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”.
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.
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.”
You can now read the most important #news on #eDairyNews #Whatsapp channels!!!
🇺🇸 eDairy News INGLÊS: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaKsjzGDTkJyIN6hcP1K
