Raw milk is having a mooment

0:00Today explained from Vox, Sean Rameswaram here at the historic Old Town Farmers Market in Alexandria, Virginia, on a quest to find something that is not totally legal here across these United States, raw milk. Mom, have you ever seen raw milk here at this market? No. Have you ever seen it anywhere? Yes, in California and in Sri Lanka. You drank raw milk in Sri Lanka? Yes, from the day I was born until I left Sri Lanka. So you're not impressed with my search for raw milk? No. Not a thought. Okay, mom's not impressed, but I'm still looking for raw milk because more and more people are drinking it, and something like 18 states are currently trying to make it easier to drink right now.

0:40Let me see if I can find some. Sir, do you know where I can find raw milk? I do not. I don't. Not here. Nobody is that stupid here. Okay, so my farmer's market thing was a bit of a bust, but we're not giving up. We're moving on to Google, and we're going to find that raw milk on the show today. Ready to soundtrack your summer? With Red Bull Summer All Day Play, you choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end DJ, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings.

1:21Visit redbull.com slash bright summer ahead to learn more. See you this summer. What's up, y 'all? I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WNBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports. And mom. And this is And Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us.

1:57Okay, Mom, we weren't able to find any raw milk at the farmer's market in Alexandria, Virginia, but I think we might be able to find some out here in Glen Arm, Maryland, about 20 miles northwest of Baltimore. Are you ready? Yes, I'm excited. All right, that's the spirit.

2:25So let me kick this off more formally. So we are standing here in a field in Glenarm, Maryland. And your name, sir? My name is Matt Priggle. And we're here with? Bobby Priggle. Are you guys related? Yes, I'm his youngest son. Very nice. Okay. And we are at the Priggle Creamery. Yep. Priggle Creamery. Also Priggle Farm. My great-great-grandfather got the property we're on now in 1895. Amazing. And has it always been dairy? Back then, historically, farms did a little bit of everything. And then over the time and generations, it's consolidated. Now it's a dairy farm. The dairy is our bread and butter.

3:04And then we also are registered to sell raw milk in the state of Maryland as a pet food. So we do offer raw milk for cats and dogs. Interesting, but not for humans. It's illegal to sell milk in Maryland for human consumption. Okay. So how big is your raw milk for pet purposes in terms of your business? So the milk for cats and dogs week to week is roughly the same or more in sales at the greenery than the pasturized milk. Wow. So a lot of people want this milk for their cats and dogs. Sounds like it, yeah. Is there like a bit of a winking situation here? Nope. No winking, no nothing. They're not buying it for their cats and dogs.

3:48They're buying pet food. What they do with it when they leave the store, you know, I can't control that. It's up to them. But it's possible. Yeah, I didn't think it was possible. People were eating Tide Pods not that long ago. Have you seen an uptick in interest in raw milk here at the creamery? I would say it's been steady for the past couple years. Oh, wow. There's some cows trying to do. Oh, wow. Wow. Wow. That wasn't just an attempt at fornication, but also a bowel movement. Did you notice that? They have a couple of party tricks. If you stick around long enough, you'll see some stuff. Sorry.

4:26I got distracted. We were at, oh, there's been an uptick in interest. I think the interest has been kind of the same as far as like what goes on with our story. But as far as, you know, like the nation in general, I think there's been a big movement and big change in interest. You know, our government currently, there's a lot of hype and push about it. Social media, there's a lot of information coming out about it. You don't think we sell a lot more now than we did last year? Not right now. I think we've grown exponentially. Whoa! We've got some father-son disagreement here. Sounds like you're maybe looking at those numbers a little more closely.

5:02And what are you seeing? I think people are more interested. They're reading more about it, hearing more about it, have interest. You mentioned some political trends that have perhaps facilitated more interest in raw milk. Are you talking about the federal government? Mm-hmm. That Maha business and all that? Yeah. I mean, people should just get to choose, right? I mean, you go to the grocery store, you get to pick all you want. If you want to have raw milk, you should be able to go get that. Do you drink raw milk? Every day. Really? Wow. And you, sir? Absolutely. Absolutely. If our kids drank raw milk, I wouldn't drink anything else.

