Raw Milk

i'm so curious how you're gonna make a real episode out of this i know we were talking yesterday and you were like i don't know how this is an episode and i was like yeah it's not just an episode there's so much of it that i'm having a really hard time editing it down i was at uh the louvre with some people today and i was like i have to leave early because i'm i'm recording a podcast they're like what's it about and i said raw milk and there's like this long sign so they sort of cock their heads like a golden retriever they're like you gotta leave for that you're doing you're recording for like three hours on raw milk i'm here instead of the louvre tonight aubrey you better make it you better he's a cultured masculine man all right you're probably gonna fact check this one oh great welcome to main space the podcast that must be heated to 145 degrees for 30 minutes it's shorter than that now but yeah i'm michael hobbs i'm aubrey gordon if you would like to support the show you can do that at patreon.com maintenance phase or you can subscribe through apple podcast it's the same audio stuff content michael i'm so amped just get into it just start start whatever you need to tell me go so today we're talking about raw milk i was gonna ask you if you've tracked the raw milk debate at all and you were like i don't think there's an episode there so i think that might be my answer to how much you've tracked it because i mean we talked about this with the honey the like blue zones honey shit that like because pasteurization like i think people think it's like a science word but all it means is like taking something up to a temperature and then like cooling it down to kill the bacteria it's not it's not like a big scary like quote-unquote processing thing like the ultra-processed foods whatever it's like the most basic shit pasteurization is only heating a liquid to well below boiling temperatures in order to kill germs that can make you very sick pasteurization today lasts for less than a minute you're raising the temperature of milk for a matter of seconds and it kills a ton of germs it kills e.coli salmonella listeria diphtheria strep fucking tuberculosis nice on top of killing all those germs it also extends shelf life pretty considerably it's very funny to classify this as this like unnatural process when it's like people like figured even if they didn't know the science people like kind of figured this out like a long time ago right it's as unnatural as me like applying heat to other foods to cook them i know and i also think a lot of people don't know that prior to pasteurization it was like a common step in recipes to be like you're using milk boil it and then you're like oh my god it's like oh my god it's like you're using milk boil it first baby oh i didn't know that actually people have been heating liquids to kill germs for like a thousand years before pasteurization really really a long time it's not like a western concept no it's also not a western concept the like earliest record that i found was in the 1100s right in both china and japan right it's like saying like uh don't give in to like western bullshit eat like raw chicken breast so on top of those existing pathogens in milk we now have bird flu in milk oh god do we i didn't even know that yep when cows contract avian flu their highest concentrations of the virus are in their memories like the song from cats memories sorry i'm cutting that i'm cutting that that's for you thank you the good news is that we know that pasteurization is effective in killing h5n1 which is the avian flu virus as of last november avian flu was in 505 herds of dairy cows in 15 states okay the usda is no longer publicly reporting info on avian flu cows so who the fuck knows where we're at now feels so good i feel so safe sale of infected milk has also not been federally banned like bird flu infected milk has not been federally banned because they are simply too busy firing everyone i'm saving my we live in hells for later in the episode but we truly do live in hell when i started researching this i really thought we were talking about sort of food poisoning level events that's part of it but there can also be long-term and permanent effects from these pathogens according to the fda listeria which is one of the common pathogens in raw milk listeria in pregnant people can lead to stillbirth and miscarriage yeah listeria is really really rough stuff yeah coli can lead to hus which can cause kidney failure and tuberculosis so there's a book that i read for this called milk exclamation point that was a history of milk that's such a good idea jeb kudos in that book the book was great and i really loved reading this history of milk and every time someone was like what are you reading i was like this awesome history of milk people just like glaze over so in this book they write quote bovine tuberculosis a disease found in cattle is transmitted to humans through milk it attacks the glands intestines and bones children are particularly susceptible and are often kept in braces for years to keep their spines from becoming deformed it's one of those like destructive diseases of like humankind and it's like such a miracle that it's not a live issue anymore it's such a huge advancement for humankind and yet we have all these grifters just being like was that really good let's bring it back i mean i think in this way a lot of the raw milk stuff kind of follows a similar path to a lot of the anti-vax stuff which is just like i haven't personally seen a child right tuberculosis how bad can it be yeah yeah exactly the cdc has conducted a number of reviews on foodborne illness outbreaks linked to dairy products one of those covered a 13 year period this was from 1993 to 2006 they covered all 50 states the studies authors concluded that raw milk was linked to 150 times more outbreaks than pasteurized no way they also found that states where raw milk sale was legal had twice the incidence of foodborne illness outbreaks oh wow to dairy versus states where raw milk is restricted or banned that's crazy because also raw milk is not that big of a market so if they're having these like huge outbreaks that means that it's a small number of people but much more likely to get sick that's exactly right milk consumption overall has been trending downward in the u.s since like the 70s right people are no longer i mean you can sort of see it culturally right like when we were kids there would be like families where you'd be like your drink to go with dinner is a glass of milk and you're like oh my god i don't want to drink some milk is that not true anymore i don't think so is it all like monster energy now is that what the kids are drinking it's all oat milk for these soy boys so milk consumption overall has been trending downward for like 50 years but raw milk consumption appears to be on the rise right according to analysis from the university of delaware consumer data showed a 21 increase in raw milk sales from 2023 to 2022 since that's a relative statistic i'm assuming that's from like a very low baseline yes it is a low baseline so an analysis of two pretty large scale and nationally representative fda surveys in 2016 and 2019 gave us a pretty good window into what raw milk consumption looks like 4.4 percent of american adults said that they had consumed raw milk in the last year and one percent reported consuming raw milk