Raw milk legalization is also deregulatory, as I was reminded by Alexia Kulwiec, the executive director of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which seeks to protect farmers’ rights to sell raw milk, among other products: “The environment [in red states] has been more friendly to the concept of less regulation of consumer choice and letting consumers decide for themselves if they want access to this local food.”

But there’s an element far more important than a deregulatory environment or traditional aesthetics: trust. Symbolically, whether you vote for the Democratic Party today can often be defined by a single question: Do you trust the experts?

As Suzy Weiss explained for The Free Press last January, drinking raw milk is often a giant middle-finger to the experts — the same ones who say Joe Biden isn’t cognitively impaired, that Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of America, and that 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.”

But if raw milk is a rage against the machine, why does that mentality belong so much more frequently to Republicans, not the organic-food liberals of old? Because, thanks to education polarization (Republicans today dominate with the less-educated and Democrats dominate with the more-educated), and trust polarization, most of the people most likely to distrust the experts are Republicans. That wasn’t always the case — in 2009, far more Obama voters than McCain voters (27 percent vs. 2 percent) believed the conspiracy theory that George W. Bush had a hand in 9/11. The belief that John F. Kennedy was killed by a cabal that included CIA leadership was a view once promulgated by left-leaning filmmaker Oliver Stone in his 1991 movie JFK — it’s now promulgated by right-leaning pundit Tucker Carlson, which writer Matt Yglesias remarked was evidence of “The Crank Realignment.” In 2015, anti-vaccine sentiment was split roughly evenly between liberals and conservatives. That’s no longer the case, of course, as anti-vaccine sentiment today is far more common today with conservatives than with liberals.

It’s not just vaccines. Conservatives, on average, trust everything less, from experts to politicians to media to other people in general. The latter — Republicans’ disproportionate general distrust of other people — has even skewed polling, since Republican voters are now less likely to answer polls, according to Democratic pollster David Shor.

This new trust polarization — where the trusting vote Democrat, and the distrustful vote Republican — began to take off during Trump’s 2016 campaign, which he ran in opposition to (and shared mutual disrespect with) America’s elites and experts. But trust polarization, especially as it relates to raw milk and other unprocessed foods, seems to have accelerated rapidly in recent years thanks to the Covid pandemic, when Republicans mobilized in opposition to lockdowns and mandates, and Democrats mobilized in favor, since it was what the experts recommended.

As 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, told me, “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.”

In many ways, Morell is a perfect avatar for the dizzying evolution of raw milk politics. She used to be frequently quoted by mainstream news outlets back when such outlets would have entertained more institutional skepticism. As the mainstream drifted from her, she drifted from it, too. In 2020, she co-wrote a book about 5G causing the Covid-19 pandemic. You can still find her on the Weston A. Price home page though, on a panel with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who says he only drinks raw milk. The former Democratic now independent candidate for president is much more popular with Republicans than Democrats, demonstrating how much his issue set, and the once-nonpartisan distrust of experts, has shifted right.