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Transcript:
What’s the most dangerous food for humans to eat? When I first contemplated that question, my mind immediately went to exotic fare: fugu, for instance, the pufferfish that contains lethal toxins but is apparently delicious when prepared correctly. Or bats, which are a reservoir for a large number of diseases and so eating them is linked with diseases like neurodegenerative disorders.
Here in the West, we often see people dying of eating foods that we don’t and we roll our eyes and wonder why anyone would be so stupid. And then we sit down to dinner with our children and pour them big glasses of milk. Milk! The actual, number one, most dangerous food for humans to eat. Or, it was, and may be once again, depending on how you define things.
I’m not even talking about the vegan talking points that link cow’s milk to various cancers later in life: the evidence on that isn’t at all clear, as cow’s milk may actually decrease your risk of outcomes like colorectal cancer while increasing your risk of outcomes like prostate cancer, while the impact on many other kinds of cancer is too mixed to really say one way or the other.
No, I’m talking about the direct dangers of drinking milk, and that’s dangers, as in plural, as in more than one way that drinking milk can fuck a human up–or, COULD fuck you up, back before we started pasteurizing it.
Bacteria absolutely LOVES milk, and so prior to the late 19th century, milk from cows, sheep, and goats was responsible for outbreaks of infections from E.coli, Salmonella, Listeria, and other deadly germs you’ve probably never even heard of. People drank tainted milk and subsequently died of diphtheria, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis, which alone killed around 65,000 people in England and Wales between 1912 and 1937. Recent research has shown that even the flu can hang out in refrigerated milk–RAW milk, that is.
“Raw” milk is milk that has not been pasteurized. Pasteurization is the reason why we no longer see tens of thousands of people dying from drinking milk. For centuries, civilizations have known that applying heat to some food products allows them to be preserved for longer periods of time, and by “food products” I of course mean alcohol. The Chinese were using it to preserve wine in the 12th century, and over the following years various people applied the technique to other substances. In the mid 19th century Louis Pasteur came up with a gentler way to pasteurize wine without screwing up the taste, and everyone loved that so much they named the entire process after him.
By the dawn of the 20th century, people realized that pasteurizing milk would prevent all this illness and death, and once it became the law and industry standard, aside from the occasional accidental exposure, no one ever again shat themselves to death over a bowl of ice cream. Forever. Everything’s great now. Oh, hold on, let me just see what’s new in social media short form video.
Ah yes, of course, that’s the director of the US Department of Health and Human Services doing a shot of unpasteurized milk while on a podcast with pseudoscientific health influencer Paul Saladino. Cool. Love to see it.
“Raw” milk is not a new phenomenon. Back in the ‘90s, I would occasionally drink it at my friends’ farms, because I grew up in the part of New Jersey that is, still, “the garden state.” Lots of cows. At the time, the families I knew drank it because they thought it tasted better, but also they probably drank it because it basically cost them nothing. Why buy the milk when you can get it from the cow for free? That’s a famous saying, I think.
But now that “manly men” like RFK are actively promoting it as some kind of cool, “back to nature,” healthy choice, I think it’s time we officially stop calling it “raw milk,” because you know they think that sounds badass. At the least, we should call it “unpasteurized milk,” and at the most we should just call it “poop milk.” Because these idiots are trying to convince people that it’s better for them when literally the opposite is true. For a start, unless you are a literal baby, milk doesn’t really offer any unique health benefits whether it’s pasteurized or not. And pasteurizing it certainly doesn’t make it any less nutritious.
But alas, “health” influencers and, now, the people in charge of the US government, don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
Ever since Trump was reelected, I’ve frequently warned about how federal oversight of food safety would be going down the drain, and pointing out that our only real hope now lies in our state regulators, who have fewer resources to handle the job. This week, I read a story that perfectly highlights this problem: “A Girl Nearly Died After Drinking Raw Milk. The State Did Little to Punish the Unlicensed Farmer Who Sold It,” a piece reported by Annie Waldman for Pro Publica.
The headline actually undersells the story, because in fact, TWO children nearly died after drinking raw milk from the same farm, and the farmer got away without any ramifications. And the state that failed, here, was my own state. The state that many people, both residents and those across the country, look to for guidance on how to protect people under a fascist federal regime that is trying to kill us: California.
