Raw Milk

0:11I'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 You got to leave for that. You're recording for like three hours on Robbill.

0:45I'm here instead of the Louvre tonight, Aubrey. You better make it. You better make it. He's a cultured masculine man. All right. You're probably going to fact check this one. Oh, great. Welcome to Main Phase, 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 slash maintenance phase, or you can subscribe through Apple Podcasts. It's the same audio content. Michael! Aubrey! I'm so amped. Just get into it. Just start whatever you need to tell me.

1:22Go. So today we're talking about raw milk. I was going to 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 is in raw milk tuberculosis 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 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 pastors really like 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 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?

3:27I didn't even know that. Yep. When cows contract avian flu, their highest concentrations of the virus are in their mammaries. Like the song from Cats. Mammaries. Sorry. I'm gutting that. I'm gutting that. That was 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.

4:23I'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. E. 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.

5:04That was a history of milk. That's such a good idea.

5:10jeb kudos

5:14in 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 destructive diseases of humankind, and it's 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?

5:59Let'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 with 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 study's authors concluded that raw milk was linked to 150 times more outbreaks than pasteurized milk. No way. They also found that states where raw milk sale was legal had twice the incidence of foodborne illness outbreaks related to dairy versus states where raw milk is restricted or banned.

6:52That'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. Interesting. 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. Is that not true anymore? I don't think so. Is it all like monster energy now? It's all oat milk for these soy boys.

7:27So milk consumption overall has been trending downward for like 50 years, but raw milk consumption appears to be on the rise. According to analysis from the University of Delaware, consumer data showed a 21 % increase in raw milk sales from 2023 to 2024. 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 of FDA surveys in 2016 and 2019 gave us a pretty good window into what raw milk consumption looks like. 4.4 % of American adults said that they had consumed raw milk in the last year and 1 % reported consuming raw milk weekly.

8:19Okay. 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 2%.

10:11Also, 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. They're like, 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 wayback 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 just 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 part the thing is that's actually why i'm here i the the french government heard me pronounce print amager 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 i get it 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 beets 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 we've still got it uh pastor figured out pasteurization and mostly applied it to wine and beer alcohol yeah the main use of pasteurization early on it was other scientists who figured out the application to milk.

12:52In 1882, a scientist named Robert Koch 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.

13:38We get a lot of feedback on how good my pronunciations are, how accurate and precise they are. Denouement. I can do it.

13:47Perseverance. Franz von Saxlett 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. It took him a while to 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 TB of it all.

14:28One 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?

15:05Right. 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 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 you were like is there an episode around this i was like don't get me started on the 1907 campaign my 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 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.

16:08He 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 New York Times was reporting about the dangers of what they called swill milk. Okay. 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 1858 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 a phrase in this.

17:07Early 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 the 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.

17:48Like that's what we should be calling it 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, 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.

18:24This reporting happened 50 years before the New York campaign, right? So 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.

19:15So they're getting it upstream. It's like make sure the milk is clean so you don't have to pasteurize it. is like the the attempt right but like even if you do that you're still like that none of that guarantees that there's not going to be e 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 a pasteurized milk tastes weird it tastes cooked and at that point it was cooked right like we pasteurize milk now for way less time right right so people are like dude raw milk tastes dope this stuff is 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 this 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.

20:10And 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 3 ,900 children were being fed supposedly safe raw milk, 1 ,509 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.

20:51Right. It sounds way bad, but it is a 14 % 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. In the meantime, New York got scooped by Chicago, who beat them to the punch and became the first city to ban raw milk in the U.S. 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 did pass.

21:42It's also funny, like, thinking about how ambitious this policymaking was compared to so much policymaking 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 policymaking should take place. 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 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.

22:27That does 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. From there, those city ordinances became state laws. It was a dance sensation. sweeping the nation and people get more accustomed to 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 Because while states have taken action at the state level, the FDA has not taken federal action.

23:24So it is still legal to sell raw milk across 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.

24:12Altadena 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. In the case of that contaminated queso fresco, that caused the deaths of 22 Angelenos.

24:55Through 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, it kind of is. In that, like, there's a scientific 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.

25:38I should also say this dude no longer owns Altadena. Altadena is still around. It's no longer owned by like total crackpots. 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 1987 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.

26:24Altadena certified raw milk advertised itself 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 see the idea that somebody like that needs like more vitamins more than they need like milk free of pathogens is insane yeah as a result for the first time ever altadena faces a court judgment finding them liable for telford's death 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 impact litigation by a consumer watchdog group.

27:31That 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 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 was 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.

28:19That's insane. The court ultimately ruled in favor of public citizen and the gray panthers and they find Altadena liable. Okay. 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.

29:39Yes! This isn't even like a hard trade-off, yeah. Following the FDA ban, following the sort of proliferation of state bans, people like pretty immediately try to find workarounds and they're successfully 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 workarounds is 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 riders.

30:31That'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 framing where it's like, oh, these are just like concerned mothers. It's Mumsnet, but for 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.

31:14And then the dairy delivers raw milk as a byproduct of the cow you fake own. Oh, I love that. We're not buying it. We're like subscribed. That all brings us to our contemporary context. Nightmare. Interestingly, 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. Well, that's because of transmission of bovine tuberculosis. A smaller herd can't transmit it as much, right?

32:00That there's fewer opportunities for the disease spreading. Washington and California both have legal raw milk retail sale. You can go to the grocery store and buy raw milk in Washington and California. It's at gas stations next to the Kratom. I mean, honest to God. One-stop shop. It's so... Just like the sketchy things aisle. You know, Erewhon 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.

32:41How about that? It's like a compromise. Like, you 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 on this. No, you treat it like it's a new discovery. We found a totally non-chemical way to sanitize milk. It's like perfectly natural. 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 as a way to sell heating milk to kill germs. Just call it like a deliberate sunshine.

33:15Milk 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 one's 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.