weekly okay that is like thank god like blessedly small totally it's a small number of people but then when you're like 150 times the likelihood of this outbreak like on the thing about like milk consumption falling in general i do a thing where if i'm getting like a brownie or a cookie at like a cafe i will order like a glass of milk with it because like a cookie and milk is hella good it used to be that that cafes and stuff would have like listed on the menu a glass of milk but now they don't even know like what to charge me oftentimes they'll just like give me a glass of milk wokeness has gone too far michael i love it i'll take some free milk with my cookie there are a lot of claims from maha types currently about pasteurization making milk less nutritious but the science just doesn't bear that out also how much nutrition do you fucking need from milk right surely losing out on some b12 is like worth it to not get sick so a 2011 systematic review looked at 40 studies pasteurization decreased the amount of vitamins e c and some b vitamins and folate and it increased the concentration of vitamin a so okay on its face it looks like it's true that pasteurization can reduce the amount of some vitamins in milk however those vitamins exist in raw milk in very small quantities exactly a couple of four examples pasteurization reduces the amount of vitamin c in milk okay but a full pint of raw milk contains zero percent of your vitamin c for the day oh wow okay vitamin e that same full pint of raw milk gets you to three percent of your recommended daily allowance pasteurized milk gets you to two percent also you know this from the last episode that i'm a vitamin e truther you should be worrying less about vitamin e than you should about fucking tuberculosis and like listeria like bugs in your juice maha types also argue that pasteurization kills off like enzymes and probiotics and all kinds of stuff overwhelmingly those things are pathogens the things that they're like oh no it's killing this off right those are things that will make you sick i'm so sorry by probiotics i mean tuberculosis diphtheria most things you eat don't have like live probiotics in them again like the probiotics thing is also kind of weird it's like you just don't need to think about this that much and now michael we're gonna get in the way back machine and we're gonna talk through the history of the raw milk debate particularly in the u.s we're gonna start with the birth of a man named louis pasteur we sure are wait are we actually we're gonna talk about pasteur for a minute i'm kind of an expert because like i'm in france right now so like i can oh my god i'll just walk us through this part do you want me to like i'll just close my notes you tell me about pasteurization and about louis pasteur i speak three words of french so like i'm actually qualified to do this the thing is that's actually why i'm here i the the french government heard me pronounce pret a manger no and they were like that's so good we're inviting you as a diplomatic trip to this country you're such a fucking you're such a little troll even for me i struggle to pronounce like english words french is like a particularly bad area so as you mentioned louis pasteur was a 19th century scientist and chemistry professor from france he was working at the dawn of germ theory kind of catching on in 1864 he took on a distiller as a client this distiller makes beet alcohol alcohol out of beets okay the distiller wanted help uh figuring out why his alcohol kept turning sour so quickly oh pasteur helped identify the culprit which was lactic yeast and found that heating the beet juice for just a few minutes before fermenting it killed that yeast and allowed it to last longer beats by dr pasteur boom oh oh it's so bad and i liked it so much i thought you would the spark is still alive by god we've still got it uh pasteur figured out pasteurization and mostly applied it to wine and beer alcohol was the main use of pasteurization early on it was other scientists who figured out the application to milk in 1882 a scientist named robert coke argued that while scientists had previously seen tuberculosis as resulting from just one germ he identified three different tuberculosis germs one was a rare form spread by birds tuberculosis he found that there was another germ that spread tb from person to person that one was much more common and there was a third kind that had not previously been identified which was tb that was spread from cows to people through milk it's not until a german chemist named franz von zaxlet came along as the resident pronunciation expert you need me to do it oh thank you so much we get a lot of feedback on how good my pronunciations are how like accurate and precise they are so i can i can do perseverance franz von zaxlet uh was the first to suggest that pasteurization be used for milk and that wasn't until 1886 which was 22 years after pasteur applied it to alcohol right it took him a while to like figure it out yeah totally also part of the reason that we call it pasteurization is by all accounts louis pasteur was like his own hype man he's like you know i'm the guy that did this right you guys should just like name it after me around the same time pasteurization becomes a big public health issue or not pasteurization per se but milk sanitation maybe milk safety becomes a big public health issue for a few reasons beyond just the the tb of it all one is that more people were moving to cities and that meant that rather than maintaining small herds of dairy cows for small communities that were more geographically dispersed there were more centralized dairies with larger herds producing larger amounts of milk and sometimes pooling milk from multiple sources first of all if you have a larger herd there's more opportunities for those cows to all get tb right and if you're pooling milk from multiple sources and one of those sources is contaminated and the others are not you pool it all together and surprise now it's all contaminated right we saw this with mad cow as well absolutely when you have like basically one big bucket full of juice if like one cow in the juice bucket has a problem then like the whole bucket has a problem yeah it's not until the early 1900s that pasteurization really starts to catch on as a public policy but then in 1907 a group of public health advocates started proposing a ban on selling raw milk in new york city oh 1907 oh seven people have like known this is bad for like more than 100 years and we're just like doing it anyway when you were like is there an episode around this i was like don't get me started on the 1907 campaign mike jesus christ the person leading the charge on that effort was a guy named nathan strauss is this someone who you have come across no so this guy was the president of the united states and he was the president of the united states and he was the the owner of macy's and the owner of abraham and strauss which was one of the biggest department stores in new york city throughout much of the 20th century okay strauss became really involved in public life he started doing a bunch of like philanthropic work he worked as an elected official one of strauss's main concerns was the public health threat of raw milk as early as 1858 the city's public health authority decided that the public health authority was going to have to change the rules of the city's public health