Almost a century ago, public health agencies began mandating that milk be pasteurized for human consumption. We’ve been fighting about it ever since.
Many, many scientific studies have shown that the process of pasteurization — heating milk to 161° F for 15 seconds and then rapidly cooling it — significantly kills off harmful bacteria, viruses, and parasites and reduces the risk of transmitting foodborne illnesses.
Those illnesses — including listeria, E. coli, salmonella, tuberculosis, and bird flu — can be fatal for children, the elderly, and immunocompromised people.
Raw milk advocates steadfastly claim that pasteurization strips milk of beneficial bacteria and enzymes, but without evidence: Public health organizations — including the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — say that claims of raw milk’s unique nutritional benefits are unsupported.
While the FDA has banned the interstate sale of raw milk since 1987, some members of Congress hope to lift that ban (a House bill to do so is currently in committee). Meanwhile, 18 states are considering more than 40 bills to make it easier to buy and sell raw milk.
Sales of raw milk have spiked as “food freedom” activists argue for their right to make personal health decisions, and wellness influencers promote raw milk as “nature’s superfood.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has championed raw milk and — before joining the Trump administration — vowed to loosen federal restrictions on interstate sales.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Anna Merlan, a senior reporter at Mother Jones, about why raw milk is having a moment, the arguments for and against drinking it, and why advocates are disappointed in Kennedy’s lack of action on raw milk.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Raw milk is having a moment right now in the United States. What is going on with raw milk?
There is definitely an increasing interest in raw milk, especially the idea of increased raw milk legalization and selling raw milk across state lines, which I think even under the second Trump administration and RFK Jr. is not super likely.
There are 40-plus bills across 18 states that have to do with raw dairy and raw cheese. Raw milk is legal to some degree in 43 states, but it varies widely. In some places, like California, where I live, you can go to the store and buy raw milk. In other places, you can access it through what’s called a herd share, which is a legal agreement where consumers have access to a milking animal or a herd, and they can buy or get the milk directly from the farmer. In other places, raw milk is only legal as pet food, but obviously there’s nothing stopping people if they really insist on it from buying and drinking milk labeled as pet food.
DC is one of the places where raw milk is illegal. In Rhode Island, it is totally illegal, except you can get raw goat milk with a prescription from a doctor. It’s also illegal in Hawaii. But in most places in the US, you’re going to be able to get raw milk in some form.
Remind us why we decided to pasteurize our milk, or what the benefits were?
One of the first big pushes for pasteurization of milk came in the 1930s after the discovery that raw milk could transmit tuberculosis, which was killing a lot of babies. There was a pretty direct relationship between more and more places requiring pasteurization and infant mortality rates going down. And so after that, it was pretty clear to most people in most public health bodies that this was a good idea.
They were saying basically, “Pasteurize your milk and we will keep more kids alive.” And then since that medical breakthrough, we’ve been trying to dial it back. Why are we trying to dial it back? And who’s doing the dialing?
Pretty much since pasteurization became a widespread thing, there has been opposition to it. And the raw milk movement has always argued that raw milk is better for you, that it’s more natural.
For instance, when I talked to Mark McAfee, who’s the founder and CEO of Raw Farm, the biggest raw milk producer in the country, he told me that raw milk makes asthma go away, which is not true, according to public health experts, virologists, and asthma experts. You’ll see arguments that raw milk is good for allergies, that it has beneficial enzymes or bacteria, and this is pretty much the argument that’s been made since the raw milk movement organized and took force — that raw milk inherently has nutrients and good qualities that are stripped from pasteurized milk.
Do these groups that are advocating for more raw milk hew to a certain political party?
Historically, raw milk, like anti-vaccine ideas, cut equally across the right and the left. I grew up in a pretty blue part of New Mexico and would certainly see raw milk being sold and discussed, though not the way that it is now. But a lot of the places that you’re seeing raw milk legislation especially picking up are red states, because of ideas around government regulation and health freedom.
And of course, red state, blue state, crunchy or libertarian, distrustful of government, wherever it might be, you might find some affinity in our current secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who last year famously did a shot of raw milk at the White House.
He sure did. He did a little shooter of raw milk to celebrate the publication of the [Make America Health Again] report, which was meant to be his big capstone piece of writing, presenting solutions for chronic disease, and was full of AI slop and fake citations and which you will notice they don’t talk about very much anymore.
Did that quash his attempt to normalize raw milk at the federal level?
This is what’s super interesting: Before Kennedy was in office as HHS secretary, he was famously really bullish on raw milk. He had this famous tweet in 2024 where he talked about all the things that the FDA was going to stop suppressing under his leadership. He said the FDA’s war on public health is about to end, and he listed all these things, including raw milk. But since then, much to the frustration of big players in the raw milk industry, there actually hasn’t been any federal action to make raw milk more legal or to make it legal across state lines. Kennedy actually hasn’t done anything on that. And Mark McAfee told me that he can’t get Kennedy to return his calls.
One thing that has happened instead, though, is that the Trump administration has suddenly been trumpeting their emphasis on whole milk. You might’ve seen this a few months ago. They were saying, “We’re bringing whole milk back to the schools.” Whole milk is no longer illegal in America, which it never was. A lot of their language around whole milk echoes the language around raw milk that you see among raw milk advocates. But they actually have not talked about raw milk at all.
You can speculate why this might’ve happened — if this is a liability issue, if there are still people at the CDC and the FDA who are like, ‘It would be a really bad idea for the federal government to promote this’ — but I would say that for raw milk and raw dairy advocates, the fact that the Trump administration has not been on their side is clearly a big disappointment.
Are public health officials other than the secretary of health and human services worried about raw milk?
Earlier this year, an infant died in New Mexico from listeria that public health officials there think was probably linked to the infant’s mom drinking it during pregnancy. And there have been a bunch of foodborne illness outbreaks. I think this is a concern for people because raw milk can carry E. coli, Salmonella, Campylobacter, things that can make you really, really sick.
One, obviously, is the increasing availability of raw milk in various places. Another concern is that it is being marketed by health influencers and other people with big social media followings as a miracle cure in a very simplistic way. And it is especially being marketed to parents as a cure-all for children, which is concerning because raw milk and dairy are especially risky for infants, immune-compromised people, and elderly people.
An illness like E. coli that could be serious, but that you would make it through, potentially, as an adult, is incredibly serious for a child and can lead to this thing called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which has sickened and killed children.
The raw milk industry tends to talk about this idea that raw milk is safe if you trust your farmer. But when you talk to a virologist, they will tell you that no matter how well you know your farmer, how much you think you trust the dairy, if you’re not pasteurizing your milk, you’re going to be at more risk of common foodborne pathogens. So you can find the farm to be delightful in every way, and it will not prevent illness.
Ideally, we would not be continuing to litigate really well-established pieces of science, and we could move on to other stuff. But instead, we are talking about raw milk again.
There’s a page on the FDA right now with counterarguments to these common claims that people make about raw milk — for instance, that it contains beneficial bacteria or enzymes or something. There’s very, very good evidence about raw milk’s actual dangers and risks.
Avishay Artsy
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