Unexplainable - Sean tries raw milk

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

Sean Rameswaram, co-host of Today, Explained, recently went on a dairy adventure. Noam talks to Sean about what he learned, and about why raw milk is gaining popularity, even though there are significant health risks. Guest: Sean Rameswaram, co-host of Today, Explained For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.com slash save. Support for this show comes from fetch pet insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise.

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Yo, noam. Hello. Yoam. It's been a while. Yeah, we used to work together on Today Explained. It was a great time. So much that I still listened to every episode of Today Explained. Much love, much love.

And I heard this episode that you guys did recently that I loved about raw milk. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I drank some raw milk. And you went to a farm, I hear? I went to a farm to do it. Yeah. How did it go? I'm still alive. Look at me. Yeah, okay. What is going on with raw milk right now? Why is everyone talking about raw milk? It's been happening for a while. People probably know that someone who drinks raw milk, whatever it might be. But we've seen

thought, let's take a look at this because once RFK enters the White House and becomes Secretary of Health and Human Services, all of a sudden, you've got him doing like a shot of raw milk at the White House. Yeah. They're not pushing it so hard. They're really getting on like the whole milk train. But there are dozens of pieces of legislation throughout the country currently making their way through state legislatures that seek to make it easier to sell and or drink raw milk.

What do you think surprised you the most from hanging out with the farmers and, you? tasting the milk. I think what's most interesting about this is if you talk to some people about raw milk, they want to condemn you for even considering the idea that you would drink non-pasteurized milk, which is essentially what we're talking about. But what's funny about it in this particular moment we're in is that you can go to like a trendy grocery store in L.A. and just buy some raw milk. You know, it's like to some people, it's tantamount to being anti-vax, and yet in California, you can go the grocery store and buy some raw milk. So this is one of those issues, like many issues in this country, that is incredibly divisive, and yet also that some parts of this

country have just kind of moved right past and have accepted it to their lives. You know, it's interesting that you bring up the anti-vax conversation. Because I do feel like conversations around raw milk tend to mirror some of the conversations I've had about vaccines where like people are just like, oh, why should I go get this vaccine? There's no measles around. Or, I mean, there kind of is measles more now. But I do think that people often forget how many people used to die from things like the measles and polio and all sorts of preventable diseases. Like vaccines have saved at least 100 million lives. And something I learned from your episode is that before pasteurization,

you know, milk could lead to these tuberculosis outbreaks and typhoid outbreaks. Yeah. Tens of thousands of people, mostly children used to die from drinking milk. Do you think people just don't remember what things used to be like or they don't want to think about what things used to be like? and they're just taking for granted all of these incredible scientific achievements we've had to get us to the place where we are now?

It's very clear that we've firmly entered the I'll do my own research era, the anti-establishment, anti-convention, anti-Big Pharma, whatever it might be. And for a multitude of reasons that I don't want to dunk on necessarily, some of it's silly, but some of it's not.

I mean, I think that's what Maha has really suggested that, well, he kind of has a point about food dies? Sure, maybe. Yeah, why not? You know? Does he have a point about vaccines? Less so, it seems. Less of a point. But people want to figure out their own path. And with raw milk especially, what you see is a lot of people drink it and they don't die, so they trust it, you know? And I think we have a problem with like anecdotal experience in this country with distrust of big ag, big pharma, big everything, and that's sometimes leading people to make some unfortunate choices. And I mean, a distrust also of scientific institutions that are saying what is safe and what isn't

safe and a reliance on your friend telling you what's safe. Yes. Does that mean you should never, ever, ever drink raw milk if you're at some beautiful farm in the south of France and a farmer says, here's a milkshake, we just made fresh for you because you're from America and you like that kind of thing. Like, no, it's probably fine. It's probably fine. Okay, that feels to me like he's trying to poison you somehow. Oh, maybe so.

Right, right, right. Anyway, that doesn't mean we should just, you know, make it easier for the entire country to drink raw milk or just remove all the guardrails. Well, it's a very interesting discussion. Your episode is great. I love the way that you talk to people on all parts of this issue. So we're going to play it for our listeners. Do you want to tee it up? Anything they need to know before you?

hit play? Today explained from Vox, wherever you listen. Hit play. Today explained from Vox, Sean Ramos from here at the historic old town farmers market in Alexandria, Virginia,

on a quest to find something that is not totally legal here across these United States. Raw milk. Mom, have you ever seen raw milk here at this market? No. Have you ever seen it anywhere?