authority so the city was going through wave after wave after wave of disease outbreaks at this time yellow fever cholera like really gnarly shit also they should leave raw milk legal but make them call it swill milk dude the reporting on swill milk from this era goes so fucking hard i'm gonna send you this is from uh that 1850 piece i'm sending you a quote the health commissioners agreed with the mayor that the swill milk nuisance must be abated i love swill milk nuisance it's so there's so many like metal turns of phrase in this early next week they will convene the board of health and unless all the signs fail will operate with energy and firmness to purify the city of the stables where that disgusting stuff is manufactured which by a scandalous and lying courtesy we have for years called pure orange county milk and under stringent penalties prohibit its use if the board of health has any function this certainly is one of them that the business of making and selling swill milk is detrimental to the public health no sane man not even a city inspector can any longer doubt it's so fascinating they're selling it as pure orange county milk which is like the same sort of thing that they do now is like they rebrand this like basically like dirty milk like that's what we should be calling it yeah as something that is like sounds slightly virtuous and like clean and natural this same piece goes on to accuse swill milk farmers of making quote diseased libels upon the fair name of cows well they have tuberculosis they also say that they'll have to quote show cause before the board why their work of death should not be discontinued more of this yeah metal also this is how i feel like genuinely like the fda should talk about like people who sell raw milk all of that is to say strauss was not alone in his belief that raw milk was a culprit this report happened 50 years before the new york campaign right so like it was a well-known and widely believed thing for decades that raw milk might have a role here but it hadn't been regulated in any meaningful way right so it is almost like a cigarette allegory where it's like we knew this was bad but we didn't do anything we did like weird half measures for ages yep so in 1907 strauss proposed an ordinance to require all milk to either be pasteurized or what was called certified certified milk producers would just test their herd way more frequently they would be held to higher food handling standards and they would submit their milk for certification from a commission of physicians so they're getting at it upstream it's like make sure the milk is clean so you don't have to pasteurize it is like the attempt right but like even if you do that you're still like that none of that guarantees that there's not right coli in your milk right again it's like getting more at the tb of it all like what's even the downside of pasteurization at this point part of it honestly was consumer demand people were like pasteurized milk tastes weird it tastes cooked and at that point it was cooked right like we pasteurized milk now for way less time right right so people are like dude raw milk tastes dope this stuff right bad i don't want to drink the stuff that tastes bad yeah i wonder if it tasted closer to like how uht milk tastes now because you can definitely like tell the difference During the campaign, Strauss told a story. has haunted me haunted i am going to send you this quote from milk exclamation point milk milk the island was being used as an orphanage and in order to ensure the children had a steady supply of good clean fresh milk a dairy herd was maintained there but between 1895 and 1897 while the 3900 children were being fed supposedly safe raw milk 1509 of them died holy shit yeah dude 40 of the kids died yes in response to this frightening statistic strauss built a pasteurization plant on the island he made no attempt to change the children's diet or improve the orphanage's hygiene just pasteurized the milk the mortality rate declined from 42 of the children to 28 honestly 28 still sounds real bad i thought they would have a way better happy ending to this right it sounds way bad but it is a 14 percent reduction which is like a lot of kids just from heating up the milk a little bit for a short period of time right despite that like really visceral really heartbreaking example the 1907 campaign failed and so did a second attempt in 1909 the ban didn't pass until 1910 and again it's not a full ban it's just like you can only sell it if it's certified right yeah yeah in the meantime new york got scooped by the city of chicago who beat them to the punch and became the first city to ban raw milk in the u.s okay they did that in 1909 but chicago's implementation was held up for more than five years for the same reasons that the new york ban didn't pass it's also funny like thinking about how ambitious this policy making was compared to so much policy making now i mean you're basically requiring an entire sector to like add on this very expensive process it's good like i think much more of this kind of ambitious policy making should be done and i think it's good but now it's like anything gets proposed that has any effect on businesses it's like decades of litigation it's like it's so hard to do this stuff now it's really remarkable how how sort of gutsy the public policy yeah work was and also it did take like 50 years of knowing better yeah and it took a super rich dude putting like all of his money and political capital into making this thing happen that does make sense i feel more american now now it feels american there we go we got there we got there we did it folks the only good things that happened are because like rich people want them so by 1917 which was just 10 years after strauss's first campaign on raw milk 46 major u.s cities required pasteurization nice from there those city ordinances became state laws it was a dance sensation sweeping the nation and people get more accustomed to pasteurization pasteurized milk and what it tastes like right by the 80s 1980s a commanding majority of states have either heavily restricted or outright banned sale of raw milk so we're in like the modern era where like you basically can't get raw milk unless you like go to great hassle that's not true it's not yet impossible because um while states have taken action at the state level the fda has not taken federal action so it is still legal to sell raw milk across the country state lines so even if you live in a state where it's not legal you could mail order raw milk like i'm in portland i could drive across the river to vancouver washington right that's sort of what we're talking about at this point so we're going to spend a little time now talking about like what got the fda to finally take action and that's a story that starts in the 70s and 80s with one of the biggest dairies in california and in the country altadena it's funny that the thing that got them to take action was not like the deaths of many children we'll get there don't worry it's weird if you've been to a grocery store in california in the last like 50 years chances are they sold altadena dairy products altadena remains one of the biggest dairies in the country in the 70s and 80s they were also one of the largest dairies selling certified raw milk so they're doing the certification process right and they're selling raw milk according to the la times altadena