Raw milk, once the darling of the most liberal Democrats, is now being championed by Republicans in the United States.
In a lengthy article on edairynews, author Marc Novicoff of Politico outlines what’s happening as state legislatures vote to over-turn laws that mandate pasteurization for milk.
“Long a fringe health food for new-age hippies and fad-chasing liberal foodies, raw milk has won over the hearts and minds of GOP (Republican) legislators and regulators in the last few years,” he wrote.
A recent vote in the Iowa legislature broke almost perfectly along party lines with nearly all Republicans in favor and only a handful of Democrats defecting to their side, Novicoff wrote.
And it’s not just in Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores.
In the words of Iowa Republican Senator Jason Schultz who for years failed in attempts to pass the law, “cycle after cycle, we find new officeholders are just becoming more freedom-oriented and less trusting of government at all levels.”
What changed?
First, liberal elites gave up on it. Iowa Democrats overwhelmingly voted against the raw milk bill; it no longer gets sympathetic coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post, the New Yorker, Grist or The Nation.
Whole Foods no longer sells it (although Erewhon now does), and perhaps fittingly, Whole Foods is now owned by Amazon, the trillion-dollar retailer whose employees donated overwhelmingly to Joe Biden over Donald Trump.
Covid is sure to have played a role here, the era where many liberals internalized that trusting the experts distinguished them from Trump and those they considered anti-science (or worse, anti-vax). One study found that whether a school planned to reopen in the fall of 2020 was much more related to its county’s support for Trump in 2016 than it was to local Covid numbers, Novicoff wrote.
At the same time, conservatives discovered that raw milk fit neatly inside a worldview that was increasingly skeptical of credentialed expertise. Though in some ways, it had always been a natural fit.
As conservative writer Rod Dreher put it in a 2002 essay called “Crunchy Cons” about his love for the organic despite its liberal tinge (and the predictable sneering of his Republican colleagues), conservatism is in part defined by the belief that “generally speaking, Small and Local and Particular and Old are better.” Much more recently, Carmel Richardson wrote for The American Conservative after Iowa’s raw milk law went into effect that the law evoked “the ghost” of a “rugged ethos” present in American culture and history.
As Suzy Weiss explained for The Free Press last January, drinking raw milk is often a giant middle-finger to the experts — the same ones who say Joe Biden isn’t cognitively impaired, that Donald Trump is the worst president in the history of America, and that drinking raw milk is “like playing Russian roulette with your health,” as the director of the FDA Division of Dairy and Egg Safety once said.
To be clear, the CDC’s own study says raw milk is estimated to have caused three deaths from 1998-2018 while oysters cause 100 deaths every year. Weiss writes “for new consumers, raw milk is a symbol. … To drink (and especially to produce) raw milk is a way of breaking with convention and raging against the machine — the United States Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Disease Control, the FDA, doctors, PhDs, state regulators, and Big Dairy.”