Yes, in California and in Sri Lanka. You drank raw milk in Sri Lanka? Yes, from the day. I was born until I left Sri Lanka. So you're not impressed with my search for raw milk? No. Not at all. Okay, mom's not impressed, but I'm still looking for raw milk

because more and more people are drinking it and something like 18 states are currently trying to make it easier to drink right now. Let me see if I can find some. Sir, do you know where I can find raw milk? I do not. I don't. Not here.

Nobody is that stupid here. Nobody is that stupid here. Okay, so my farmer's market thing was a bit of a bust, but we're not given up. We're not giving up. We're moving on to Google. And we're going to find that raw milk on the show today. Okay, Mom, we weren't able to find any raw milk at the farmer's market in Alexandria, Virginia. But I think we might be able to find some out here in Glenarm, Maryland, about 20 miles northwest of Baltimore.

Are you ready? Yes, I'm excited. All right. That's the spirit. Let me kick this off more formally. So we are standing here in a field in Glenar, Maryland. And your name, sir? My name is Matt Pringle. And we're here with Bobby Pringle. Are you guys related? Yes, I'm his youngest son. Very nice. Okay. And we are at the Pringle Creamery. Yep. Pringle Cremery. Also, Pringle Farm. My great-great grandfather got the property we're on now in 1895.

Amazing. And has it always been dairy? Back then, historically, farms did a little bit of everything. And then over the time and generations, it's consolidated. Now it's a dairy farm. The dairy is our bread and butter. And then we also are registered to sell raw milk in the state of Maryland as a pet food. So we do offer raw milk for cats and dogs. Interesting, but not for humans.

It's illegal to sell milk in Maryland for human consumption. Okay. So how big is your raw milk for pet purposes in terms of, your business? So the milk for cats and dogs week to week is roughly the same or more in sales at the greenery than the pasteurized milk. Wow. So a lot of people want this milk for their cats and dogs. Sounds like it, yeah. Is there like a bit of a winking situation here? Nope, no winking, no nothing. They're not buying it for their cats and dogs and they drink it themselves. They're buying a pet food, what they do with it when they leave the store. You know, I can't control that. It's up to them.

But it's possible. No, anything's possible. People were eating tiepods not that long ago. Have you seen an uptick in interest in raw milk here at the creamery? I would say it's been steady for the past couple years. Oh, wow. There's some cows trying to do. Oh, wow.

Wow. That wasn't just an attempt at fornication, but also a bowel movement. Did you notice that? They have a couple party tricks. If you stick around long enough, you'll see some. stuff. Sorry. I got distracted. We were at, oh, there's been an uptick and interest. I think the interest has been kind of the same. As far as like what goes on with our store, but as far as, you know, like the nation in general, I think there's been a big movement and big change in

interest. You know, our government currently, there's a lot of hype and push about it. Social media. There's a lot of information coming out about it. You don't think we sell a lot more now than we did last year? Not right now. I think we've grown exponentially. Whoa, we've got some father-son disagreement here. Sounds like you're maybe looking at those numbers a little more closely, and what are you seeing? I think people are more interested in. They're reading more about it, hearing more about it, and have interest.

You mentioned some political trends that have perhaps, you know, facilitated more interest in raw milk. Are you talking about the federal government, that Maha business and all that? Yeah. I mean, people should just have, get to choose, right? I mean, you go to the grocery door, you get to pick all you want. If you want to have raw milk, you should be able to go get that. Do you drink raw milk?

Every day. Really? Wow. And you, sir? Absolutely. If our kids drank raw milk, I wouldn't drink anything else. You wouldn't drink anything else? I have an option of drinking raw milk or pasteurized milk in the same refrigerator.

I pooled raw milk every day. Are you guys like glass of milk guys? Are you talking about like with your cereal or what? I had a glass of milk with my stick last night. I had in my coffee this morning. Oh, like with your dinner? Oh, yeah. Now, I'm not going to be offended by your answers to this question, but I want you to guess what kind of milk I drink.

Oat milk. Which isn't milk, by the way. It's oil. Oat oil, oat juice. I'm laughing because you guess correctly in one guess. Well, there's nothing wrong. I don't care. Like, if you want, by all means, drink as much as you want, but it's not milk because milk, by definition, has to come from a mammal's mammary glance.