was subject to dozens of recalls in the space of like 10 years wow not only for products that they sold retail but also because they supplied raw milk to other producers who then made things like queso fresco with it and that would then get recalled right in the case of that contaminated queso fresco that caused the deaths of 22 angelinos oh wow through all of this altadena defended itself and denied any responsibility in every step along the way every case their owner was out in the press constantly referring to altadena's raw milk as quote the cleanest milk in the world by clean we do not mean it doesn't kill kids we mean something else the owner is also alleging in the press that this is all a conspiracy against raw milk which like well it kind of is in consensus that your product is dangerous then like yeah it kind of is right like a flu shot is a conspiracy against the flu right a bunch of parents got together just because we killed kids i should also say um this dude no longer owns altadena altadena is still around it's no longer owned by like total crackpots okay so like if that's where you buy your milk don't worry it's not going to like a raw milk truther anymore and they no longer sell raw milk they're not doing that anymore right so this all comes to a head in nineteen ninety-eight years ago when i was a when two altadena court cases finally make kind of a meaningful dent in altadena's reputation and in their ability to sort of do what they're going to do one is the paul telford case a 66 year old man named paul telford was undergoing radiation for lung cancer and his doctors had him on a liquid diet altadena certified raw milk advertised itself as a liquid diet and as safe and clean and pure so he was drinking it regularly for the few weeks leading up to his death altadena argued in court that cancer killed him but at the time of his death he had infections caused by both salmonella and listeria oh right i don't think the idea that somebody like that needs like more vitamins more than they need like milk free of pathogens is insane yeah as a person if you're looking for something like this you're going to have to look at some of the books you're going to have to look at some of the books and you're going to have to look at some of the like yay they were found liable boo they were ordered to pay 40 grand to tell god yeah you just like kill five or six people a year and just pay pay that out and keep making your product right it's such a small amount in today's dollars that's around 113 grand the other lawsuit that is sort of making its way through the courts around this time was filed as a lawsuit against the consumer watchdog group that watchdog group is public citizen okay founded by ralph nader nader's like a really like influential guy on consumer safety stuff so public citizen filed suit uh against altadena they co-filed with the gray panthers do you know about the gray panthers it's like a seniors advocacy group and i fucking love the name it makes me so happy there's gonna be like like a combination of like black panthers and like a bunch of white people so they were gray you were just color mixing in your brain the suit argued that altadena was making false advertising claims they were marketing their raw milk products as quote safe healthy wholesome and pure and as suitable for vulnerable populations like babies and sick people that's insane the court ultimately ruled in favor of public citizen and the gray panthers and they find altadena liable for their rights and that ruling prompted a federal court to sort of force the fda's hand we've talked about this in the past that the fda can only regulate interstate commerce things that happen within the state fall at the state level so back in 1973 the fda had strongly considered a ruling that only pasteurized milk could be shipped across state lines which would have effectively banned interstate commerce of raw milk they consider it again in 1985 but that's during the reagan administration and you know those fuckers aren't passing new regs right yeah the public citizen ruling addressed the fda directly and said basically look like you can do what you want but quote there is no longer any question of the fact that raw milk is unsafe right so they now have like judges saying publicly in high profile cases like come on jokers nothing about this is safe this is literally like why we have a government so that you can't just like sell a dangerous product to people yes and you can't just be like i don't know regulation just sort of isn't our thing it's literally like what you're trading off is like a slight inconvenience to a corporation versus the deaths of children yes this isn't even like hard trade-off yeah following the fda ban following this sort of proliferation of state bans people like pretty immediately try to find workarounds and they're successfully great in doing so of course they are how do i keep doing this thing that kills kids one of those things one of the more popular And one of the most popular workarounds something something called a milk club okay which is essentially like an underground railroad for listeria when you put it that way it's less appealing there are like a bunch of organizations that get really into milk clubs one of them a person named liz reitzig who is one of the big popularizers of milk clubs who also was a supporter of the raw milk freedom writers that's so good i'm basically rosa parks i want them to be able to kill kids i'm essentially gandhi it's like staggering mother jones describes the raw milk freedom writers as quote a caravan of self-described frustrated mothers who wanted the repeal of federal raw milk laws but it's like the same french where it's like oh these are just like concerned mothers it's mom's net but for right diphtheria as opposed to like people who are just like anti-science freaks in addition to milk clubs there's a workaround called herd shares so the idea is you're not buying raw milk you're paying to lease a cow in a dairy herd and then the dairy delivers raw milk as a byproduct of the cow you fake oh i love that we're not buying it we're like subscribed that all brings us to our contemporary context nightmare interestingly the the current sort of landscape around raw milk laws is that frankly a lot of blue states allow the sale of raw milk and a lot of red states ban it outright is it illegal in oregon you can buy raw milk but only directly on the farm from a farmer with a herd of three cows or fewer oh weird because well that's because of transmission of bovine tuberculosis oh a smaller herd can't transmit it as much right that there's fewer opportunities for uh the disease spreading yeah washington and california both have legal raw milk retail sale you can go to the grocery store and buy raw milk really in washington and california it's at gas stations next to the kratom i mean honest to god one stop shop it's so whoa just like the sketchy things aisle you know arowan sells it in california of course they do and it's 13 bucks the funny thing is i think you could actually do a thing where you're like look you want raw milk we don't want raw milk why don't we compromise and we come up with some sort of process where like we'll bring it up to a certain temperature but like it won't be brought up to boiling how about that as like a compromise like they just don't know what pasteurization is and they're like yeah