How raw milk is the battleground in America's (very) toxic new culture war... with Gwynnie and gun-loving Republicans on the SAME side!
Eccentric health guru Gwyneth Paltrow pours it in her coffee every day so all its wonderful bacteria can get to work cleansing her perfect innards.
Other liberal foodies are guzzling raw — or unpasteurised — milk, too, while half of Hollywood seems to have been in thrall to the high-fat keto diet, whose cheerleaders argue that unpasteurised cream is one of the best foods to eat to lose weight.
‘There are schools of thought that drinking raw milk is better because once you process it and everything, that’s when the dairy becomes harder to tolerate,’ opined Gwynnie vaguely in a recent radio show.
Such commendations, along with myriad social media ‘influencers’ singing its praises on TikTok, may help explain why there has been a 20 per cent increase in demand for raw milk in the U.S. in the past year.
While its sale has been banned or restricted for decades on health grounds, in recent years it has benefited from a booming demand for organic produce. Attracted by claims of its healthiness or simply its creamier taste, 4.4 per cent of Americans try it each year, according to a 2019 study. However, experts say its current trendiness means that number has certainly risen significantly.
But now the ‘natural’ food diehards and calorie-averse celebrities have an unlikely ally: U.S. conservatives.
There has been a 20 per cent increase in demand for raw milk in the U.S. in the past year
They have embraced raw milk as the latest battleground in the endless culture wars with their political opponents. Americans, as they see it, have a God-given right not only to bear arms and speak freely but to pour whatever they want on their breakfast cereal — even if it comes straight from a cow’s udder.
The UK is not immune to milk’s growing role in political debate on this side of the Atlantic, either. This week it emerged that a taxpayer-funded quango is to research the connections between ‘milk and colonialism’. One of the experts involved has argued previously that milk is a ‘white supremacist’ imposition on other cultures because much of the rest of the world has high levels of lactose intolerance.
U.S. government officials and the dairy industry have long opposed raw milk on the grounds it doesn’t undergo the 70C heat treatment pasteurisation process they insist is necessary to kill microorganisms that can make people very ill.
They can trot off a long and forbidding list of harmful bacteria that raw dairy can contain, including salmonella, E.coli, listeria and cryptosporidium. These bugs and others can cause infections such as typhoid fever, tuberculosis, diptheria, miscarriage and even death.
Raw milk fans who never come close to a cow, say critics, may not be aware that the animals’ underbellies and flanks are often covered in faeces, contaminated by harmful bacteria and which inevitably gets into the milk. As a food safety expert put it earlier this year, drinking raw milk is ‘like playing Russian roulette with your health’.
Unfortunately, such warnings sound like the ‘nanny state’ oppression that tends to get Republicans reaching for their constitutionally-enshrined assault rifles.
Conservative commentators and media outlets are joining politicians in championing the merits of raw milk and the right of Americans to buy it easily. A string of Republican states have voted to free up farmers to start selling it. (It isn’t illegal to drink raw milk in the U.S. but, since New York became the first American city to make pasteurisation compulsory in 1910, it has been very difficult to sell it.)
Advocates claim raw milk has more vitamins, minerals and healthy fats than pasteurised. They also argue it is easier to digest and helps to prevent conditions such as asthma, eczema, allergies and respiratory infections.
Some of the bacteria killed off during the pasteurisation process actually are beneficial, they insist. They often point to the health of Amish children — a group that seeks to live simply and distance itself from many aspects of modern life — who are raised on unpasteurised dairy. Studies have shown such youngsters almost never suffer asthma, dermatitis and allergies.
The same has been said of people who grow up on farms and may drink untreated milk from their livestock. Critics counter that there are almost certainly other reasons for this, such as their healthy outdoor lifestyle.
Devotees of raw milk include actress Gwyneth Paltrow
Health guru Paltrow has unpasteurised milk in her coffee every day
Health experts also deride claims that raw dairy products are somehow more natural in a world of heavily-processed food and drink. ‘Drinking raw milk is about as “natural” as drinking water contaminated with raw sewage,’ says Dr Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at New York University. ‘Pasteurisation is no more “unnatural” than cooking, refrigerating or freezing food. We do all of these things to make food safer to consume.’
She and other experts point out that heating milk to pasteurise it doesn’t alter its nutritional value. The U.S. government’s Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC) insists there are no health benefits from raw milk, but a lot of potential hazards.
This hasn’t remotely deterred the Right, whose instinctive contempt for the ‘experts’, the CDC and any federal organisation that tries to curb Americans’ behaviour boiled over during the social distancing of the pandemic.
‘We find new [political] officeholders are just becoming more freedom-orientated and less trusting of government at all levels,’ said Iowa state senator Jason Schultz, who pushed through a bill to legalise the sale of raw milk there. (This represents a change of heart as, in 1980, Iowa actually jailed a diary farmer for 30 days for selling it.)
TikTok raw milk influencers have fuelled the demand
Most states have long agreed either to ban the sale of raw dairy products or, as in the UK, severely restrict sales to specially licensed farms who often can only sell it on-site or to a few outlets.
But in recent months, more and more Republican states, including Georgia, North Dakota, West Virginia and Iowa, have voted to end raw milk’s outlaw status and allow farms to sell it.
One conservative youth organisation, Turning Point USA, sells T-shirts with the logo ‘Got Raw Milk?’, a play on the mainstream dairy industry’s advertising slogan ‘Got milk?’. (However, it rather undermined the authority of its message by putting a picture of a bull rather than a cow on the shirt.)
The latest state to take up the cause is Louisiana where, until now, the sale of raw milk was illegal except at one establishment near Lafayette, where the farmer got round the ban by operating a system called ‘cowboarding’. The consumer buys a cow and pays the farmer to look after and milk it. So, technically, the milk is not sold to them as they own it.
In recent months, more and more Republican states in the U.S., including Georgia, North Dakota, West Virginia and Iowa, have voted to end raw milk’s outlaw status
Louisiana’s Senate and House of Representatives have already approved its raw milk bill — some making mooing sounds as they did so — and it now only awaits almost inevitable approval from the state’s conservative governor. Citing a battle cry of the American Revolution, the bill’s Senate sponsor Eric Lafleur called it ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ legislation.
In a rousing speech, he rounded on his main Democrat opponent — the appropriately named Senator John Milkovich — and his government ’interfering in our everyday lives and how we can produce milk’. He went on: ‘We can’t trust a farmer to milk a cow and sell a few gallons to his neighbour? C’mon guys, this is America! The greatest country in the world! Built on the backs of farmers across this country —dairy people built this country.’
But the Republicans aren’t getting it all their way: Louisiana’s legislation will allow any shop to sell raw milk as long as it carries a warning that it is ‘not for human consumption’ and may contain ‘harmful bacteria’. But few people expect that to stop raw dairy aficionados consuming it.
Not when the fundamental rights of citizens are at stake. As the President of the Louisiana State Senate wryly commented on passing the raw milk bill this month, ‘Only in America.’
