Days before Thanksgiving, Mark McAfee was fielding calls about the voluntary recall of his farm’s raw milk after a batch distributed to stores in California tested positive for genetic material that contains the bird-flu virus. “Can I pinch myself?” McAfee said. “This is actually happening.” His disbelief was born not of stress, but of fortune. “I have an educational opportunity to share the science I know to help people, to help humanity,” he said.
Located outside of Fresno, McAfee and his family run a company called Raw Farm, producing 80,000 gallons of unpasteurized milk every week, more than any other dairy in the world. Despite the bird-flu setback, McAfee says that demand has been surging about 2 percent per week this year as raw milk gets its moment. His clients include the NASDAQ-listed Sprouts Farmers Market chain as well as Erewhon, the Los Angeles–based grocery to the stars. (Whole Foods sold his milk until they got out of the unpasteurized business in 2010.) He lists a number of famous clients, from Danica Patrick to Sylvester Stallone to Patrick Dempsey.
While recording a documentary about raw milk released earlier this year, former vice-presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan told McAfee that her running mate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., drinks his milk when he is home in Malibu. As Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has said he would put an end to the “aggressive suppression” of raw milk — beginning most likely with a repeal of the Food and Drug Administration’s ban on interstate sales.
For decades, raw milk was a cultural totem of the flower child. “It was a very nondescript, weird bunch of people,” says McAfee. “Movie stars. Back-to-the-earth people. A pseudo-hippie kind of thing.” But the product has moved from the kitchen tables of California health nuts to the agenda of the next Republican administration due in part to Kennedy’s rise.
Representative Thomas Massie, a daily raw-milk drinker, has introduced a bill with nine fellow Republicans to legalize the interstate traffic of unpasteurized milk. The MAGA youth-voter organization Turning Point USA sells a “Got Raw Milk” T-shirt. Infowars hosts are shouting about how bird flu is a plot to take raw milk away. On his show, Joe Rogan has decried the government’s “war on raw milk” and explained how countries like France are doing fine with higher levels of raw-dairy consumption: “They seem to be healthy as fuck, and they’re not fat.” As for Kennedy, he says he doesn’t touch regular store-bought milk anymore.
Raw-milk drinkers are still a relatively niche group, with 4.4 percent of American adults drinking it once a year, according to a 2022 FDA survey. But that number appears to be growing. Market research from NielsenIQ shows that weekly sales of raw milk are up as much as 65 percent compared to similar periods last year. Clearly it’s not just conservatives drinking raw milk in spite of guidelines from federal public-health officials warning that it increases one’s chances of foodborne illness. (In New York, where raw milk can be sold only on the farm where it is produced, many drinkers in the city rely on the Pennsylvania Amish, who break the ban on interstate traffic by giving it away at homes in the city in exchange for “donations.”) Proponents cite the milk’s creamier flavor and tout alleged health benefits; they say it boosts the immune system or prevents asthma.
Actual public-health officials disagree — “Raw milk does not cure or treat asthma and allergy,” says the FDA — with these claims. “Pasteurization was one of the great public-health achievements of the 20th century,” says Marion Nestle, a molecular biologist, nutritionist, and professor emeritus at New York University. The simple process of heating up milk for a brief period kills dangerous bacteria, such as salmonella, listeria, and E. coli. If you are a healthy adult who drinks raw milk contaminated by these pathogens, it can make you sick. If you are a child or someone else with a weakened immune system, it can be a far greater threat. The CDC directly advises parents not to give their children raw milk. The FDA states that raw milk has no additional nutritional benefits compared to pasteurized milk. As for the asthma claim, the FDA states that raw-milk advocates have “misused” a key study in order to prop up false evidence that raw milk prevents the disease.
In recent months, an uncertain threat has emerged in the H5N1 bird flu virus. Dr. Richard Webby, an infectious-disease expert and the director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Influenza Studies, says there is an unclear but increased risk of bird-flu exposure if you drink raw milk. “My gut feeling is that humans are probably a little bit more resistant to this virus than other species, but we just don’t know the answer,” he says. “But seeing what this virus is capable of doing, even taking that risk, in my mind, is crazy.”
Although for some conservatives who have gone raw, taking the risk may be the point. McAfee notes that the pandemic caused a “paradigm fracture” among many Americans, causing them to distrust public-health advice beyond just the lockdowns and coronavirus vaccine. “There was a renewal of interest in 2020 during COVID,” he says. As Republicans moved toward raw milk, a number of conservative-leaning young media figures — “tradwives,” influencer bros — began to reject foods with vegetable oils and other processed fare. The party that rejected Michelle Obama’s push for healthy foods in schools a decade before was pushing for a return to ingredients their grandparents might recognize. Kennedy condensed this idea in his campaign merch earlier this year, selling “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again” shirts — even if he is not a fan of Trump’s McDonald’s order.
McAfee has claimed that Kennedy’s transition team has asked him to work as an advisor on raw-milk standards, but more pressing issues are on his plate right now. Three days after his first recall, tests found genetic fragments of bird flu (not the virus itself) in a second batch of raw milk from his farm delivered to Erewhon and Sprouts Farmers Market. By Monday, the California Department of Food and Agriculture announced that all Raw Farm operations would be “under quarantine.”
