He profits from raw milk which makes people sick. The government doesn’t stop it.

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One February morning, a white Ford pickup truck drove through a thick curtain of fog, winding down a muddy farm road in California’s Central Valley. Out came a strapping, tanned 64-year-old milkman, who left the engine running as he walked toward me with open arms.

“You must be Mark,” I said, warning him that I wasn’t the cuddling type.

“I’m a cuddler,” he said, pulling me in anyway. “I feel like I’ve known you forever.”

I had spent the last two weeks corresponding with Raw Farm founder Mark McAfee, who had filled my inbox with messages and PowerPoint presentations extolling the virtues of his biggest and most controversial product:

It’s delicious.

It makes you feel good (the gut-brain serotonin and dopamine cycle).

It’s great for asthma and literally saves lives.

He was talking about raw milk, which, based on 150 years of basic science, offers little reason to consume it. By definition, it has not been pasteurized, the simple process of heating milk to kill harmful bacteria. Before the practice became widely adopted a century ago, thousands of babies died each year from illnesses linked to contaminated dairy products. Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant and proven nutritional benefits on its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure the disease and subjects it to consumers more 100 times greater risk of foodborne illnesswhich can be particularly dangerous for young children.

And yet McAfee’s farm, the nation’s largest raw milk dairy, brings in about $30 million a year, meeting a growing demand from customers who say they want foods that haven’t been robbed of their health benefits by industrial processing. Once attracting a fringe crowd, raw milk has been propelled into the mainstream in recent years by a powerful mix of politics, wellness culture and a groundswell of suspicion that health institutions have been compromised by big pharmaceutical and food companies. Its supporters made it a symbol of freedom and defiance. More than 10 million Americans now drink it; national weekly sales increased by 65% ​​between 2023 and 2024 alone.

The success of raw milk baffled me: how could it have become so established in this country, despite regular epidemics of salmonella and E. coli, and even discovery of avian flu in Raw Farm milk? More urgently, what was the government doing to protect the public from the demand for products that scientists say are risky, even deadly? Speaking with McAfee seemed like a good place to start; federal and state regulators had linked his company to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that sickened hundreds of people.

“I hospitalized a few kids who were sick, but they recovered,” McAfee admitted before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”

McAfee is no ordinary farmer. He’s a raw milk fanatic who has escaped serious punishment despite two decades of skirmishes with the Food and Drug Administration and the Justice Department, which repeatedly accused him of violating federal laws and regulations. The Biden administration was poised to take action against his farm when President Donald Trump took office and handed over leadership of the nation’s health agencies to one of McAfee’s most notable clients.

The year before he was confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president, using his campaign platform to denounce the government’s “aggressive suppression” of raw milk. In his new role, he said he was “advocating“for this and famous the release of a federal report titled Make America Healthy Again with a toast to raw milk pumpers at the White House.

For his part, McAfee doesn’t just sell Kennedy’s favorite milk. He sells the idea that his dairy products are safe and healthy – for you, your children, your grandparents – because his farm carefully checks its milk for bacteria.

“They think we’re some kind of fringe, weird trend, and we’re very serious here,” McAfee said after welcoming me to his farm, which he runs with his adult son and daughter, 20 miles southwest of Fresno. “And you’ll see it in what we do today.”

He led me to a cream-colored bungalow he called his pathogen lab, where two workers in scrubs prepared milk samples.

The farm tests each batch for four types of bacteria: salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter and listeria, all of which grow in cattle’s intestines and can contaminate milk with microscopic spots of infected feces. The microbes can cause a host of symptoms in humans, ranging from vomiting and diarrhea to sepsis, kidney failure and even death.

“We catch these things and divert the milk immediately,” McAfee said of the pathogens.

I assumed that after diverting the batches, the farm threw them away.

Later that day I learned otherwise.

“We have an alarm system here: if there’s something seriously wrong, they can immediately label the milk, and it’s only used for cheese,” McAfee told me. “Because, you know, cheese is pathogen-resistant.”

The research has watch that raw cheese is actually not resistant to pathogens; Although aging may mitigate some risks, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process.

Hearing about this practice took me by surprise – what did the farm do with this milk? – so I asked the question again.

McAfee confirmed that milk containing pathogens was used to make cheese, with the exception of batches containing salmonella, which he said were thrown out or sent for pasteurization. (I later learned that the FDA knew he was doing this and had told him to stop two years ago. But no one had alerted the public.)

