The Problem with Raw Milk: It's Annoying

I bought raw buffalo milk in a U-Haul in a Venice Beach gym parking lot on a Saturday at 7am. I’m not NOT part of this particular world

We had a discussion a while back in the Smart Mouth Patreon about raw milk, but since then it’s become an ever more popular topic. And, a few weeks ago, the farm I buy raw milk from had a recall.

I came to raw milk because my boyfriend and pasteurized dairy are in a lifelong fight. So, being who I am and what my interests are, I have learned as much as I could about raw dairy products. And now I use them. Which is embarrassing, because everyone promoting raw milk is a disingenuous pain in the ass.

For instance, many of the raw milk advocates write essays and post TikToks along the lines of, “we drank milk straight from the cow for all of history! Then the USDA stepped in and ruined everything!”

As if the milk pasteurization mandate wasn’t for very good reason. While for most of human history peoples’ dairy products didn’t come from more than a few miles away, the Industrial Revolution in the U.S. turned animal and animal product processing into a centralized, and truly filthy, vile, operation.

Though Louis Pasteur is usually credited with coming up the idea of pasteurizing milk for safety, he actually didn’t work with dairy products. A German chemist named Frans von Soxhlet was the first person with a platform to put forth the idea that milk needed treatment. This was in 1886, and he was correct, though it might not have occurred to him if he had lived a century earlier. 

Here’s why: Alcohol has been incredibly popular throughout all of history. In the United States of the mid-1800s, cow’s milk was considered the height of health products, making it an easy sell, and consequently easy to lie about. These two facts come together thusly: the process of making alcohol results in “spent” grains, which have very little nutritional value, which cows do not care about, so they have no problem eating spent grains. To get the most bang for their buck, in the mid-1800s distillery owners started buying cows, who eat the factory’s waste products, and then produce milk that the distillery can also sell. Overwhelmingly the booze/milk companies do not care at all about animal welfare, nor do they care about human welfare: the cows are not kept clean, nor are the people milking them, nor are the buckets or the bottling machines, meaning that at any step of the process piss and shit and blood can be mixed in with the milk. (The most common sources of disease in cow’s milk are mastitis and manure … even today.) The cows are so unhealthy that their milk is visibly thin, so it’s mixed with things like plaster and starch. This became known as “swill milk.” The infant mortality rate in the early 1870s in New York City was 20%, and eventually researchers made the milk-death connection.

All that to say, the government didn’t mandate pasteurization of milk because officials suddenly made up the idea that milk is inherently dangerous. It was because of how disgusting - and immoral - the supply chain had become. (Also because it’s easier to fix food than human rights and this was a good distraction from worker safety.)

Of course, compelling everyone to pasteurize milk rather than ensuring the cleanliness of dairies is a very United States-style solution. So is using guns to enforce it, as the FDA, the Franchise Tax Board, and LAPD did in 2012 in Los Angeles, when they busted an unlicensed grocery store and dumped 800 gallons of raw milk down the gutter. That’s one example from this century of many.

I remember when the Venice event happened, and it did - and still does - slide me down that slippery slope of “states’ rights! Small government!” But it doesn’t get me, unlike some people, all the way to “I am a sovereign citizen.”

The first person to publicly get weird about raw milk was Weston A. Price, a dentist with grandiose ideas who still has a huge influence among people existing in the part of the political spectrum where left-wing and right-wing meet. (His thesis: Pasteurized milk? That’ll make your teeth fall out. Your future kids’ teeth, too, you monster.)

Now that the internet has given everyone a voice, similar ideas about milk are very easy to find (including on the Weston A. Price Foundation website). This is where I form my opinion, mentioned earlier, that raw milk activists (and the TikTokers paid to pretend to care) are just the WORST.

These TikTokers are usually the raw meat-eating bodybuilders and the tradwife homestead/servile OnlyFans types. Here’s one of them:

@sammyllaceyLets talk raw milk!! I'm beyond upset that I was deprived of such a nutrient dense food for so long! #gotmilk #animalbased #milk #dairy

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A couple of her lines are straight-up lies, but most of them are misdirections, which make me so outrageously mad. For instance, she says raw milk contains “100% of your daily B12 in just one glass.” Notice that she says glass, not cup. That’s because a glass is not a unit of measurement, so she’s not actually saying how much you have to drink to get 100% of your daily B12. But more importantly: pasteurized milk has the same amount of B12 as raw milk. So she’s not telling a lie about raw milk, but she sure is obfuscating! (Also our daily recommended intake of B12 is 2.4 micrograms. But by mentioning it specifically, she sure does make you think B12 is the most vital and elusive of nutrients. If you’re not a vegan, this is not a difficult vitamin to access.)  (And: this is a tamer version of a video she’s taken down in the last month or so. They’re onto us being onto them.)

@healthanieRaw Milk PSA #rawmilk

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Five whole days! LOL. Another example of raw milkheads eliding the truth. And in this blog post: 

“It is true that raw milk produced as ‘intended for pasteurization’ and sourced from  Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) is generally unsanitary and unsafe to consume raw. … At the Raw Milk Institute, we agree that consumption of this type of raw milk is high risk … 

It is clear that raw milk produced with the intention to be pasteurized is likely to contain dangerous pathogens. This type of raw milk is unsafe, and I would never feed it to my family. Unfortunately, this type of raw milk’s negative reputation has led many to believe that all raw milk is unsafe to consume.” 

What do you mean, “this type of raw milk.” That type of milk is never sold raw.