And it doesn't. It's pressed and secreted oils and water that gets diluted and flavored down so you can actually drink it. I will say unlike the other soy boys who come to visit you guys, I kind of have some lactose issues. So my drinking of oat milk, you know, it's a nice alternative for those of us who get some stomach issues when we drink milk. Of course, the reason most of us don't drink raw milk in this country is because many, many decades ago, We discovered that through pasteurization, we could avoid a whole host of diseases that were killing kids, including salmonella, hysteria, tuberculosis, it turns out, e-coli. There's a lot of questions now about bird flu in the raw milk. Your thoughts?

So historically, the biggest problem, like you said, many, many decades ago, it was 100 years ago. And people had this idea that nothing has changed in the past 100 years with the agricultural practices around. So historically, so what happened was grains and distilling became really big in the 1920s, right? So all the distilleries were in the city, and they were bringing in weed in and barley and oates and everything and doing all the distilling process. And they had all these leftover grains and didn't know what to do with them. And they said, well, let's feed it to cows. All the dairy farms are out in the country? Why are we shipping everything in?

And why are we just bringing the dairy into the city next to the distillery? and we'll just go from one building into next and give it to them. Well, the problem was, one, no nutritional value left in the grains that the cows were eating. The cows were kept indoors, which is ripe for sanitation issues. Also in that era, there was no closed systems. There was poor refrigeration as well. And over time, now, our milk, we like to see it around 36 degrees. Okay.

And then we have a closed milking system, right? So the milk never actually touches the air until it's getting bottled or you open the cap for the first time. Do you guys ever have people show up here who are curious about raw milk for their pets or maybe for another purpose? Who talk about those anxieties around, you know, Listeria, salmonella, anything like that, and then have questions for you guys? So Listeria is a groundwater issue. And we get tested very, well, the health department comes out once a year in test. It's our groundwater. So that gets tested on a periodic basis.

And then the biggest concern that people have with raw milk is E. coli. And the problem with the field is you have thousands of cows in one spot. It's very easy for it to transmit. So when it goes to slaughter, one bad cow can get everywhere just by hands moving. We're a single herd. These are all of our cows. No one touches it but us. And it goes from here to the processor.

and then onto our shelves. You would tell someone who showed up here with some anxieties over raw milk not to worry about it. I would never tell them that. If I was saved in Pennsylvania, I could give you a whole lot of different answers. Aha.

But if they're worried or concerned, I would tell them not to drink it. There's always a chance. I wouldn't buy raw milk for me to consume or my family if I wasn't able to visit the farm and see how the practices are. And if you can't visit the farm, I wouldn't drink their milk.

Okay. And obviously that's not how most Americans, Americans consume their food? Correct. I think if you're buying raw milk, it should come from your state and it should come from your farmer. I think you should find your farmer.

And you should keep it there. Yeah, I don't think milk from California should come in to the East Coast. The amount of time it takes in transportation, there's too many variables or things can go wrong. It needs to be a hyperlocal product. Now, if I were to ask about trying some raw milk, how does that work in the state of Maryland?

Would I have to recommend you don't because it's not. pasteurized and maybe contain some harmful bacteria. Now, and I can't buy some to try right now, to say I lived a little bit while I was out here, but I could buy some for my mom's dog. Yeah, milk for catching dogs, yeah. So maybe I could buy some of that. Now, if I were to drink some of that, that's my business.

I recommend you don't, though. Got it. But you do? I drink for all milk every day. And when was the last time it made you sick? I have never been sick that I'm aware of from consuming it. I rarely ever get sick to begin with. Well, I'm going to buy some, and what I do with it is my business.

And on this Memorial Day, there's something beautiful about that. Yes. Well, thank you and happy Memorial Day to you guys. It looks like you're working through it. Cowl's always got to be milked. That's right. Work never ends. That's right.

They don't know it's Memorial Day. They don't care. I'm shaking the raw milk, and then I'm trying the raw milk. Here we go. Open in the raw milk. Oh wow, yeah. Smelling the raw milk. What does it smell like? It doesn't smell like anything. Let me shake it one more time just to be extra sure, you know? Okay, here we go. Wish me luck. Tastes like milk. How you doing? Do you want to try it? What? Like sick.

One sit. All right, mom's trying the raw milk. Here we go. What do you think? If nobody told you, you wouldn't know. If nobody told you, you wouldn't know. Yeah. I think that's true. Unless I get salmonella latered. You won't. Mom says I won't.