“Our cheese is hugely successful across America,” McAfee said, noting that it is sold in hundreds of stores, from health food stores to chains like Sprouts Farmers Market. “HEB in Texas sells $50,000 a week.”

I was wondering how long it would take for cheese to be linked to another outbreak.

Unbeknownst to me, one was already in progress.

Chapter 1: The Pioneer

In the early 2000s, McAfee was producing pasteurized milk for dairy group Organic Valley when a raw milk enthusiast named James Stewart made an unusual request.

Stewart had founded a private company dining club in Venice, Los Angeles. Its members included movie stars, “crystal worshipers” and other “fanatics,” McAfee recalled. They were looking for a stable source of raw milk at a time when consumers were becoming aware of the risks of food contamination with additives, fertilizers and pesticides.

“How fast can you drive here with as much milk as possible?” » McAfee recalled Stewart’s question.

McAfee, not really understanding why people would want to drink unpasteurized milk, nevertheless went to his silo, filled half-gallon containers, and packed them into coolers. Then, with his wife, he made the long drive south to the Los Angeles coast.

Dozens of people were waiting for them, McAfee said, launching into a scene that unfolded with Hollywood flare. “I couldn’t even get out of the car,” he said. “They’re banging on the windows and opening the back. … Just chaos, clapping, excitement, crying.”

As their $20 bills began to fall on him, so did their stories of how raw milk cured their health problems, including asthma. That moment transformed him, he said: He realized he was selling more than milk — it was “food as medicine.”

Some 20 years later, Stewart remembers that moment, too. “I saw the light go off in his head,” Stewart told me. “He was looking for a way to expand his business and not be limited to a commercial supplier of pasteurized and homogenized milk. »

McAfee, a third-generation California farmer, was born into a family that had forged an unconventional path. His father, whom McAfee describes as both a humanitarian and a rebel, founded several farming operations. cooperatives and made national news in 1972, when he help bail activist Angela Davis by putting her land as collateral.

McAfee did not initially follow in his father’s footsteps. He worked for 16 years as a paramedic before taking over the family farmland left behind by his grandparents. The farm grew up apples, almonds and alfalfa, and in 2001 McAfee expanded into the commercial dairy sector. But its days of producing milk for pasteurization were short duration; A few months after meeting Stewart, McAfee converted his dairy to sell only raw milk.

It enters a market on the brink of extraordinary growth.

California has always allowed raw milk to be sold in stores, but Los Angeles County strict rules had in fact slowed down its retail sales. In 2001, food freedom advocates, including Stewart, successfully petitioned the county to relax regulations, allowing McAfee’s access to a new pool of customers. This would happen again and again, in state and local governments across America, as the internet, and then social media influencers, attracted exponentially more people to the cause.

At the time McAfee converted its dairy products to raw milk, only 27 states allowed its sale.

One way or another, almost all of them would eventually.

One thing stood in the way of McAfee and all these activities: federal regulation restrict the sale of raw milk from one state to another. The 1987 ban had the effect of keeping homes contentwhich makes it easier for local authorities to respond.

But there was a loophole: Raw milk could be sold across state lines if it was labeled as pet food.

McAfee saw an opportunity, and he wasn’t subtle about it on the website for his farm, which at the time was called Organic Pastures. The farm “creatively labeled its products for sale outside of California in a way that would not be illegal,” the site says. saidand this ensured that people could still consume them. Justifying the strategy to an Oregon newspaper, McAfee said in 2005, “I am a revolutionary in this field, and I will not neglect any loophole that would allow the milk to come out.”

As its raw dairy products grew, McAfee presented itself as an outsider waging a war against industrialized food. “Market giants have processed our foods to death to extend shelf life and expand distribution,” he said in a 2006 article. interview. “The raw milk revolution is born from this disorder.”

Two decades later, he still talks about raw milk with the passion of a convert. He answered even simple questions with lengthy explanations, speaking in a rapid, torrential style and snapping his fingers or pinching the air for emphasis. Only later did I realize that what seemed spontaneous was largely a speech he had honed over years of promotional interviews and farm visits.

McAfee touted the benefits of unpasteurized milk in public libraries And chiropractor offices. Raw dairy products, his farm has claimedcould cure, treat or prevent a myriad diseases and conditionsfrom diabetes and ear infections to allergies, eczema and arthritis. The farm developed the site icanbreathe.org to promote the so-called Milk Cure for asthma. “Only raw milk works in this natural treatment,” the dairy said. “Pasteurization of milk kills or alters the natural enzymes, antibodies and fatty acids that are essential to the physiology of how it functions in your body.”