5:37You wouldn't drink anything else? I have an option of drinking raw milk or pasteurized milk in the same refrigerator. I pool raw milk every day. Are you guys like glass of milk guys? Are you talking about like with your cereal or what? I had a glass of milk with my steak last night. I had it in my coffee this morning. Oh, like with your dinner. Oh, yeah. Now, I'm not going to be offended by your answers to this question, but I want you to guess what kind of milk I drink. Oat milk. Which isn't milk, by the way. It's oat oil. Oat oil, oat juice. I'm laughing because you guessed correctly in one guess.

6:11Well, there's nothing wrong. I don't care. If you want, by all means, drink as much as you want. But it's not milk because milk, by definition, has to come from a mammal's mammary glands. And it doesn't. It's pressed and secreted oils and water that gets diluted and flavored down so you can actually drink it. I will say, unlike the other soy boys who come to visit you guys, I kind of have some lactose issues. So my drinking of oat milk, you know, it's a nice alternative for those of us who get some stomach issues when we drink milk. Of course, the reason most of us don't drink raw milk in this country is because many, many decades ago, we discovered that through pasteurization, we could avoid a whole host of diseases that were killing kids, including salmonella, listeria, tuberculosis it turns out, E.

7:01coli. There's a lot of questions now about bird flu in the raw milk. Your thoughts? So historically the biggest problem like you said many many decades ago it was a hundred years ago and people had this idea that nothing's changed in the past hundred years with the agricultural practices around. So historically so what happened was grains and distilling became really big in the 1920s, right? So all the distilleries were in the city, and they were bringing in weed in and barley and oats and everything and doing all the distilling process. And they had all these leftover grains and didn't know what to do with them.

7:35And they said, well, let's feed it to cows. All the dairy farms are out in the country. Why are we shipping everything in? Why don't we just bring the dairy into the city next to the distillery? And we'll just go from one building to the next and give it to them. Well, the problem was, one, no nutritional value left in the grains that the cows were eating. The cows were kept indoors, which is ripe for sanitation issues. Also in that era, there was no closed systems. There was poor refrigeration as well. And over time, now, our milk, we like to see it around 36 degrees. Okay. And then we have a closed milking system, right?

8:13So the milk never actually touches the air until it's getting bottled or you open the cap for the first time. Do you guys ever have people show up here who are curious about raw milk for their pets or maybe for another purpose? Who talk about those anxieties around, you know, listeria, salmonella, anything like that, and then have questions for you guys? So listeria is a groundwater issue. and we get tested very well the health department comes out once a year and tests our groundwater so that gets tested on a periodic basis and then the biggest concern that people have with raw milk is e coli and the problem with the feedlot is you have thousands of cows in one spot it's very easy for it to transmit so when it goes to slaughter one bad cow can get everywhere just by hands moving.

9:05We're a single herd. These are all of our cows. No one touches it but us. And it goes from here to the processor and then onto our shelves. You would tell someone who showed up here with some anxieties over raw milk not to worry about it. I would never tell them that. That's the thing, right? If I lived in Pennsylvania, I could give you a whole lot of different answers. Aha! But if they're worried or concerned, I would tell them not to drink it. There's always a chance. I wouldn't buy raw milk for me to consume or my family if I wasn't able to visit the farm and see how the practices are. And if you can't visit the farm, I wouldn't drink their milk.

9:40Okay. And obviously that's not how most Americans consume their food. Correct. I think if you're buying raw milk, it should come from your state and it should come from your farmer. I think you should find your farmer. And you should keep it there. Yeah, I don't think milk from California should come into the East Coast. The amount of time it takes in transportation, there's too many variables where things can go wrong. It needs to be a hyperlocal product. Now, if I were to ask about trying some raw milk, how does that work in the state of Maryland? I would have to recommend you don't because it's not pasteurized and maybe contains some harmful bacteria.

10:17Now, and I can't buy some to try right now, to say I lived a little bit while I was out here, but I could buy some for my mom's dog. Yeah, milk for cats and dogs, yeah. So maybe I could buy some of that. Now, if I were to drink some of that, that's my business. I recommend you don't, though. Got it. But you do. I drink raw milk every day. And when was the last time it made you sick? I have never been sick that I'm aware of from consuming it. I rarely ever get sick to begin with. Well, I'm going to buy some. And what I do with it is my business. And on this Memorial Day, there's something beautiful about that.

10:55Yes. Well, thank you and happy Memorial Day to you guys. Yeah, you as well. It looks like you're working through it. Yeah, cows always gotta be milked. That's right. Work never ends. That's right. They don't know it's Memorial Day. They don't care.