It's two days later now, and I didn't, but my tummy did feel a little funny that Memorial Day night, if I'm being completely honest, but as I said, I got some lactose issues, so it's still oat oil for me. When we're back on today, explain, we're going to hear about the movement raw milk's having, not just in Glenauer, Maryland,

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What do we circulate? Looking for a man who has recently drunk milk. My name is Anna Merlin, and I'm a senior reporter at Mother Jones covering disinformation, extremism, and technology. I guess if you've hung around on either side of the ideological spectrum for the past decade or two, you've probably heard someone talking about raw milk. For me, I've heard, like, lefty, crunchy people talking about raw milk personally. But raw milk is having a moment right now in these United States.

We are not united on raw milk. What is going on with raw milk? There is definitely an increasing interest in raw milk, especially the idea of increased like raw milk legalization and selling raw milk across state lines, which I think even under the second Trump administration and RFK is not super likely. The FDA has enforced their ban on the interstate sale of raw milk since, the 1980s, but there is a bill out there in committee right now. And there's also tons of bills at the state level to continue making raw milk even more accessible in various states.

There are like 40 plus bills across 18 states that have to do with, you know, raw dairy, raw cheese. Oklahoma just passed one. Congratulations, Oklahoma. We are one step closer to food freedom. Raw milk is now legal to advertise and sell up to 1,500 gallons. So this is super awesome for Oklahomans. Raw milk is legal to some degree in 43 states, but it varies really widely. So in some places like California, where I live, you can go to the store and buy raw milk. In other places, you can access it through what's called a herd share, which is a legal agreement where consumers have access to a...

milking animal or a herd, and they can buy or get the milk directly from the farmer. In other places, raw milk is only legal as pet food, but, you know, obviously there's nothing stopping people if they really insist on it from buying and drinking milk labeled as pet food. I bought and drank some pet food raw milk yesterday, Anna. Yes, I imagine you did. Because you're in D.C. That's right.

I had to go to Maryland to do it, though. Yeah. Yeah. So D.C. is one of the places where raw milk. is illegal. Rhode Island, I believe it is totally illegal, except I think you can get raw goat milk with a prescription from a doctor. It's also illegal in Hawaii. But yeah, most places in the U.S., you're going to be able to get raw milk in some form. Remind us why we decided to pasteurize our milk or what the benefits were. Right. So one of the first kind of big pushes for pasteurization of

milk came in the 1930s after the discovery that raw milk could transmit tuberculosis, which was killing a lot of babies. Pasterized milk, a safe food, trusted by millions of people, and important in every diet. Let's go back to middle school for a quick refresher on pasteurization. It's a centuries-old process that heats up milk to kill off bacteria, like salmonella, listeria, or e-coli, then cools it back down. By heating raw milk to at least 161 Fahrenheit for 15 seconds and letting it cool, we can reduce the amount of viruses and bacteria in dairy.

And so there was a pretty direct relationship between more and more places requiring pasteurization and infant mortality rates going down. And so after that, it was pretty clear to most people and most public health bodies that this was a good idea. Okay, so there were some clear risks here before pasteurization came around,

and then they were saying basically, pasteurize your milk, warm it up a little bit, and we will keep more kids alive. Yeah. And then since that, you know, medical breakthrough, basically, we've been trying to dial it back. Why are we trying to dial it back? And who's doing the dialing? So pretty much since pasteurization became a widespread thing, there has been opposition to it. And the raw milk movement has always argued that raw milk is better for you,

that it's more natural. It's actually healing and very beneficial for your body. Raw milk will not spoil like conventional milk does. For instance, when I talk to Mark McAfee, who's the founder and CEO of Raw Farm, the biggest raw milk producer in the country. He told me that raw milk makes asthma go away, which is not true. According to public health experts, virologists, asthma experts, you will see arguments that raw milk is good for allergies, that has beneficial enzymes or bacteria. And this is pretty much the argument that's been made since the raw milk movement sort of organized and took force, is this idea that raw milk inherently.

has nutrients and good qualities that are stripped from pasteurized milk. And these groups that are advocating for more raw milk, do they necessarily hue to a certain political party? I think that historically, raw milk, like anti-vaccine ideas, kind of cut equally across the right and the left, you know, I grew up in a pretty blue part of New Mexico and would certainly see raw milk being sold and discussed, so not the way that it is now. But definitely, you know, a lot of the places that you're seeing raw milk legislation, especially picking up our red states because of ideas around government regulation and health freedom. And like, of course, red state, blue state, you know, crunchy or libertarian, distrustful of government, wherever it might be.