McAfee founded a nonprofit, the Raw Milk Institute, in 2011, spreading similar claims alongside studies he said supported them. Although a few cited European studies observed a correlation between raw milk consumption and lower rates of asthma and allergies, they did not prove that raw milk directly led to a reduction in disease, nor recommended its consumption due to pathogen risk. The experts have suggested the association could probably be explain by the “farm effect,” in which children who grow up around animals and agriculture have been shown to have stronger immune systems.

Comprehensive reviews Of the published science on raw milk has been largely unable to substantiate claims about its benefits, and most experts agree that it is neither healthy nor safe to consume. But McAfee says its customers are better informed. For him, the stories of families who believe raw milk transformed their health are their own proof, revealing truths that institutions have failed to grasp. “If raw milk was a fad or a lie, then why would people repeatedly buy raw milk and then tell the world how much they love it,” he said. “Our consumers read their instincts and watch their children flourish.”

He also said the government had not invested enough in research to assess the benefits.

“I implore you to say, ‘This is not anti-science, this is extremely pro-science,’” he told me. “It’s about using science that is not yet easily accepted.”

And for many health-conscious people, this possibility that raw milk might help them – or their loved ones – is often enough for them to try it.

Chapter 2: The first

Mary McGonigle-Martin was shopping at a Southern California grocery store in 2006 when she spotted advertisements suggesting that McAfee milk could treat allergies and digestive problems. She thought about her 7-year-old son, Chris, who she suspected had a sensitivity to dairy, and then visited the McAfee website to learn more. She knew the risks of refusing pasteurization, but the site assuaged her concerns: It said the farm tested her milk and never found a single pathogen.

So she started buying it and her son started drinking it. And about a month later he became seriously ill. What started as a trip to the nearest hospital for bloody diarrhea turned into a race to save his life as his kidneys began to fail. Airlifted to a children’s hospital in Loma Linda, Chris was placed in a medically induced coma. He spent nine days on a ventilator and 18 days on dialysis, during which doctors gave him blood, platelet and plasma transfusions. “He was about to die,” Martin told me. “I had flashes of him being in a coffin and attending his funeral.”

Chris had a dangerous strain of E. coli, known as O157:H7, which led to hemolytic uremic syndrome. This rare disease, which mainly affects children, occurs when bacterial toxins spread throughout the body and damage red blood cells, causing clots in organs, primarily the kidneys. With prompt intervention, most people survive. But it can cause lifelong complications.

While sitting in the intensive care unit, Martin overheard another mother mention that her daughter was suffering from the same problem. It turned out that the girl had also drank milk from the McAfee farm. Hoping to intervene before others became ill, the families reported the illnesses to the dairy and the state, which quickly issued a death notice. recall and quarantine ordersuspending the distribution of farm products.

McAfee told me that when he learned about the two sick children, he “wanted to know the truth.” So he took his wife’s Volvo and drove four hours to the hospital. Then, somehow, he found a way into the ICU. “I knew how to get through security,” he said. “A paramedic can go anywhere, and I was disappointed with the nurses.”

Martin told me she was surprised when McAfee showed up in the waiting room, but she nonetheless shared the details of her son’s ordeal. “I listened to her with as much compassion as I could,” McAfee told me. But in his memories, he observed that Martin’s son was not as seriously ill as he had been led to believe. “He’s eating McDonald’s, watching cartoons, just doing great, and they’re telling the world he’s ready to die,” McAfee said. “I was really upset about it.”

McAfee’s version of events was impossible, Martin told me: When he arrived at the hospital, Chris had just been taken off the ventilator and was still struggling to breathe on his own; numerous contemporary notes confirm this. Even after being extubated, he couldn’t eat solid food for weeks due to severe pancreatitis. “I was so hungry,” Chris told me. “I started crying because I couldn’t eat.”

When I asked Martin why she thought McAfee gave such a different account of their meeting, her response was simple: “Mark is the master manipulator. (McAfee claimed his recollection was accurate: “It’s not spin; it’s a simple truth.”)

Six people contracted E. coli in the first outbreak linked to the McAfee farm, according to federal regulators; their median age was 8 years. Although the specific strain of E. coli from the outbreak was not found in the products, some samples taken by investigators showed high numbers of bacteria, indicating contamination.

