Why Is Your Weird Facebook Uncle Obsessed With Raw Milk?

Donald Trump has been reelected as president of the United States, which means that stupidity will be frequent and widespread. And unfortunately, it’ll come at the cost of a lot of people’s health. Remember when Trump was president last time? We were plunged into a literal pandemic, and he wanted his doctors to explore whether disinfectants like bleach could be injected into the human body to stop the virus. Well, it seems we’ve been transported back into the land of disturbingly dumb — and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s nomination as U.S. health secretary will only seem to add fuel to this very stupid fire. Except this time, the focus will be on milk — raw milk, to be exact.

If you’ve noticed that a slew of right-winger influencers (including that one uncle you’re dreading seeing this Thanksgiving) have been posting fervently about drinking and enjoying raw milk out of nowhere, you aren’t losing it (but they might be). It’s not because people just discovered raw milk. It’s because RFK Jr. has expressed his dedication to stopping the “aggressive suppression” of raw milk. So, in support of this dumb AF goal, equally dumb people are showing “solidarity” with unpasteurized milk.

What Is Raw Milk?

If you drink cow, goat, or other animal milk, the milk you’re drinking doesn’t come straight from the udder — and this is a good thing. It goes through a process called pasteurization, which gets rid of all of the bacteria and germs so that it can be safe to drink. Raw milk is basically unpasteurized milk, which means that it could’ve been contaminated at any point in the milk extraction process. If you dilute raw milk with water, you can use it to fertilize plants like tomatoes and peppers. It can also be used as a disinfectant. But what it shouldn’t be used as? Regular drinking milk.

Is It Safe To Drink Raw Milk?

The short answer: no! The Food and Drug Administration has made it pretty clear that unpasteurized milk can pose serious health risks. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pasteurization is crucial for milk safety — because the process kills harmful germs that can cause illness.

If you need extra reason for caution, Bird Flu was just detected in raw milk being sold in California. While no one has been confirmed sick “out of an abundance of caution, and due to the ongoing spread of bird flu in dairy cows, poultry, and sporadic human cases, consumers should not consume any of the affected raw milk,” the California Department of Public Health said in a news release.

Why Won’t Trump Supporters Shut Up About Raw Milk?

Because we’re living in a time where science apparently doesn’t matter, some people (largely Trump supporters) are ignoring very real health concerns and drinking raw milk anyway. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene recently tweeted, “Raw Milk does a body good. Make America Healthy Again!” And it doesn’t help that Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services secretary claims that pasteurization causes all of the “good bacteria” to be taken out of milk. The bacteria in question here? Oh, you know, things like Salmonella, E.coli, and Listeria — all things that can make you very, very sick and even kill you in severe cases.

In the same way that there was a spike in calls to Poison Control in relation to disinfectant exposures in 2020, we can expect issues to arise from people drinking raw milk. The reason that people are so fired up about it has nothing to do with their love of raw milk. In fact, I’d bet that most of these people posting videos of them drinking raw milk went out and bought their first carton because it’s become a talking point in relation to Trump’s election.

Listen, if you want your cereal with a side of severe food poisoning, be my guest, but promoting raw milk as “healthy” isn’t just horrendously incorrect, it’s also dangerous AF.