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How Raw Milk Went from a Whole Foods Staple to a Conservative Signal (March 2024)
www.politico.com
... In 2008, as he was running for the Iowa House of Representatives, Jason Schultz was stunned to learn dairy farmers could get in trouble for selling milk.
A local farmer had shown him the cease-and-desist letter he had received from the Iowa Department of Agriculture for selling milk straight from his cows to his friends and neighbors without pasteurizing it " heating it to kill bacteria " first.
So one of the first things Schultz, a Republican, did upon winning was introduce a bill to legalize the sale of so-called raw milk. The bill went nowhere, which wasn't much of a surprise in a Legislature controlled by the opposite party, though almost no one in either party was interested in fighting a small army of big dairy lobbyists and public health officials who lectured about the dangers of potentially fatal bacteria. Moreover, the state had a long-standing prohibition on the sale of raw milk; indeed, in 1980, Iowa jailed 37-year old dairy farmer Delbert Banowetz for 30 days for the offense.
But Schultz wouldn't give up, pushing the bill year after year. Very slowly over time he attracted supporters like Esther Arkfeld, a homeschooling mom and dairy owner turned grassroots leader who argued raw milk had health benefits and could help small farmers, too. Last May, Schultz's bill finally passed, legalizing the sale of raw milk directly from farm to consumer. The vote " 37 to 13 in the Senate and 64 to 35 in the House -- wasn't particularly close.
What changed since 2008 is a vivid example of a larger upheaval in American politics. The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still say raw milk is dangerous and the state dairy lobby sent lobbyists to the Iowa Capitol to defeat Schultz's bill. But Iowa has flipped " it's a Republican state now, from the presidential vote to the governor's office to the near-supermajority Legislature " and that flip has occurred alongside even larger shifts in national politics, spurred on by the rise of Donald Trump. With Trump has come a new GOP electorate, one more rural, more working class, less ideological and generally more distrustful of lobbyists, big business and "the experts." And that has been a big help for a cause that is bucking just about every one of those groups.
Long a fringe health food for new-age hippies and fad-chasing liberal foodies, raw milk has won over the hearts and minds of GOP legislators and regulators in the last few years. (The Iowa vote broke almost perfectly along party lines with nearly all Republicans in favor and only a handful of Democrats defecting to their side.) And it's not just in Iowa. Montana, North Dakota, Alaska, Georgia and Wyoming all have passed laws (or changed regulations) since 2020 legalizing the sale of raw milk on farms or in stores. ...