Chris suffered permanent kidney damage. Now 27, he can no longer drink alcohol and will spend the rest of his life under the care of a nephrologist due to his high risk of chronic kidney disease.

The disease persisted in other ways as well. “I would have random flashbacks and panic attacks over anything,” he told me. The smell of hospital soap. The sticky feeling of bandages or tape on his skin. His mother found him a trauma counselor gie, which “changed his life,” he said, except that he still held a knot of resentment. Not towards his parents; he considers them victims like himself. “So much anger at Mark,” he told me recently. When he later saw McAfee’s milk sold at a Sprouts, “I wanted to take a bat and destroy the whole aisle.”

Martin couldn’t let go either. She hired Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who specializes in food safety litigation. Alongside the family she met at the hospital, she sued the McAfee Farm in 2008, and the dairy settled for an undisclosed amount. “They couldn’t find the pathogen in our milk,” McAfee told me. “She claims she had it in her child’s milk, and that’s what the insurance company took to settle, and we weren’t going to take legal action.”

Emboldened, Martin, who was a high school guidance counselor, found her second calling as a food safety advocate, testifying against raw milk access bills across the country.

After the settlement, McAfee wrote to Martin apologizing, but also begged her to move on.

“Mary, please appreciate the fact that so many children are thriving and growing strong thanks to raw milk,” he wrote. “The very low theoretical risk of illness from tested, retailed and approved raw milk is far outweighed by the health and recovery from illness enjoyed by children who drink raw milk.”

Martin appreciated the note, but acknowledged that even in his seemingly sincere apology, McAfee could not adapt his belief system to his experience. “He really thought it was just a fluke. It wouldn’t happen again,” she said.

Chapter 3: Pathogens

Eager to continue showing me his farm’s serious approach to pathogens, McAfee had me ride in his truck to watch his cows being milked. Raw Farm has about 1,400 of them, which produce up to 8,000 gallons per day, priced at $19 each. The smell of sweet milk hung in the air, mixed with the earthy musk of manure.

“We’ll see what kind of music they play this morning in the milk barn,” he thought.

“You play music for trafficking?” » I asked.

“Mexican music,” he said as he got behind the wheel. “It’s very Pavlovian. … You start to see milk coming out of their teats.”

In the open barn, workers sprayed a small herd of cows with a fire hose, removing flies and manure stains from their bellies, which were then inspected, smeared with iodine and wiped dry with a towel. The steady pulses of the milking machines mingled with a percussive musical rhythm as McAfee walked through the rows, showing off their light pink udders. “Super clean,” he said with pride.

Hygiene seemed to be a clear priority everywhere we went, from the thick binders of safety plans – “none of these documents collect dust,” he told me – to the sterile moon suits workers wear to package milk.

McAfee said the 2006 outbreak opened its eyes to the risks of its product and was part of the reason it developed standards for unpasteurized dairies.

But greater awareness and better practices haven’t stopped McAfee customers from continuing to get sick. 2007And 2011And 2012And 2016 – and the farm has had to issue recalls more than half a dozen times after pathogens were discovered in its products. cts.

And then between 2023 and 2024, regulators linked the farm to one of the largest raw dairy outbreaks known to the public In decades, more than 170 people have fallen ill with salmonella. McAfee has disputed the link between his farm and many outbreaks, including this one.

“It’s really crap,” McAfee said, saying his farm was not responsible for all the cases. “It was 25, maybe 30.” He also disagreed that the majority of patients were children, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had indicated. detailed in a report published last year. “I challenge this data at a fundamental level.”

It was a typical McAfee defense. Throughout our conversation, he never lost his cool, even when it came to epidemics. Instead, he calmly dismissed the government’s methodology, explaining that he counted cases of “standard diarrhea,” which he said had “no disease claims” because they could be treated with “good hydration and lots of good bone broths, electrolytes and the like.”

It also seized cases where the government could not identify an outbreak strain in its products, but found it in samples of farm water and cow dung or made connections to his farm using genetic sequencing or patient interviews – practices that epidemiologists regularly rely on. McAfee felt that none of this constituted compelling evidence that his farm was directly the cause of the outbreaks. Instead, such episodes seemed to reinforce his perception that he was climbing a mountain alone, fighting against institutions already biased against raw milk before hearing his case.

Once the mandatory quarantines were over, he would declare victory.

