I was at the off-grid farm of one of our area's premiere hippie mamas and she took me to her cow barn/milking parlor which had chickens running around and plenty of chicken crap. She told me she'd offer me some milk if her cows weren't dry which saved me the need to refuse the offer.

There's a raw milk lobby. [1][2]

But behind the regulations, at the barns and on the front porches where warm, frothy milk is exchanged for crumpled paper bills, something is happening that even the keenest regulator cannot get his hands on: the source of the ebb and flow. It is not churned in government office buildings or at federally regulated packaging stations, but by people coming together in pursuit of a shared vision of the good life, whether that’s raw milk, an unsprayed chicken carcass, or a homeopathic remedy that is not FDA approved. Maybe you can’t farm, but you can support someone who can.

Alta-Dena Dairy in Southern California used to be the nation's largest producer of raw milk, but too many people died.[3]

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/10/the-alt-ri...

[2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-power-of-knowing...

[3] https://law.justia.com/cases/california/court-of-appeal/4th/...

I'm pretty sure people who drink raw milk are aware of the risks.

If you were breast-fed, you drank raw milk as a child. And pasteurization removes/diminishes nutrients in milk. It’s much more nuanced than ‘raw milk is bad’.