Once a "fringe health food for new-age hippies and fad-chasing liberal foodies", raw milk has "won over the hearts and minds" of the US right-wing.
Selling unpasteurised milk – straight from the cow, without heating to kill bacteria – directly to consumers was largely illegal in the US before 2008. The bacteria can be fatal, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). John Sheehan, the former director of the FDA's plant and dairy food safety division, famously compared drinking raw milk to "playing Russian roulette with your health".
Its proponents, however, have long claimed that raw milk boasts a range of health benefits, and contains enzymes vitamins lost in the pasteurisation process – among other misconceptions debunked by the FDA. Now, although still a "niche product", raw milk is increasingly popular among Republicans, said Marc Novicoff, associate editor of The Washington Monthly, for Politico: a "conservative culture-war signal that is a sweetheart of deep-red state legislatures".
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During the 2000s, after decades of highly processed food and skyrocketing obesity rates, consumers began to favour natural, organic food, said Novicoff. Raw milk began to grow in popularity among subsets of liberals, alongside a wider farm-to-table movement and the popularity of Whole Foods.
"The appeal of raw milk is that it's an unprocessed and natural food," David Gumpert, author of "The Raw Milk Revolution" told The Free Press. "Milk is the first nurturing food that mammals have, including humans, so it has a lot of symbolism in that way."
In 2008, Iowa's Republican Senator Jason Schultz was "stunned to learn dairy farmers could get in trouble for selling" raw milk and introduced a bill to legalise it, said Novicoff. The bill initially "went nowhere", but slowly Schultz attracted supporters. Last May the bill finally passed – with nearly all Republicans in favour.
Since 2020, five other Rebublican-leaning states have passed laws or changed regulations to legalise the sale of raw milk in farms or supermarkets, while liberal elites "gave up on it". The trend is "a vivid example of a larger upheaval in American politics", said Novicoff, mirroring the rise of Donald Trump and a GOP electorate that is "more rural, more working class, less ideological and generally more distrustful" of experts.
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The Iowa law evoked "the ghost" of a "rugged ethos" from America's iconoclastic past, according to The American Conservative.
A 'giant middle finger to experts'
The past few years has seen "a dramatic uptick in raw-milk consumption", wrote Suzy Weiss for The Free Press. It "represents a time before everything got screwed up" – a "halcyon era". And since it's unpasteurised, it's "a little bit dangerous – as the medical establishment has warned". "It's forbidden," wrote Weiss. "And when you don't trust the institutions forbidding it, the draw is all the greater."
Most states still don't allow it to be sold in supermarkets – but most have "loopholes for the determined and savvy", while more are moving to legalise it. For now, to drink (and, especially, to produce) raw milk "is a way of breaking with convention and raging against the machine", said Weiss, "while engaging in caveman-inspired biohacking".
"Raw milkers want control over their lives", said Weiss, and that includes their food.
More than the deregulatory appeal, conservatives discovered that raw milk fits "neatly inside a world view that was increasingly sceptical", said Novicoff. On average, American conservatives "trust everything less", from experts to politicians to the media, and this loss of trust rapidly accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Raw milk has "taken on a new tone" since then, one dairy farmer told Weiss. A lot of people lost faith in the national health institutions, and more broadly in scientific and health advice.
Drinking raw milk is a "giant middle finger to the experts", said Novicoff.
Covid had a lot to do with it, Sally Fallon Morell, the president of the pro-raw milk Weston A. Price Foundation, told Politico. "A lot of people don't believe everything the government says any more."
Harriet Marsden is a senior staff writer and podcast panellist for The Week, covering world news and writing the weekly Global Digest newsletter. Before joining the site in 2023, she was a freelance journalist for seven years, working for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent among others, and regularly appearing on radio shows. In 2021, she was awarded the “journalist-at-large” fellowship by the Local Trust charity, and spent a year travelling independently to some of England’s most deprived areas to write about community activism. She has a master’s in international journalism from City University, and has also worked in Bolivia, Colombia and Spain.
