lot of, uh, controlled substances. We don't let you enroll your kid in school without vaccinating them for certain communicable diseases. In a lot of states, not everyone anymore, Jesus Christ.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Then I also think raw milk is different because there isn't actually any like benefit to it.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Right, there's not a use case.

• 1:03:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, the purported benefits are fake, like people are lying and then it just feels like it's in a category that's much closer to just like driving without a seatbelt.

• 1:03:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, like it is and it isn't, right? Like it's a freedom issue, but you're like, sorry, you want the freedom to, I guess, drink things that make you sick?

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Right. And also especially to give them to your kids, right? It's like, there's also victims of this who are not making a choice. And there's a reason why, like, if you want to smoke when you're over 18, you're smart enough to decide that that's the risk reward for you. But like, if kids are being given raw milk, those kids are not in charge of the decision.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Right. That is the hardest stop for me.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Is like the fact that like so many people are getting raw milk under the misapprehension that it will prevent their kids from getting allergies.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  And in the process, their kids are getting fucking diphtheria.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  And like old timey ass diseases.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  Because that also is where like regulation would come in, that you're basically making a trade off. Okay, regulating this does involve some like loss of freedom, if you think about it purely philosophically, but also will save the lives of many children.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  I thought that I would give our final word today to a food scientist named John Lucy, who was quoted by USA Today. Quote, "A lot of people just don't trust science anymore, but I don't even think this is science. I think a lot of it is just common sense. This is not making milk into an ultra-processed food."

• 1:04:49Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  This is just heating it to 160 degrees for 15 seconds.

• 1:04:54Speaker 00

  You fucking weirdos.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  It's so, it really is one of those things where I'm like, I feel like I'm living on another planet.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  The most amazing thing to me is that these people do not believe in bacteria, but they do believe that you can walk around a state fair and identify people with prenatal injuries.