After the reopening of its dairy following a an epidemic that sickened five children in 2011, he revealed how people were suffering without his product in a celebration video. McAfee shook hands with a young man who wore a side cap. “This guy came from Alaska to get raw milk!” » McAfee said. The young man describes a sort of lack: “My immune system collapsed. I lost a lot of lean mass.” When a gray-haired woman said she was driving four half-gallons to visit her grandchildren in Texas — “that’s how desperate I am for them to be healthy” — McAfee kissed her on the head and called her a “raw milk freedom rider.”

At least 233 people have been sickened in eight outbreaks that federal and state regulators have linked to the McAfee farm since 2006, and at least 40 of them have been hospitalized.

The tally is almost certainly underestimated, experts and regulators told me. Many recover from foodborne illness at home and do not seek testing.

The outbreaks raised an obvious question: Why didn’t regulators shut down the operation? The American food safety system aims to balance public health with citizens’ freedom to eat foods that may be harmful to them, such as raw oysters and sushi. Regulators expect that some will inevitably get sick and so work to ensure that consumers are at least aware of the risk.

State regulators are responsible for overseeing raw milk sold legally within their borders. In California, they require it to be sampled and tested monthly for the presence of pathogens. Raw Farm is in good standing, according to the Department of Food and Agriculture, consistently meeting standards for sanitation and cow health. But spokespeople for that agency and the state Department of Public Health stressed that the best way to prevent the disease is to drink pasteurized milk. Otherwise, they write in an email, “there will always be a risk of contamination.”

Many people who switch to raw milk don’t fully understand this risk, John Lucey told me. A food science professor who directs the Dairy Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lucey grew up on a farm and has studied dairy for three decades. “Cows poop all the time,” he said. “Farms are just a reservoir of bacteria: the floor contains bacteria, the walls contain bacteria, the cows carry bacteria. »

One of the appeals of raw milk is a deeper connection to its source; By knowing a farmer personally, people assume their food will be safer, Lucey said. But what raw milk consumers often don’t realize is that many dairy farmers fight tirelessly to produce clean milk.

“Sometimes you lose because the cow triggered the milking machine. Something happens,” he said. “The farmers do their best and they are very hardworking people, but just because Daisy is a nice cow and the farmer is a nice guy doesn’t mean things are hygienic and they can prevent things 100% of the time.

In the past two years alone, nine states have experienced outbreaks linked to raw dairy products by regulators, not counting those linked to the McAfee farm. In Washington State, about 10 people fell ill with E. coli linked to the consumption of raw cheese, and in Florida, where raw milk can only be sold as pet food, approximately 20 people fell ill. Among them was a pregnant mother whose small child had been hospitalized; she said she caught his bacterial infection and I had a miscarriage at 20 weeks. (The Florida Farm said its products had not tested positive for pathogens and that it had informed its customers that its raw milk was not intended for human consumption; Washington Creamery voluntarily recalled his cheese.)

Just last week, Idaho health officials announcement that nearly 60 people had fallen ill after consuming raw milk.

Discussing the risks of raw milk with McAfee was a real challenge.

As we drove in his truck to the next stop on the tour, I mentioned the prevalence of pathogens, as well as the trend of outbreaks on his farm. He acknowledged that some risk exists, but stressed that it was “very, very, very small” and was “fantastically” outweighed by the therapeutic value of raw milk. And then he insisted on disentangling the rewards from the risks, as if that were even possible.

“Show me the reviews of raw milk if it’s safe,” he told me, one hand on the steering wheel, the other punctuating his remarks in the air. “None.”

“Well, critics would say there’s a risk…”

“No, if it’s sure“, he said, interrupting me. “If it’s safe, how could you criticize it?

“But they would say it’s not safe,” I said.

“Show me the risk,” he repeated. “I haven’t seen it yet. We found it. We diverted it immediately.”

Chapter 4: The Art of War

We had seen almost every stage of production – from “grass to glass,” as McAfee called it – when he parked his truck next to the hangar that houses his Cessna 210 Centurion propeller plane. Next door, a few steps from his hacienda-style home, is a bungalow that he uses as an office.

He showed me his replica medieval sword, his podcasting setup, and one of his favorite books, “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu. He said China’s ancient military treaty shed light on its long-running feud with the federal government.

