The Life-Affirming Vitality Of Raw Milk

Authored by Matthew Gasda via RealClearBooks,

I've been drinking raw milk for almost 15 years, ever since I made a sudden switch from veganism while visiting my sister in Europe. At the time, she was living in Germany and getting raw milk from a local farmer. I remember mocking her, interrogating her, feigning disgust—performing disgust—which I thought was justified by science and ethics. Then, in an instant, it hit me: I was the one being disgusting (rejecting local, traditional, healthy food while scouring German supermarkets for synthetic vegan snacks imported from around the globe).

When I got back to New York City, where I lived then and still live now, I found a raw milk co-op, which I still use today. The driver, who I won’t name because it’s illegal to sell raw milk in New York, has become my friend. The milk comes from the Amish. Over these 15 years, I’ve only been to the doctor once, for a routine physical. I’ve had no major health problems or depression. My friends say I look young; I feel young. I play sports every weekend. I play fast for my age. I feel better, much stronger, than when I was much younger, and vegan.

Thus, the animus behind the Amish vote turning out for Trump, linked to events like the federal raid on Amos Miller’s farm and the confiscation of his raw dairy, didn’t surprise me. The Amish are representative figures for a particular kind of social and subject position. Their traditional practices and resistance to modernization make them perfect symbols for a broader cultural revolt against technocratic authority.

While not a national headline, the Fed’s raid on Miller went viral on X, and for me, it exemplified how progressive health culture—once about choice and care—has become indistinguishable from federal overreach. The message sent by the state health officials and NGO activists is clear: no one should drink milk or slaughter animals on their own or seek non-pharmacologically mediated health. We should drink oat milk, pea protein smoothies, and eat fake meat. Pharmaceuticals should be the first and last line against illness.

For some, the meme-ification of raw milk (and related products like beef tallow) is just a sideshow to what is increasingly, clearly, a small "r" anti-bureaucrat populist political revolt. However, I think the raw milk meme, the signifier, encapsulates something very deep about that revolution: Americans want the level of healthiness the Amish have, and are increasingly willing, like the Amish, to push back against health norms dictated by bureaucrats, Big Agra, and Big Pharma.

"Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier," the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wisely asserts. Case in point: fake milks, which have long symbolized "progress"  and liberal orthodoxy, environmental sensitivity, and supposed better health and living. Progressive food hygiene reflects a broader cultivation of neuroticism—a puritanical morbidity that’s ultimately about self-denial. It’s not just that Amish foods, rooted in centuries of tradition, are safe. It’s that they taste good—rich, fatty, nutritious. Foods like raw milk, pastured eggs, and raw meat excite the senses, nourish the body, and make modern life, with its endless laptop work, socializing, and algorithmic dating, feel worthwhile.

Drinking raw milk is part of a larger desire to reconnect to the body, to natural reality, to traditions, to the earth. Raw milk symbolizes nature, locality, and the uncommodified. It stands against a scientistic (not scientific) mindset that insists on interventions like pasteurization—treating food in a way that might make it marginally safer but also destroys part of its essence, its taste. Pasteurization is a metaphor for the progressive mentality: a relentless pursuit of safety at all costs, even if it makes life blander and less vital.

Raw milk, tallow, and the broader "MAHA" movement reject this safetyism. They defy the smug, know-it-all attitudes of the Axios, Ezra Klein class, who can’t fathom why anyone would choose non-optimized, non-expert-approved practices. For years, I’ve had friends (who are often demonstrably, obviously, very physically unwell) tell me I’m endangering myself by drinking raw milk. They’ve called it disgusting, weird, even subversive. These same types were shocked when I didn’t wear a mask or get a vaccine, and they’re just as shocked that I didn’t vote for Kamala.

This ahistorical obsession with safety and control—what's "normal"—isn't just conditioned by corporate food interests; it's embedded in a complex web of power relations that shape our very understanding of health and risk. The modern food safety regime—which has been internalized by cable-news watching, unthinking ‘libs’ as normal—demands not just compliance, but cultish devotion to the status quo systems (like the food and medical systems)—a devotion which entails a denial of our sensory experience and a rejection of accumulated wisdom. It's a form of what Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence,” whereby what for thousands of years was considered a normal act (drinking unprocessed milk), becomes redefined by a dominant, in this case, technocratic culture as dangerous or regressive.

Our technocratic, medicalized, scientistic life-system insists we feel "right" rather than feel alive, and that symbols matter more than the signals of the body itself. Drinking raw milk, therefore, has a kind of sacramental quality, just in the sense that it shocks those who practice the rituals of liberal hygiene and right-living; it inverts hygiene practices and is actually about making food holy again.

We're asked to sacrifice tradition for regulation, vitality for standardization, embodied wisdom for bureaucratic protocols. We're trading the full-bodied experience of life—with all its subtle flavors, risks, and rewards—for a thin gruel of safetyism and industrial efficiency. Raw milk memes, and the Amish voting turnout, and MAHA isn't just about dairy or tallow or seed oils; it's about refusing a certain kind of bargain where useful unofficial forms of knowledge and experience are discarded and mocked.

Progressivism, both as a politics and a lifestyle, has the high burden of proving that the future is always better than the past; I think many are finding that there’s no reason to accept that burden. Sometimes the past, backed by thousands of years of fine-tuning, is just better than the future.