that sounds pretty reasonable as long as you don't bring it up to boiling it's like yeah actually you know what we can meet in the middle of the night and we can do it in the middle of the night on this you know you treat it like it's a new discovery we found a totally non-chemical way yeah yeah yeah it's milk it's like perfectly natural totally and actually it dates back hundreds of years so it's an ancestral way of keeping milk safe that's good you could use the like paleo bullshit language yeah as a way to sell heating milk to kill germs just call it like a deliberate sunshine milk sunning we're basically sunning the milk the milk has gotten red light therapy just like the kind you put on your balls the only like my only hopes for america now because everything is just like on fire is just like let's just how can we lie to these people to get the outcomes that we want because they're so dumb ultimately in 2007 we were at a national high point of raw milk regulation just four states allowed for retail sale of raw milk in grocery stores say their names who was it i don't remember which four states i didn't look into which ones in 2007 it does by the way it does seem like california has always been a state that doesn't ban it which i'm like fucking california man when it was too big to fail in recent years a number of states have repealed those bans and allowed for the sale of raw milk today many coastal states allow retail sale of raw milk california and washington a number of western states most of new england all allow for retail sale of raw milk oh so how in less than 20 years have we seen such a backlash to pasteurization and a rollback of those state bans right the story of how we got here starts with the founding of the weston a price foundation i was gonna ask about this if they're gonna make a little cameo oh it's not even a little cameo it's like a protagonist it not protagonist and antagonist is is that a drag name has someone so mike what do you know about the weston a price foundation well i know of them from a previous show research yes it's like the dumbest like woo woo ant that you can possibly imagine but also with like a ton of power woo woo ant is such a great description of the vibes at weston a price there's like a patina there's like a hippie aesthetic yeah yeah to some of the things that they produce so here is uh i'm gonna send you their mission statement which i think i was gonna send you in the seed oils episode so we're coming closer because i know i have it in my notes i'll just do it from memory the foundation is dedicated to restoring nutrient-dense foods to the human diet through education research and activism it supports a number of movements that contribute to this objective including accurate nutrition instruction organic and biodynamic farming pasture feeding of livestock community-supported farms honest and informative labeling prepared parenting and nurturing therapies specific goals include establishment of universal access to clean certified raw milk and a ban on the use of soy formula for infants well it goes really nuts at the end there they're also leaving out of this mission statement like how much of their whole thing is about animal fats and like fat is actually good for you and you should be eating meat fat and like right keto kind of elements right so that mission statement has like a fair amount of curb appeal if you're not a partisan or if you're like a little left-leaning here's a little glimpse into the issues currently listed on their website okay say no to cell towers in your neighborhood oh i love this okay bird flu in raw milk our founder reveals the lies underlying the latest attack on raw milk oh they're debunking you from an hour ago in shambles western a price foundation and they also have a section called main health topics here are some of their main health topics cod liver oil our number one superfood okay why butter is better nature's healthiest fat vaccinations the most important decision parents will ever make i wonder where they come down on that i wonder what decision they think is best and then they'll the last one is just soy alert the funny thing is they sound like some sort of like 1910s grandma they're gonna give you a werther's and measles the foundation is named for weston a price do you know who weston a price is i did not i looked this up but i forgot he's a dentist from cleveland oh who authored a book called nutrition and physical degeneration that was published in 1939 price traveled to more than a dozen countries to observe the health and diets of different societies his argument was that the dental and physical health of non-industrialized excuse me hiccup is your fucking beans for breakfast i only have beans to blame yeah they make me all that i am um his argument was that the health of non-industrialized communities was superior to the health of industrialized communities laughably false but okay he said that the culprit for americans health woes was quote foods of modern commerce okay what we now call processed and ultra processed foods here is a synopsis of his conclusions from a piece in the atlantic i apologize for making you read something from the atlantic i hate you i know i know you do uh it says in the conclusion of price's book he suggests a common theme in the book and it's a common theme in the book the healthy primitives ate plenty of meat seafood and fats americans would be wise to adapt their own diets accordingly price warned shortly before publishing the book he'd gone to the rutland state fair in vermont and had sat for an hour observing the crowd three out of every four people he saw there he said showed signs of prenatal injury due to poor maternal nutrition he's like eating a turkey leg at a fucking state fair just being like that guy's fucked up that's that guy's fucked up your mom fucked up just like judging people on no information that's that is absolutely what does that even mean why i included that part about the state fair allow me to introduce this part where he just sits at a state fair and goes that guy's fucked up yeah look at his overbite that's because your mom didn't eat enough butter so like of course this is like just like an aggressively racist way of talking about shit right he is also a dentist and not a physician which is a different fucking thing also i i will say like when i worked in human rights i did a lot of work on like developing countries and oftentimes you read like nutritional reports and like in poor countries people are often eating like 1900 calories of like white rice in a day because you can't afford protein you can't afford like fat like it's just not factually true that people in like poor southeast asia are eating tons of like meat and seafood and fats those are like rich people food the book didn't make much of a splash when it was first published i can't imagine why it would yeah but it was influential with two people who matter most and those are the co-founders of the weston a price foundation okay one of them is a credentialed person the other one is not we're going to talk first about the credentialed person mary enig had a master's and a doctorate in nutritional science so she is credentialed but her views are extremely fringe she passed away in 2014 she was a big critic of vegetarianism oh good i love this the the vegetarian dunking always comes along with this weird animal fat thing among other