The Raw Milk Revolution

Can you imagine drinking milk straight from the cow? At one point in time, that was the only way milk was consumed. Now, drinking wholly unprocessed milk is regarded as "extreme" by the general population, but its popularity is resurging in the kitchens of many young American women.

Thanks to the social media “trad wife” phenomenon, homestead influencers such as Hannah Neeleman of Ballerina Farm, the vegan diet backswing, and a desperate search for relief from dairy intolerances by thousands of women, there is a popular and growing demystification surrounding our nation's most hotly debated dairy product. 

There are many staunch opinions regarding human consumption of raw milk, which is milk that hasn’t been through the pasteurization process intended to kill off harmful bacteria. While pasteurization makes the milk shelf stable and safe for everyone to consume, it also destroys bacteria that would be otherwise healthy for our digestive systems and ease the process of lactose breakdown in the gut. Pasteurization of milk nationwide began in 1973 when all milk involved in interstate commerce began requiring pasteurization per FDA regulation. The sale of raw milk is illegal in Nebraska, Hawaii, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia. In many other states, it’s available only from licensed farms via milk delivery or herd share, or it’s sold only to be used as pet food.

Raw milk’s proponents can’t stop talking about the benefits, and its dissenters can’t stop accusing those who drink it of being deranged, suicidal lunatics. This product has gained an image for itself, one of idyllic misty morning farms, a sleepy cow milked by a dress-clad woman at sunrise, a bounty of warm milk consumed by six little children eating a homemade breakfast. In short, these days raw milk is seen as homespun, downhome, and traditional. Raw milk has become political, and it has landed firmly in the red camp. 

Milk as an Exercise of Freedom

Influencer Hannah Neeleman milked a cow straight into a bucket and fed it to her family, and raw milk gained instant celebrity status. Its place on conservative family blogging social media was cemented, and its popularity has risen ever since.

But raw milk’s resurgence isn’t just about bottling a bucolic life and representing bygone pastoral values. For young conservative women, raw milk is a gateway for making choices for their own families without government oversight. Women are asking questions about the government's influence on their lives and rejecting aggressive decision-making on their behalf. Raw milk represents the massive return to traditionalism happening right now, both in theory and in practice. Modern ways of living aren't working. Women are dissatisfied with their lives, more stressed, and less healthy. To buy raw milk is one tiny way to back away from modernity and step into a more analog life.

If you consider where you are most likely to find raw milk – on a farm or homestead in a more rural area – it’s not surprising that it’s conservative-minded individuals driving the raw milk craze. Its accessibility spread outward from agricultural areas, making majority right-voting locations some of the first to dabble in the world of the unpasteurized. It’s conservative women leading the strong and growing movement towards a traditional family structure and lifestyle, one where the man works a job and the woman stays home to care for the children and the home. These women, released from the shackles of a 9-5 and striving for a more family-centered lifestyle, are wise to the fact that what is accepted as normal isn't always the same as ideal or even correct. The spider web effect of this notion means that the same rejection of normality begins to permeate many aspects of life. Suddenly, raw milk isn’t the taboo and risky substance it’s been represented to be. They can purchase it from the farmers’ market or licensed local farmers and bring it home for their family to enjoy largely without issue. 

To buy raw milk is one tiny way to back away from modernity and step into a more analog life.

Women in 2024 are realizing that they no longer have to play by the rules. The feminine conservative movement is full of women taking back control of their lives in small but significant ways. They treat their own health conditions outside the pharmaceutical industry, they garden and raise their own chickens, and they opt to remove their children from the failing public school system and homeschool instead. Seeking out raw milk is another one of those small and important shifts from the conventionally accepted “normal” to an independently selected, heirloom practice. Strengthening the raw milk market benefits people and families on an individual level by potentially improving the health of those who drink it, and supporting the small farms whose milk sales increase their livelihood.   

To drink raw milk is a choice you can only make for yourself, and this writing is neither an endorsement nor an encouragement of its consumption. In fact, it is the very practice of exercising free choice after consideration of risk that is part of what’s driving the recent increase in the sale of unpasteurized dairy products. In this country, you are free to make choices for yourself that others might not make or that others find unwise. It’s part of exercising our freedom.

The Failure of Veganism

What we eat is an entirely personal decision, but the government and popular media have done a good job of encouraging and virtue-signaling for one style of eating in particular. For many years now, Americans have been bombarded by celebrity and political endorsements of eating vegan, vegetarian, or plant-based to improve our health and the environment. The vegan movement was pushed largely on women, who not only adopted it, but embraced it with vigor and force as a lifestyle rather than simply a diet. Products began springing up in grocery stores worldwide that replaced meat, often soy-based frankenfoods that came prepackaged in plastic. For many women, these diets did not restore health as promised, and women who spent years deep in the bowels of veganism culture and plant-based diets often found their bodies worse off than when they endeavored to forgo animal products in the first place. 