You might find some affinity in our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who last year, famously, did a shot of raw milk at the White House? He sure did. Want to do you a shot of raw milk to toast this with me? All right. Secretary Kennedy, cheers. He did a little shooter of raw milk to celebrate the publication of the Maha report, which was meant to be his big kind of capstone piece of writing,

presenting solutions for chronic disease and was full of AI slop and fake citations in which you will notice they don't talk about very much anymore. Did that quash his attempt to normalize raw milk at? the federal level? So this is what's super interesting. Before Kennedy was in office as HHS secretary, he was famously really bullish on raw milk. As I was here last year, I only drank raw milk. He had this famous tweet in 2024 where he talked about all the things that the FDA was going to stop suppressing under his leadership. You know, he said the FDA's war on public health is about to And he listed all these things, including raw milk.

But since then, much to the frustration of big players in the raw milk industry, there actually hasn't been any federal action to make raw milk more legal or to make it legal across state lines. Kennedy actually hasn't done anything on that. And Mark McAfee told me that he can't get Kennedy to, like, return his calls. Huh. One thing that has happened instead, though, is that the Trump administration has suddenly been trumpeting their emphasis on whole milk, right?

Oh. You might have seen this a few months ago. They were saying, you know, we're bringing Whole Milk back to the schools. So today I'm delighted to sign the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act into law. Whole Milk is no longer illegal in America, which it never was. It's like the war on Christmas. Yeah, exactly. And he's also ended the war on saturated fat.

So, yeah, a lot of their language around Whole Milk really echoes kind of the language around raw milk that you see. among raw milk advocates, but it's not. They actually have not talked about raw milk at all. So you can speculate, you know, why this might have happened, if this is a liability issue, if there are still people at the CDC and the FDA who are like, it would be a really bad idea for the federal government to promote this. But yeah, I would say that for raw milk and raw dairy advocates, the fact that the Trump administration has not been on their side is clearly a big disappointment. Well, anecdotal, Anna, but the creamery I visited yesterday, Preigal, out in Glenar, Maryland,

they said raw milk was a big boon to their business. I mean, even though they only sell it for cats and dogs, it certainly seems like people are drinking it. Are public health officials, other than the Secretary of Health and Human Services, worried about that trend, if there is one? So earlier this year, an infant died in New Mexico. from Listeria that public health officials there think was probably linked to the infant's mom drinking it during pregnancy. And there have been, you know, a bunch of foodborne illness outbreaks. So, yeah, I think this is a concern for people because raw milk can carry, ecoli, salmonella, campbellobacter, things that can make you really, really sick.

So there are concerns here, right? One, obviously, is the increasing availability of raw milk in various places. another concern is that it is being marketed by health influencers and other people with big social media followings as like a miracle cure in a very simplistic way. And it is especially being marketed to parents as a cure-all for children, which is concerning because raw milk and dairy are especially risky for infants, immune-compromised people and elderly people. You know, an illness like Ecoli that could be, you know, serious. but you would make it through, potentially as an adult, is incredibly serious for a child and can lead to this thing called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which has sickened and killed children.

The raw milk industry tends to talk about this idea that raw milk is safe if you trust your farmer. But when you talk to like a virologist, they will tell you that no matter how well you know your farmer, how much you think you trust the dairy. if you're not pasteurizing your milk, you're going to be at more risk of common foodborne pathogens. So, you know, you can find the farm to be delightful in every way, and it will not prevent you from illness. You know, ideally, we would not be continuing to litigate, like, really well-established pieces of science, and we could move on to other stuff. But instead, we are, you know, talking about raw milk again and whether it's a good idea. So I take it despite it being available at, say, the grocery store around the corner from you, you Anna Merlin are not going out to buy any. You know, I grew up partly on a ranch and I have actually seen cows before and I know how they're shaped and I know where the utter is compared to, for instance, the cow's asshole.

So no, I am personally not going to drink raw milk. If your listeners want to look at the FDA or the CDC, there's a page on the FDA right now at the moment called raw milk. misconceptions and the danger of raw milk consumption. And you can read a lot about the counter arguments to these common claims that people make about raw milk. For instance, that it contains, you know, beneficial bacteria or enzymes or something. Like, there's very, very good evidence about raw milk's actual dangers and risks. Anna Merlin, mother Jones.com. Shoutouts to my mother. for making the time. Shoutouts to Avi Shai Arzhi for making today's show with help from

Amna Al-Sadi, David Tadishore, Bridger Dunagan, and Gabriel Dunitav. It's today explained.