things uh mary enig is a vegetarian and she's a vegetarian and she's a vegetarian and she's a vegetarian and she's a once argued that coconut oil could effectively treat hiv and aids the other co-founder is um the one who is still with us sally fallon moral is her name she is not the credentialed one she has a bachelor's in english from stanford and a master's in english from ucla and take it from a literary arts major from brown university knock that shit off you're not a nutrition guy she called her a vegetarian and she's a vegetarian and she's a vegetarian and she's a vegetarian and co-authored a book called the contagion myth why viruses including quote-unquote coronavirus are not the cause of disease our entire show is just leading up to this thing where all of these people just come out against the fucking germ theory of disease michael you're not asking the questions that matter which is if germs and viruses don't cause disease what does and the answer is 5g oh wait is it literally it is my god i thought she was gonna do some like imbalance of humors type shit but this is this is very innovative in the 90s she read weston a price's book and it really resonated with her as a result she started feeding her kids a high fat diet with lots of animal fats in it she starts feeding her kids raw milk she says her children don't have any health problems at all and she credits that diet for things as like even though she's a vegetarian she's a vegetarian and she's a for like her kids not needing braces she's like it's the animal fats that's why or maybe she's decided not to give them braces they're like mom yeah totally their teeth are fucked up it's kind of mean one of the biggest priorities of the foundation is raw milk they don't usually call it raw milk they call it real milk weston a price foundation um spins off something called the campaign for real milk you know what i'm saying which no joke to this day has a blog post called the vendetta against altadena again the whole real milk thing it's like what do you think pasteurization is real milk is only warm once and that's when it comes out of a cow it doesn't get warm again later they're all like catastrophizing about like this extremely minor thing this is a quote from the website of the campaign for real milk under the header raw milk safety okay it says real milk milk that is pasture raised full fat and unprocessed is an inherently safe food that's because raw milk contains numerous bioactive components that kill pathogens in the milk prevent pathogen absorption across the intestinal wall and strengthen the immune system no other food that we consume contains a built-in safety system like the one in raw milk dude this is like the most density of bullshit i think we've ever had would you like to know what their source for this is it is one case study from 1984 it's like it's a sheer balls to say like not only is raw milk not bad for you but it's actually super good for you it's actually the only food that's this good for you you're basically encouraging people to drink like a shitload of it so in 2007 they also founded something called the farm to consumer legal defense fund and from what i can tell this is the most effective arm in their raw milk work okay the fund provides legal support to farmers presumably farmers aligned with their organizational values of course the defense fund also set a goal quote to make raw milk sales legal in every state right they sort of put out the word that they're providing legal support and legal defense funds to farmers right in that process they start elevating those dairy farmers in the press and that is where we start to see a real uptick in more mainstream coverage of raw milk fights when a raw milk dairy farmer is found to be in violation of a state or local ban or when raw milk tests positive for really dangerous pathogens they then kind of court media and push the story as like an injustice look at how our federal government is attacking these small farmers right who are just doing things the way we've always done things don't pay attention to the mortality rates yeah and they frame it as like really devastating evidence of governmental overreach right ah so they're identifying raw milk farmers and then kind of pitching them to the media as like salt of the earth family farmers who are being trodden upon by government overreach yeah like the legal attack doesn't necessarily make headlines in and of itself right it makes more headlines to have people kind of wilding out and we have a couple of people who have kind of wilded out about raw milk right so i want to spend some time talking about two of their biggest rising stars of the raw milk world i'm like a raw milk influencer i'm like so popular oh my god i'm like the coolest it's just like me puking in the toilet one of those is someone named mark mcafee who is from the san joaquin valley in california in 2000 he co-founded what was then called organic pastures dairy company which was renamed in 2020 to raw farm usa all caps and now the logo is just two ar-15s i mean there's a lot of like distressed american flag graphics happening yeah it's very much like aesthetic by christian odigie right right mcafee founds his farm in 2000 by 2020 and he's been in 2007 his products were in 300 stores in california just fucking room temperature just on the shelf just festering to their credit they do refrigerate it but then why do they refrigerate it these people don't even believe in bacteria why are you refrigerating it have like bright green fucking mold floating on it you fucking weirdos mcafee also had a mail order business that he said brought in about 80 000 a month now you might be thinking this is after the fda ban how on earth is this going to work i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know is he selling mail order raw milk across state lines and that is he is labeling it as pet food not for human consumption that's like those people that were selling like fish antibiotics on amazon much like altadena before them raw farm usa has faced a lot of lawsuits and regulation first up that labeled as pet food thing didn't last very long he was doing that in 2007 talking about in the press in 2007 in 2008 they did face federal criminal charges for that oh wow god in 2023 federal prosecutors charged that raw farm usa had once again been shipping raw milk across state lines so as a result they're now in a consent decree oh wow until 2028 the fda can conduct audits and unannounced inspections but as we know the fda a shell of its former self i see just order raw milk in the fucking mail it takes like a couple days in like the back of a van to like get to you the farm has had many recalls the most recent was in december for bird flu in their milk oh my god when mcafee was asked for comment on the bird flu recall he gave comment to mother jones here is how he responded to their request for comment on the bird flu recall trace the money he wrote in an email in which he also denied bird flu could be a threat to his business or his customers health we don't think avian flu causes things to be unsafe you may think i'm some kind of crazy person but show me one person who's ever gotten sick from raw milk with avian flu viruses don't exist in raw milk they die off quickly fearing viruses is ridiculous he says he holds that only people lacking strong microbiomes and good immune systems need worry of