11:13I'm shaking the raw milk, and then I'm trying the raw milk. Here we go. Opening the raw milk. Oh, wow. Yeah. Smelling the raw milk. What does it smell like? It doesn't smell. It doesn't smell like anything. Let me shake it one more time just to be extra sure, you know? Okay. Here we go. Wish me luck.

11:39Tastes like milk. How you doing? Do you want to try it? One sip. One sip? All right, mom's trying the raw milk. Here we go. What do you think? If nobody told you, you wouldn't know. If nobody told you, you wouldn't know. That's true. Unless I get salmonella later. You won't. Mom says I won't.

12:10It's two days later now, and I didn't, but my tummy did feel a little funny that Memorial Day night, if I'm being completely honest. But as I said, I got some lactose issues, so it's still oat oil for me. When we're back on Today Explained, We're going to hear about the movement raw milk's having, not just in Glenar, Maryland, but across the country.

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15:01Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash YouAreRichBFF. We got to circulate this on radio. All right. What do we circulate? Looking for a man who has recently drunk milk? My name is Anna Merlin, and I'm a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering disinformation, extremism, and technology. I guess if you've like hung around on either side of the like ideological spectrum for the past decade or two, you've probably heard someone talking about raw milk. For me, I've heard like lefty, crunchy people talking about raw milk personally. But raw milk is having a moment right now in these United States.

15:44We are not united on raw milk. What is going on with raw milk? There is definitely an increasing interest in raw milk, especially the idea of increased raw milk legalization and selling raw milk across state lines, which I think even under the second Trump administration and RFK is not super likely. The FDA has enforced their ban on the interstate sale of raw milk since the 1980s. But there is a bill out there in committee right now. And there's also tons of bills at the state level to continue making raw milk even more accessible in various states. There are like 40 plus bills across 18 states that have to do with, you know, raw dairy, raw cheese.

16:33Oklahoma just passed one. Congratulations, Oklahoma. We are one step closer to food freedom. Raw milk is now legal to advertise and sell up to 1 ,500 gallons. So this is super awesome for Oklahomans. Raw milk is legal to some degree in 43 states, but it varies really widely. So in some places like California, where I live, you can go to the store and buy raw milk. In other places, you can access it through what's called a herd share, which is a legal agreement where consumers have access to a milking animal or a herd and they can buy or get the milk directly from the farmer. In other places, raw milk is only legal as pet food.

17:20But, you know, obviously there's nothing stopping people if they really insist on it from buying and drinking milk labeled as pet food. I bought and drank some pet food raw milk yesterday, Anna. Yes, I imagine you did. Because you're in D.C. That's right. I had to go to Maryland to do it, though. Yeah. Yeah. So D.C. is one of the places where raw milk is illegal. Rhode Island, I believe it is totally illegal, except I think you can get raw goat milk with a prescription from a doctor. It's also illegal in Hawaii. But yeah, most places in the U.S., you're going to be able to get raw milk in some form.

17:57Remind us why we decided to pasteurize our milk or what the benefits were? Right. So one of the first kind of big pushes for pasteurization of milk came in the 1930s after the discovery that raw milk could transmit tuberculosis, which was killing a lot of babies. Pasteurized milk, a safe food trusted by millions of people and important in every diet. Let's go back to middle school for a quick refresher on pasteurization. It's a centuries-old process that heats up milk to kill off bacteria like salmonella, listeria, or E. coli, then cools it back down. By heating raw milk to at least 161 Fahrenheit for 15 seconds and letting it cool, we can reduce the amount of viruses and bacteria in dairy.

18:40And so there was a pretty direct relationship between more and more places requiring pasteurization and infant mortality rates going down. And so after that, it was pretty clear to most people and most public health bodies that this was a good idea. Okay, so there are some clear risks here before pasteurization came around. And then they were saying basically pasteurize your milk, warm it up a little bit, and we will keep more kids alive. And then since that, you know, medical breakthrough, basically, we've been trying to dial it back. Why are we trying to dial it back and who's doing the dialing?

19:16So pretty much since pasteurization became a widespread thing, there has been opposition to it. And the raw milk movement has always argued that raw milk is better for you, that it's more natural. It's actually healing and very beneficial for your body. Raw milk will not spoil like conventional milk does. For instance, when I talked to Mark McAfee, who's the founder and CEO of Raw Farm, the biggest raw milk producer in the country, he told me that raw milk makes asthma go away, which is not true. according to public health experts, virologists, asthma experts. You will see arguments that raw milk is good for allergies.