“Moonlight Ridge,” a goat farm owned by a 23-year old woman named Courtney Baker, sold gallons of unpasteurized milk to people using word-of-mouth, facilitated by–what else? Facebook groups. Meta prohibits selling poop milk on their Marketplace, but they don’t limit “discussion” on regular pages and groups.
In this case, a woman who was having trouble weaning her baby saw a post recommending poop milk, posted by her–big sigh, here–chiropractor. In case you don’t know, chiropractors are charlatans. You shouldn’t even go to them for back trouble, let alone any other health concern you may have. And you definitely, absolutely, should not buy unpasteurized poop milk from them.
Unfortunately, this mother, Emily Marris, didn’t know any of that. She commented on her chiropractor’s post, asking if unpasteurized milk would be good for her baby. Other commenters in the group pointed her to Moonlight Ridge, suggesting that goat milk would be better than the chiropractor’s cow milk as it’s easier for babies to digest.
Marris visited Moonlight Ridge and met Baker, who sold her a gallon of milk and met the baby who would be drinking it. The two women texted afterward, celebrating the fact that the baby drank the milk and seemed to digest it well.
After six months of drinking the unpasteurized goat milk, the baby suddenly got sick. After several days of vomiting, the parents took her to the hospital where she was confirmed to have E. coli O157:H7, one of the most dangerous strains of the bacteria. As the baby barely clung to life, Marris texted Baker to warn her that the doctors said she had likely got it from the milk. Baker revealed that she had no idea you could even get E. coli from milk: “All the tests I’m finding looks like it mainly comes from meat,” Baker wrote.
Meanwhile, another family was giving the exact same goat milk to their six-year-old daughter, who also fell ill, was also rushed to the hospital, and was also found to have the exact same strain of E. coli. Marris again texted Baker and suggested she stop selling milk now that there were two otherwise unrelated children fighting for their lives in the hospital with the same infection. Then she watched as Baker continued posting on Facebook advertising her goat milk.
Baker later insisted that she knew the infections didn’t come from her goat milk because if so, she and her husband would have gotten sick, too. As a reminder, these infections are far more deadly to children, the elderly, pregnant people, and other people with compromised immune systems. 23-year old dipshits, unfortunately, are at a lower risk.
Had this outbreak come from one of California’s licensed unpasteurized milk farms, authorities would have gone onto the premises, milked the animals, and tested the milk as well as the soil and equipment surrounding them. Because Moonlight Ridge was NOT licensed to sell unpasteurized milk, instead the authorities sent Baker a cease and desist, and asked her to hand over her own milk sample, which they did not witness being collected. That sample came back clean, and Baker used that clean sample as proof that her milk was safe as she continued to sell through Facebook messages. The only change? Now she had to label the milk as “not for human consumption.” She was still allowed to sell it as pet food, or for other applications like soap making.
As we’ve seen with ivermectin, a product being labeled as “for pets only” rarely stops lunatics from consuming it.
And as an aside, unpasteurized milk is also unsafe for your pets. In 2024, the CDC revealed that at a Texas dairy farm where the cows tested positive for bird flu, 24 cats died after drinking the unpasteurized milk from the cows there. Pasteurization kills bird flu. So excuse me if I’m a bit disgusted that the loophole being used to sell poop milk to be given to babies is actually horrible even when following the letter of the law. In a decent society, our rules and regulations should protect all members of our families, even the furry ones. But I digress.
The good news here is that both children in this story survived. The bad news is that they will likely suffer long-term effects from this–the younger girl will “need to be seen every six months by a nephrologist and would not ever be able to drink alcohol.” That’s terrifying. If you’ve ever known a teenager with a potentially deadly condition, you know how hard it is to keep them safe when they’re surrounded by peer pressure and the desire to live a “normal” life. Courtney Baker’s negligence could still lead to this girl’s death.
Meanwhile, California authorities decided not to pursue criminal charges against her, despite the clear history of Facebook posts and text messages and hospital records that prove she sold tainted milk to be given to children, and continued selling it after being informed of the children’s condition. According to Pro Publica, Baker decided not to press her luck here: she has moved Moonlight Ridge to Arizona, where new authorities with new regulations will have to decide how to deal with her.
Federal oversight of this issue is now run by RFK, Jr., who we know is a fan of poop milk, so this is the new normal: even if state regulators do the bare minimum of investigating a bad actor, that actor can just move to a different state and keep going. What could go wrong? After all, letting dangerous people move from place to place with no oversight worked so well for the Catholic Church.