covid-19 for instance he says i got it and it was mild i'm a rod i'm a raw milk drinker it didn't hardly phase me i can't argue with science all right he got covid and he drinks raw milk show me one person who got sick from covid and it wasn't mild he's saying only people without good immune systems need to worry that's a lot of fucking people dude he's the guy with the turkey leg at the state fair being like your mom your mom drank too much wine pointing at people being like fetal alcoholism - He's also very clever. clear on his view of where the demand for raw milk is coming from he told cbs news quote people are seeking raw milk like crazy anything that the fda tells our customers to do they do the opposite yep that sounds about right that sounds like we're dealing with the dumbest fucking people in the country who are also running it by the way to your point mcafee is currently rumored to be in consideration for a role at hhs of course that's always the fucking epilogue to these people now the good news is that he does think bird flu is quote a huge scam oh good that was backed by pharma companies quote to create fear and produce a new vaccine after covid closed up just say fucking birds aren't real get to the fucking point let's just birds are fake dinosaurs we all know this god why not there's another sort of rising star named you this god why not there's another sort of rising star named you amos miller who is an amish raw milk dairy farmer in pennsylvania okay pennsylvania allows for sale of raw milk you just have to have a permit and the core of the issue with amos miller is he's like fuck your permit i'm never getting a permit so like it is legal to do what he is doing he just decided to do it in the illegal way right so i love that requires dairy farmers raw dairy farmers to regularly take care of their dairy farmers and they're not allowed to take care of their dairy farmers it's pretty fucking reasonable permit holders can't however produce raw yogurt kefir or fresh cheese i am guessing that that was the problem he'd have to stop selling some of his products it's also such garbage that you can just fucking sell this dangerous product with a permit it feels like these people have all been coddled by like these weird carve-outs for what for what reason are we doing this it's so weird pennsylvania's attorney general has also charged that amos miller has also been illegally shipping raw milk across state lines through what he calls a buyer's club okay that has led to this kind of wild protracted face-off between miller and regulators he and his attorney really seem to be like leaning into the controversy on a bunch of this his attorney while they had a court case in progress wrote that pennsylvania's secretary of agriculture thinks he's quote the food pope of the world right he is kind of the food pope of america of pennsylvania yeah absolutely this guy thinks he's in charge of this issue yep that's how a government works amos miller is extremely public about his alignment with the weston a price foundation he publicly talks up the foundation he cites them as kind of a cornerstone of his analysis and it's a flash point of his politicization around this issue he has been a sponsor of their annual conference where fun fact the keynote speaker has been rfk jr of course i'm amazed it took us this long to get to him honestly for all of those reasons and more amos miller has made a great candidate for right-wing stardom part of what happens is that these guys start going hard on raw milk publicly weston a price then boosts the media stories that they're in yeah right and there's this sort of like symbiotic relationship of they keep grabbing headlines and weston a price keeps boosting them yeah once we've got these couple of rogue dairy farmers in the headlines those are now news stories that podcasters can pull up yeah yeah that youtube reaction channels can start to react to and it becomes a topic of conversation that otherwise wouldn't necessarily be a topic of conversation right it then becomes a circular thing where like right then you get the stories about like oh the movement for raw milk is getting bigger and then that then feeds into the next round of people who are like oh maybe i should be trying this and then you get yep the next round of stories saying oh there's a lot of raw milk people around we have had a wave of raw milk endorsements from high profile people many of whom are friends of the show paul saladino has encouraged feeding raw milk to infants yeah great stuff i mean he also says that they should like eat raw livers and stuff so at least he's consistent uh joe rogan says he's a raw milk drinker i watched a whole clip of him talking about it at length and he switches pretty quickly from raw milk to whole milk as the language he uses so i think he doesn't know what we're taught like i genuinely think he doesn't know he's someone you could go on his show and be like they need to heat up the milk joe easy easy he also talks in the fucking clip he's like uh you can pretty well tell when has gone bad like i just sniff it before i drink it that's not even safe or not and you're like we're not talking about sour milk joe you can't smell listeria joe it's not the same thing it's oh my god again these people don't believe in like microscopic things that can cause diseases turning point usa sold a shirt that said got raw milk on it referencing a very timely got milk reference in 2025 first of all and second of all it did have an illustration of a bull on because now we're at the place where it's like do you do you know where milk comes from god damn it's not even like do you believe in bacteria it's like walk me through what you think milk is it's when you squeeze almonds mike oh my god thomas massey that same republican from kentucky has introduced a bill to overturn the fda ban on interstate raw milk sales goop herself says that she puts raw cream in her coffee each morning and she says she gets it from mark mcafee's farm god not that i expect any better from jesus christ she acknowledged to the cut that some of the claims around raw milk are quote-unquote pseudoscience but she also said is someone going to invest in getting a data set around raw milk oh my god it's not gonna be the dairy industry right and i'm like what are you fucking kidding me if the dairy industry was like you can do less work sell more products at a higher price point across the fucking country do you not think altadena would be jumping yeah at the opportunity and also you're paying for the raw milk it's also a business it's not like big business versus like small farmers it's all big business and also like who's gonna get the data set we've had the data set since the fucking 1800s my guy this is like the thing this is also like rfk jr being like we're finally gonna see whether vaccines work on top of that there has also been considerable uproar uptick in pro raw milk discourse on gab and rumble and info wars and a couple of info wars podcast hosts have talked about it one of them owen schroyer said in his podcast the war room quote they say bird flu and milk bird flu and milk oh it's the scariest thing they'll just make raw milk illegal that's what this is all about and i'm like them is trump and rfk jr right and even under democrats no one was reaching further than the fda interstate commerce ban no one was saying it's totally illegal to sell raw milk