19:56It has beneficial enzymes or bacteria. And this is pretty much the argument that's been made since the raw milk movement sort of organized and took force is this idea that raw milk inherently has nutrients and good qualities that are stripped from pasteurized milk. And these groups that are advocating for more raw milk, do they necessarily hew to like a certain political party? I think that historically raw milk, like anti-vaccine ideas, kind of cut equally across the right and the left. You know, I grew up in a pretty blue part of New Mexico and would certainly see raw milk being sold and discussed, so not the way that it is now.

20:37But definitely, you know, a lot of the places that you're seeing raw milk legislation, especially picking up our red states because of ideas around government regulation and health freedom. And like, of course, red state, blue state, you know, crunchy or libertarian, distrustful of government, wherever it might be. You might find some affinity in our current secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who last year famously did a shot of raw milk at the White House. He sure did. Want to do a shot of raw milk and toast this with me? All right. Secretary Kennedy, cheers. He did a little shooter of raw milk to celebrate the publication of the Maha Report, which was meant to be his big kind of capstone piece of writing presenting solutions for chronic disease and was full of AI slop and fake citations in which you will notice they don't talk about very much anymore.

21:33Did that quash his attempt to normalize raw milk at the federal level? So this is what's super interesting. Before Kennedy was in office as HHS secretary, he was famously really bullish on raw milk. As I was here last year, I only drank raw milk. He had this famous tweet in 2024 where he talked about all the things that the FDA was going to stop suppressing under his leadership. You know, he said the FDA's war on public health is about to end. And he listed all these things, including raw milk. But since then, much to the frustration of big players in the raw milk industry, there actually hasn't been any federal action to make raw milk more legal or to make it legal across state lines.

22:19Kennedy actually hasn't done anything on that. And Mark McAfee told me that he can't get Kennedy to, like, return his calls. Huh. One thing that has happened instead, though, is that the Trump administration has suddenly been trumpeting their emphasis on whole milk, right? Oh. You might have seen this a few months ago. They were saying, you know, we're bringing whole milk back to the schools. So today I'm delighted to sign the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act into law. Whole milk is no longer illegal in America, which it never was. It's like the war on Christmas. Yeah, exactly. And he's also ended the war on saturated fat.

22:54So yeah, a lot of their language around whole milk really echoes kind of the language around raw milk that you see among raw milk advocates, but it's not. They actually have not talked about raw milk at all. So you can speculate, you know, why this might have happened, if this is a liability issue, if there are still people at the CDC and the FDA who are like, it would be a really bad idea for the federal government to promote this. But yeah, I would say that for raw milk and raw dairy advocates, the fact that the Trump administration has not been on their side is clearly a big disappointment.

23:32Well, anecdotal, Anna, but the creamery I visited yesterday, Preagle, out in Glenarm, Maryland, they said raw milk was a big boon to their business. I mean, even though they only sell it for cats and dogs, it certainly seems like people are drinking it. Are public health officials, other than the Secretary of Health and Human Services, worried about that trend, if there is one? So earlier this year, an infant died in New Mexico from listeria that public health officials there think was probably linked to the infant's mom drinking it during pregnancy. And there have been, you know, a bunch of foodborne illness outbreaks.

24:11So, yeah, I think this is a concern for people because raw milk can carry E. coli, salmonella, campylobacter, things that can make you really, really sick. So there are concerns here, right? One, obviously, is the increasing availability of raw milk in various places. Another concern is that it is being marketed by health influencers and other people with big social media followings as like a miracle cure in a very simplistic way. And it is especially being marketed to parents as a cure-all for children, which is concerning because raw milk and dairy are especially risky for infants, immune-compromised people, and elderly people.

24:54You know, an illness like E. coli that could be, you know, serious, but you would make it through, potentially as an adult, is incredibly serious for a child and can lead to this thing called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which has sickened and killed children. The raw milk industry tends to talk about this idea that raw milk is safe if you trust your farmer. But when you talk to like a virologist, they will tell you that no matter how well you know your farmer, how much you think you trust the dairy, if you're not pasteurizing your milk, you're going to be at more risk of common foodborne pathogens.