[Author grows angrier] Nobody ever suggested that anybody was drinking raw conventional milk! Nobody is wistfully imagining strolling up to a Unilever or ConAgra dairy and asking for a bucketful straight from the teat. Disingenuouity number one. 

Number two is this talk of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. One blogger wrote “pasteurized milk today comes from cows crammed in cages loaded with synthetic hormones and antibiotics.” Use of synthetic hormones and antibiotics does not define CAFO. The Wisconsin Department of Health Services says “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are agricultural meat, dairy, or egg facilities where animals are kept and raised in confinement.” The definition of CAFO can vary by state, but generally speaking, they include any ranch where animals are confined for 45 days or more per year. But, CAFO legislation is more about waste water than animal or food safety: the manure, and how it’s disposed of, is what the government is concerned about when it comes to CAFOs. 

Persuasion through misleading statements. Is there a term for that? Either way, it’s an old classic, and everywhere in raw milk marketing. There’s a regular lie I see a lot, too: that raw milk doesn’t go bad; it turns into sour cream if you keep it out. Allow me to tell you that you’d have to have the deadest taste buds in the world for you to try it and still think that’s true. 

But back to sovereign citizens. These are individuals who believe that no government has any authority over them. This usually takes the form of refusing to pay for utilities or car registration. It has converged with the raw milk movement because people who believe themselves to be sovereign citizens naturally believe that the government should not dictate what they eat. 

The person in the sovereign citizen movement who is perhaps attracting the most attention right now is Amos Miller, a man who sells meat and dairy to a subscription club with members across the country. He has been cited numerous times for refusing to allow USDA and Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture inspectors onto his property and for selling without a permit. The fines are racking up, as is the positive attention and the donations to fundraisers, first on GoFundMe and now on GiveSendGo, a “Christian” site. (It wouldn’t be insane to wonder if fundraisers are the farmer’s new business plan, right?)

I suppose all that is the private business of the sovereign citizen, but Miller’s website contains a post that advocates for eating asparagus as a cancer treatment. A Southern California club that sells raw products from Miller and others (I bought raw buffalo milk from it, in a U-Haul in a Venice Beach gym parking lot on a Saturday at 7am. I’m not NOT part of this particular world) lamented that due to Miller’s lawsuits “quite a few members have asked about ordering tallow or lard, and unfortunately, the farm is completely out of these two very nutritious fats.”

Once again this sub-industry is rampant with subtle distractions. What is a nutritious fat? What nutrients? Omegas? Because those are in conventional animal products, too. Why should consumers trust your word when your word is a Jell-O salad of half-truths?

Having said all that. 

🙂

Man, raw milk has really been demonized. 

The CDC lists raw dairy as a food “more likely to cause food poisoning,” but meat, eggs, sprouts, leafy greens, raw flour, seafood, and fruits and vegetables, overall, are also on the list. I’m not always on the Michael Pollan train, but I do agree with his note that the FDA’s focus on regulating and shutting down raw milk producers is a little strange, given how few people consume it, and especially given how many people get sick from other foods — including pasteurized dairy. 

One study showed that from 1998 to 2009 in the U.S., poultry, fish, pork, beef, and leafy greens were the most common culprits in reported outbreaks. Dairy (the study didn’t differentiate between raw and pasteurized) came in eighth, after “fruits/nuts” and mollusks. Red onions gave about 2,000 people salmonella in 2020. Drinking water got 16,000 people in one outbreak in 1965. In the last 50 years, potato salad, peanut butter, and cantaloupe have been the sources of huge outbreaks. One of the very largest food poisoning outbreaks in the U.S. occurred in 1985, when a confirmed 16,000 people got salmonella from pasteurized milk. Strangely enough, it’s relatively good news that it was salmonella, as listeria is way more common in pasteurized milk than raw milk, and is much more deadly. (And yet, the FDA specifically advises against raw dairy in the listeria section of its food poisoning pamphlet.) It also recommends pristine home and personal hygiene as the main way to avoid listeria — given that, again, listeria is more common in pasteurized milk, and food poisoning from pasteurized milk is more likely to result from poor hygiene than in raw milk, where it’s likely to come from animal pathogens. (The hygiene issue covers both the dairy and the animal handlers. If you don’t believe in paid sick days for workers at this point… sure, poor people deserve only cruelty, bootstraps etc., but what about your own self-preservation?)

The powers that be are really digging in their heels about raw milk. Immediately after stating that 449 raw milk food poisonings led to five deaths — compared to 174 pasteurized milk poisonings, of which 17 people died and seven miscarriages occurred — the Canadian Public Health Association’s first conclusion is that “warnings about the risk of unpasteurized dairy consumption need to continue.”

I do think we’re going about this milk wrong. Overprocessing our food only serves industry, not people. The government should mandate clean farms and civil rights and take actual steps against animal cruelty.

Marketing pasteurized milk around its ever-increasing shelf life does nothing for me; in fact, it’s a little gross. 

Raw milk tastes good. Ice cream made with raw milk is incredible. We learned the wrong lesson from “The Jungle.” ("I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.") Still, I wouldn’t serve raw milk to a minor or someone over 80. 

Ultimately, the fact that its loudest cheerleaders are obfuscating fascists-disguised-as-libertarians is enough to keep me from exclusively buying raw milk. But if that’s not the kind of thing that compels you, we have reports like this one from 1922 that detail what diseased milk can do to a person. I love freedom of choice in theory, but unfortunately, business owners have the freedom to choose to cut corners.

I’ll still buy raw milk. I appreciate it. But please call the authorities if I ever say “nutritious fats.”

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