in the united states of america right there's some things to think about in terms of like why raw milk has taken off now after so many years of such successful regulation of it there are a couple of things one is that as in the turn of the 19th to 20th century the dairy industry has been changing in recent decades more and more independent and family dairy farmers have disappeared they've been bought out they've been overtaken by large-scale corporate dairy farms and if small farmers are trying to compete with the margins of huge dairy farms they can't right right so instead they're going to look for ways to signify that their milk is different and better this is part of the reason why um some small dairies have started putting their milk in glass bottles because it looks like a heftier and more prestigey kind of product oh that's interesting right there are a number of dairy farmers that i read interviews with who are like look i don't believe that gmos are any kind of issue but we absolutely label our milk as being gmo free because people will pay more if there's a gmo free label on it and people are i guess willing to pay more for milk they think is like fucking has so many vitamins or some shit on top of that in recent years there has been more new research to misinterpret the biggest example of this is that in the late 90s there was a swiss epidemiologist who started to look into something called the farm effect it is this sort of sometimes observed sometimes not effect where some kids raised on farms appeared to develop allergies and asthma much less than kids raised in other settings right so they published their first study on this in 1999 and they found that local kids who lived on farms did indeed appear to have lower rates of allergies this is just in switzerland right that's all we're talking about here studies since then have been considerably more mixed but there's definitely like enough evidence to keep looking the farm effect appears to be most observed and in some case like it might even be exclusively observed and so i think it's a good thing to keep that in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking for a farm effect that's a good thing to keep in mind if you're looking farm milk essentially what they're talking about when they talk about farm milk is milk that is produced on the farm but in that research they didn't track whether the farm milk was raw or not because they might be just like pasteurizing it themselves right or they might be doing what lots and lots of farmers have been doing for hundreds of years and boiling or scalding the milk yeah even though they have not been able to certify what portion of that is raw versus pasteurized versus boiled or scalded milk raw milk folks have seized upon this and been like aha i knew it it's the milk even for them this is thin it is really thin farms in other countries have kids who may or may not be drinking raw milk have fewer allergies there's like five leaps you have to make to think that's evidence of anything your kid's gonna get asthma so as a result don't let them get asthma instead give them a listeria kill him quicker on top of the dairy industry stuff on top of that new research one of the big boosts that appears to have taken place with raw milk consumption is covid lockdowns and the amount of anti-vax and anti-science yeah uh sentiment that that kicked up mark mcafee has talked about what a boom in sales they experienced during and after right raw milk and sort of the rhetoric around raw milk dovetails really nicely with a number of other right-wing projects and conspiracies so one of the biggest boosters of raw milk has been a number of trad wives right which is like part of this project around cultural nostalgia and like a throwback to a time with much more misogyny and also like everything else on tiktok it's like mostly people faking it i'm so sorry you don't think nara smith woke up to a sick top and i'm sorry you don't think nara smith woke up to a sick toddler and was like i need to make cough drops from scratch right like the whole thing is just like it's like those morning routine videos that we were talking about that are like completely faked it's just everyone is like faking the lifestyle that they're living and this is just like one of the other fake lifestyles that you can pretend that you're doing i will say some folks on the right go so far as to contend that dairies are injecting chemicals into pasteurized milk sure they call it quote state approved milk what fiat currency that's just like everything you eat is state approved there's like health inspections at restaurants on some level it's state approved i'm a rebel i don't eat your state approved usda inspected beef have fun getting poisoned have fun getting fucking listeria genuinely and like i mean i do think that is sort of the question that we're grappling with here is like what are the risky decisions that we let people make right we allow people to drink to excess we allow people to smoke we give them lots of warnings about it but they're allowed to do it we allow people to eat like steak tartar you don't even like shit like that but we also like don't let people use like a lot of uh controlled substances we don't let you enroll your kid in school without vaccinating them for certain communicable diseases in a lot of states not everyone anymore jesus christ but then i also think raw milk is different because there isn't actually any like benefit to it right there's not a use case yeah the reported benefits are fake like people are lying and then it just feels like it's in a category that's much closer just like driving without a seat belt yeah like it is and it isn't right like it's a freedom issue but you're like sorry you want the freedom to i guess drink things that make you sick right and also especially to give them to your kids right it's like there's also victims of this who are not making a choice and there's a reason why like if you want to smoke when you're over 18 you're smart enough to decide that that's the risk reward for you but like if kids are being given raw milk those kids are not in charge of the decision right that is the hardest stop for me right is like the fact that like so many people are getting raw milk under the misapprehension that it will prevent their kids from getting allergies right in the process their kids are getting fucking diphtheria right and like old timey ass diseases because that also is where like regulation would come in that you're basically making a trade-off okay regulating this does involve something like that right so like if you're a kid and you're not getting some like loss of freedom if you think about it purely philosophically but also will save the lives of many children i thought that i would give our final word today to a food scientist named john lucy who was quoted by usa today quote a lot of people just don't trust science anymore but i don't even think this is science i think a lot of it is just common sense this is not making milk into an ultra processed food i know this is just heating it to 160 degrees for 15 seconds you fucking weirdos it's so it really is one of those things where i'm like i feel like i'm living on another planet the most amazing thing to me is that these people do not believe in bacteria but they do believe that you can walk around a state fair and identify people with prenatal injuries so you