There was a time when unhinged back-to-nature idealism was limited to the green left. Not anymore. Raw milk has become a MAGA symbol.
We all know the type: modern-day hippies who wear handmade tie-dyed clothes to Mary-Ann’s Natural Emporium (or Whole Food Emporium, as it once was called), and buy crunchy foods that have never seen the inside of the factory and are guaranteed free of preservatives, colourants, flavourants, emulsifiers, gluten, lactose, sugar, fat, and all the other things that make food safe, digestible, and tasty.
They’re likely to drive VW Beetles or urban SUVs, and preach love, peace and socialism at anyone who cares to listen.
Hobby horse
Their particular hobby horse is the evil of corporations who put profit before people, and probably put people in the food. They’ll weave improbable conspiracy theories about how Big Agri, Big Food, Big Pharma, and Big Retail are all in league with the government regulators to poison the people, to keep them chronically sick, unproductive, docile, and mentally ill.
They don’t trust government regulators, because regulatory bodies are part of the capitalist establishment and are in the pockets of multinational corporations. They don’t trust scientists, because they work either for the government or for the corporations.
They truly believe that if you can’t pronounce it, you shouldn’t eat it, thereby turning ignorance into the standard for food safety.
In their world, there’s nothing worse than being an unapologetic capitalist who believes in free markets, because that implies that you’re either a patsy who isn’t smart enough to see the connections, or a stooge who secretly pockets money to parrot the corporate line. They’re enlightened (or “woke”, if you’ll pardon the term), and you’re either an ignorant chump or an evil lackey.
Radical right
Lately, this anti-establishment back-to-nature nonsense has been infecting the opposite side of the political spectrum, too.
It started on the radical extremes, with people like shouty conspiracy-theorist Alex Jones turning paranoia about the deep state and the New World Order into a profitable platform for peddling crazy videos, dubious remedies, and nutritional supplements.
It is, of course, entirely justifiable to be skeptical of establishment science, to be opposed to regulations of any kind, and to be distrustful of the cronyist nexus between big government and big business. I am, and it’s a perfectly rational, libertarian view to take.
But there’s always been a libertarian fringe which is so skeptical, so opposed, and so distrustful, that their brains fall out and all that’s left is a mindless hippie chanting, ‘Om’.
Conversion
Enter stage left, a life-long Democrat, environmental lawyer and anti-capitalist nutjob.
He has said Donald Trump “discredited the American experiment with self-governance”. He has said Trump “systematically” supports totalitarian states around the world. He said Trump was a “terrible president” who “turned government over to corporate pirates”. He said Trump had an “imperial plan” for American foreign policy which would not put America first and would not make America great. He called Trump’s policies “absurd and terrifying”. He said, “Trump has a weakness for swamp creatures, especially corporate monopolies, their lobbyists, and their money”. He said instead of draining the swamp, Trump “hired swamp creatures to regulate their own industries”. He said Trump didn’t stand up for the Constitution when it really mattered, during the pandemic. He said Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election were “appalling”. “He’s a bully, and I don’t like bullies,” he said of Trump.
Then he had a conversion the likes of which has not been seen since Paul saw the light on the road to Damascus.
That person, of course, is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who caved like a spineless little piss-ant when Trump dangled a whiff of power in front of his nose. His supporters meekly flocked onto the Trump Train, and RFK is now one of Trump’s chief bootlickers.
This pattern of former critics kowtowing to the powerful demagogue is not uncommon. Many of the appointments Trump announced in anticipation of his inauguration in January were once sharply critical of Trump, but can’t bow and scrape low enough now.
Let me quote an authority on the subject: “The way that you build a truly vicious nationalist movement is to wed a relatively small core of belligerent idiots to a much larger group of opportunists and spineless fellow travelers whose primary function is to turn a blind eye to things. We may not have that many outright Nazis in America, but we have plenty of cowards and bootlickers, and once those fleshy dominoes start tumbling into the Trump camp, the game is up.”
So said none other than the craven lickspittle, RFK Jr.
Raw milk
But back to the topic at hand.
In the mid-19th century, a flawed genius named Louis Pasteur studied, among many other things, the role of micro-organisms in the fermentation of wine and beer. He was particularly interested in those that could cause disease in humans.
He developed the process by which potentially contaminated liquids, like wine, beer and milk, were heated in order to kill most of the pathogens they contained. This significantly lengthened their shelf life before they would spoil. The process was named after him, and became known as pasteurisation.
Throughout the 20th century, pasteurising milk and other dairy products became common and prevented many diseases, including tuberculosis, brucellosis, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and Q-fever.
Unpasteurised milk, marketed as “raw milk”, is an excellent growth medium for micro-organisms, including campylobacter, cryptosporidium, escherichia coli, listeria, brucella, and salmonella.
While raw milk from a good dairy is fairly safe to drink straight off the farm, it doesn’t travel well. Bacteria grow fast, giving it a short shelf life before spoiling.
There is little evidence that pasteurisation significantly reduces the nutritional value of milk, and those nutrients that are affected, like vitamin C, are easy to obtain from the rest of a healthy balanced diet.
Despite the relatively low level of consumption of unpasteurised milk in the US, it accounts for more than five times the number of hospitalisations for food-borne illness than pasteurised dairy products do.
MAGA milk
Recently, sales of raw milk increased sharply, despite the threat of bird flu among dairy cattle which could spark a new pandemic if it were to infect humans.
What used to be a health fad among left-wing celebrities (including RFK Jr.) and pseudo-hippie urban elites has become an icon of resistance among the Make American Great Again (MAGA) crowd.
Hosts on Alex Jones’s platform, Infowars, are yelling that bird flu is a plot by the government to take your raw milk away. Turning Point USA, a MAGA-oriented youth voter organisation sells “Got Raw Milk” T-shirts. Podcast host Joe Rogan rants about the government’s “war on raw milk”. Republican legislators are introducing bills to legalise the interstate sale of raw milk.
It’s really strange to see so much political noise spent on a health food fad that has so few benefits but poses substantial risks.
Yet as Phoebe Davis writes, it isn’t about raw milk, per se. “It’s about how the MAGA movement has found common ground with the anti-establishment left to sow mistrust in federal agencies, a stance fully embodied in RFK Jr’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’.”
Liberty
Of course, as a libertarian, I don’t care what you drink. If you want to drink festering milk contaminated with cow shit, then be my guest. The government has no right to protect you from your own stupidity.
Having said that, I also understand the impulse for public health authorities to want to protect people from what is an obvious health risk, especially for young children and the elderly, at very little cost. You won’t see me campaigning against pasteurisation standards.
There’s a lot to be said about over-regulation, but surely it would make far more sense to start by tackling something really meaningful, such as, say, the laborious and expensive process to get new cancer drugs approved. While patients are dying, regulators say it isn’t safe enough to try innovative new drugs, even in terminal cases. That strikes me as perverse.
It doesn’t strike me as perverse to restrict the sale of raw milk to circumstances – such as sales direct from farms – where the milk isn’t exposed to the vagaries of long supply chains, and isn’t easily available to unwitting consumers and vulnerable elderly people or children.
Brandishing raw milk as some sort of badge of honour, of resistance against the “deep state”, against over-regulation, and against overweening public health authorities, strikes me as pretty stupid.
It has exactly the same vibe as those libertarians who think the most important issue in fighting the big, bad government is to legalise pot. Sure, legalise it, but making weed your symbol of resistance is just dumb.
Enjoy your diarrhoea, MAGA nitwits.
[Photo: A cow in a meadow. Nice, isn’t it? Photo: copyright-free via pxhere.com.]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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