Got Milk? Why Raw Milk is Popular (And Dangerous)

Raw milk isn’t illegal. Should it be?

What is Raw Milk?

Most of the jugs of milk you get from your local grocer are pasteurized. This process heats up liquids (including beer!) to keep it from souring or going bad; it also prevents disease by killing tiny pathogens. It’s named after a French scientist who fucked around and found out, for the good of all humanity, that heat kills disease.

You can still get unpasteurized, or “raw,” milk. People who drink it are more susceptible to traveling down the Crunchy to Alt-right pipeline. If you’ve never heard of the term “crunchy” it’s a term to capture the stereotypical Berkeley mom in Tevas or Birkenstocks who wears all her babies, gives them amber teething necklaces, and professes that vaccines cause autism. All that aside, the Bay Area is teeming with raw milk for sale. 

Why Do People Drink It?

Raw milk proponents say it tastes better and has good side effects. The milk taste differs, but it’s nothing you can’t improve by switching from 2% to whole milk or paying attention to the type of pasteurization. Milk flavor can be impacted by all sorts of things. The joke is that you can taste when milk comes from a happy cow, and that’s not far from the truth. They’ve even found that the grade of the pasture can affect the flavor profile. 

A 2024 study from Lan et. al suggests a little heat can balance out undesirable flavors like hexanal, which smells like freshly mown grass. Yet ultra-pasteurization at a higher heat sped up the oxidation of the fats and led to more methyl ketones (bad taste). 

Another factor is something called homogenization. Homogenized milk is basically shaken up so that the fats are evenly blended throughout the jug. That’s why raw milk might look frothy on top.

Gut Check

As for the gut check, the risks of drinking raw milk far outweigh any potential benefit, and remember that there are no peer-reviewed studies proving that there are any benefits to begin with. Your body gets most of the nutrients it needs by consuming a diet with lots of variety and color; anything else is someone trying to sell you something. And many people don’t even realize they’re flirting with orthorexia, which is disordered eating focused on obsessing over the healthiest things to consume.

Dangers Abound

Meanwhile drinking raw milk can expose you to all of the following (and this is NOT an inclusive list):

• Tuberculosis that makes you cough up blood and you die
• Diphtheria that gives you a white patch on your tonsils that blocks your airways and you die
• Typhoid that rips holes in your guts and you die
• Campylobacter that gives you deadly diarrhea (that means you die)
• Listeria that inflames your brain until it’s too big for your head and you die
• Brucella that makes your bones ache until your heart gets too big and you die
• E. Coli that kills the tissue in your bowels and you die
• Salmonella that infects your bones and you die
• Strep that can really fuck up a pregnant person 
• Flu (did you know you can die of the regular flu?)
• HVN1 (Bird Flu) that can… Well, you get the picture.

Milk is going to continue being a big part of pop culture. Villains and celebrities drink it. It’s a big part of many of your favorite dessert recipes. It’s even a tradition to leave out milk and cookies for Santa. But don’t jump on a hype train for something that might end up killing you. 

Got Milk?