Raw milk is about to have its culture war moment
☀️ Happy Monday y’all. Let’s do this.
Issue #209: Milktalk, the NYC marathon-as-party, a simple explanation of tariffs and becoming the boss of your phone
Let’s talk about raw milk.
Long a trend among health influencers and tradwives who make claims about its nutritional value, raw milk is a staple topic of “for you” pages across all flavors of social media. With former presidential candidate/bear corpse dumper/raw milk booster Robert F. Kennedy Jr. poised to become head of the Health and Human Services Department, raw milk is about to have its culture war moment.
The science on unpasteurized milk seems straightforward:
- It’s risky. As the FDA says, consuming it in any form poses serious increased health risks from germs like Salmonella, E. coli, Listeria, and Campylobacter. Drinking it can kill you.
- It’s not healthier for you — there aren’t more nutrients or probiotics, it doesn’t cure lactose intolerance, it’s not better at preventing osteoporosis.
In other words, the misleading benefits would never outweigh the immense risk that comes from drinking it.
What’s the counter argument? In addition to the fundamentally wrong health claims above, there’s an argument about taste (I’ve tried raw milk; it tasted like…milk?), but also a generalized dislike of processed, industrialized food, which is a thread RFK Jr. is likely to pull on if he’s confirmed (by no means a foregone conclusion). There’s also reason to question why we are drinking so much milk to begin with.
One more thing: If you’ll recall, last spring there was a bird flu epidemic among dairy cattle in the U.S. You maybe haven’t heard much about it lately, but it’s still going on; there have been 136 new cases discovered in California in the last 30 days. The conversation in the spring was about milk safety, and ensuring that milk production was safely eliminating the virus. The process for that? Pasteurization. So add increased risk of bird flu to the list of reasons not to drink raw milk.
🏄♀️ 1 sentence, 1 story
- You run thousands of training miles to make it to the New York City Marathon just to see someone hold up a sign saying “Welcome to the Bronx, now get the f*ck out” — but it’s all worth it. (Patricia Vicary, Runner’s Life)
- We’re drawing lots of wrong conclusions from the election results; Democrats shouldn’t over-correct and Republicans shouldn’t be over-confident. (Matthew Dowd)
- A small business owner explains tariffs in simple terms: the prices of imported goods go up, and the increased cost is paid by the importer, and passed on to the consumer. (Sam W.)
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