The environmental impact was also oversold. Fruits and vegetables consumed in vast quantities by the vegan community had to be flown and trucked to grocery stores in which their presence was out of season and non-native. Soy-based meat alternatives had to be packaged in petroleum-based plastic products, all of which adds up to increased fossil fuel use.

Veganism and plant-based eating were pushed on American women, and what they got in return was high grocery bills and gastrointestinal issues. Suddenly, the government-sponsored vegan diet didn't look so appealing. They looked for a better solution, one they freely chose for themselves. The vegan backswing introduced a new generation of women to straight-from-the-source animal products like home-cooped eggs, cows purchased whole then butchered, and raw cow’s milk – all sustainable, minimally processed, and nutrient-rich animal foods. Ex-vegans took to social media to lament their dissatisfaction with the diet, and soon learned of the supposed healing power and high nutrient density of raw milk, which their depleted bodies desperately needed, and they were willing to give it a try.

A Host of Advocates

A significant number of women in America suffer from some degree of lactose sensitivity, ranging from mild stomach discomfort after consuming dairy products to debilitating chronic illness from lactose exposure. Without much help from Western medicine in the way of curative treatments, some women began sampling raw milk in hopes that the native bacteria and enzymes present in the unpasteurized product would allow them to consume dairy without discomfort. To their surprise, many discovered they could in fact tolerate raw dairy, and the miracle spread across TikTok and Instagram like wildfire.  

Raw milk proponents like the non-profit nutrition group the Weston A. Price Foundation have been championing raw milk’s digestibility for decades. Sally Fallon Morell, Weston A. Price Foundation president, gained widespread popularity during the pandemic, and the foundation was able to shine a larger spotlight on animal-based eating. Distrust in the government and health regulatory bodies was exceptionally high during the pandemic and post-pandemic period, and interest in alternative remedies and foods that fall outside the boundaries of what is widely accepted skyrocketed. 

Purchasing raw milk during this tumultuous time was a great way to support the ultimate small business: your local farmer. And when stores required masks and established hoops for patrons to jump through just to put food on the table, your local milk producer likely did not. 

If there is an ailment, raw milk has probably been touted as an anecdotal cure-all for it.

Although the Weston A. Price Foundation, led by doctors, dentists, and scientists, conducts studies on raw dairy products, most of the information gathered across social media is anecdotal. There are countless testimonials from women who once could never dream of touching anything other than almond milk now able to drink raw milk with comfort. Women who deal with skin issues like acne and eczema are finding relief, and women are shocked to see arthritis symptoms lessening or clearing up after introducing raw milk to their diet. If there is an ailment, raw milk has probably been touted as an anecdotal cure-all for it.

So, can raw milk really be the lifesaver that its champions declare it to be? If you ask the FDA and the National Institute of Health, definitely not. But thousands of women who have tried it say otherwise. The curative capabilities of raw milk probably live somewhere in between. It seems that the majority of the people willing to take that gamble in the United States are conservative women. It’s an interesting break from the norm, as it’s the ideologically liberal who were once the primary inhabitants of the alternative nutrition periphery. The left has undergone a massive switch over the last decade, moving from the hippie tonics and tinctures generation to a new breed of liberals who worship at the altar of government-sponsored science, which leaves no room for anecdotal evidence. They “believe women,” but not the ones who say that raw milk cured their gut issues.

Our straight-from-the-udder milk drinking ancestors could never imagine the firestorm of controversy that raw milk has become in recent years. Consumption of raw milk poses risks, just like driving a car to work or eating from your local sushi bar. Yet it’s young conservative women who are most willing to take that risk. It’s a small choice that harkens back to a more ancestral time, when foods were less processed and family structures were more traditional. For women who are dissatisfied with modern living or who experienced the downfalls of eating vegan firsthand, choosing to buy raw milk is a step towards a more local, slower-paced way of living. 

If you are one to wholeheartedly “trust the science,” you’re likely to never touch the stuff. But if you remain open-minded to the possibility that the conventionally accepted “normal” is not always the best option, then you might begin inquiring about where to find raw dairy. There is a strong possibility that, should you choose to consume it, raw milk could make you healthier. It just might be the starting point for the health and cultural revolution our country desperately needs.