Twenty years ago, its use of the pet food loophole to ship goods across state lines drew almost immediate scrutiny. In 2005, an undercover FDA investigator called the farm and I was told the milk was safe for human consumption. Two years later, according to court records, the farm sent a e-mail to consumers by telling them: “Raw milk can be shipped via UPS to all US states” and “Tell everyone who suffers from asthma that they will be cured by raw milk.”

In 2008, the DOJ sued criminal charges and a civil suit. McAfee resolved the accusations, promising that the farm would no longer sell raw milk across state lines. But prosecutors wanted a court order that would force McAfee and the farm to comply, quoting their “shameless efforts to manipulate the law.”

To illustrate McAfee’s continued defiance, the government highlighted statements he made online that year and the following year. In a blog post, he said: “If we are ever attacked, it will be big theater… There will probably be riots. ” In another, he said he would not use weapons “to the tipping point” and mentioned “another Wounded Knee, Ruby Ridge or Waco.” Prosecutors argued to drive demonstrated a “recognizable danger” that he would break the law again.

In 2010, the judge obtained a permanent injunctiondemanding, among other things, that the farm stop selling raw milk beyond California and remove any statements promoting its health benefits. McAfee told me the directive was an attack on his right to free speech. “I believe deeply and passionately in the truth, and they were telling me I couldn’t tell the truth,” he said. “I had to go to therapy about it, you know. I didn’t want to do something stupid.”

A violation of the order could have resulted in enforcement action, but in the years since, authorities have backed off their blows. (McAfee insisted they had no punches to throw.)

The FDA and DOJ have retained find evidence of violations, in 2016And 2019And 2021according to court records. Although federal prosecutors initially sought harsh penalties, including the detention of Raw Farm and McAfee in contemptthey agreed on a judgment of consent in 2023, which required the farm to submit to independent audits to ensure it was complying with the law.

Then, in early 2024, FDA inspectors discovered the farm had a “standard practice” of producing cheese from milk suspected or known to contain pathogens, according to court documents; laboratory records showed that its cheese also tested positive even after the mandatory aging period.

In February, federal regulators publicly related From raw farmhouse cheese to an outbreak of E. coli which lasted a month. Nearly a dozen people across five states fell ill.

Among them was Paul Panelli, who went to his Newport Beach, Calif., grocery store looking for Tillamook cheese to make tacos. Finding he was sold out, he switched to Raw Farm cheddar, attracted by packaging that made it appear organic and all-natural. He told me he didn’t know the cheese was made with unpasteurized milk.

Panelli and his wife, Julie, both suffered from food poisoning. He was diagnosed with an E. coli infection which required several kidney surgeries. “She’s literally afraid to eat,” her husband told me. That of the family trial against Raw Farm is ongoing; in court records, the farm denied responsibility for their illnesses.

Raw farm pushed back against the government, claiming that it would follow federal regulations by aging its cheese and claiming to have I tested everything before sale, so no contaminated product reached the market, according to court records. Federal law allows the interstate sale of unpasteurized cheese as long as it is aged for at least 60 days, although this is not fully enforceable. eliminate the risk – or explain that a farm uses pathogenic milk to make it. The FDA asked the farm to destroy any cheese made with contaminated milk, arguing that it violated the law, according to court documents. The farm lawyer said it was compliantand insisted there was no “bad cheese” to throw away.

To force the farm to follow government orders, it needed a judge’s ruling, but a delay in the process underfunded The Eastern District of California left the case on hold until 2025. The arrival of the Trump administration that year created a political opening for McAfee.

By the time Kennedy took over the health department, McAfee had already developed close ties with those around him. “I’ve been going back with him for a long time,” McAfee told me. Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, stopped at Raw Farm during her presidential campaign, creating multiple videos with McAfee. (She did not respond to my email questions.) She was even asked to become an advisor to the FDA, McAfee told me. The position never materialized, but McAfee still benefited from the change in administration.

Without publicly giving a reason, last January, the government abandoned his efforts to take action against the farm. A former federal employee with knowledge of the lawsuit told me that the cases involving raw milk were downgraded in the new administration because of Kennedy’s stance on the matter.

Natalie Baldassarre, a DOJ spokeswoman, did not respond to my questions about the decision, but said in an email that the administration “will always be concerned about public health risks and will continue to take appropriate enforcement actions to protect American consumers.” The Department of Health and the FDA did not respond to my attempts to request comment. Kennedy, through his department, also did not respond to my questions.

McAfee called the removal a “big victory.” Drawing on the teachings of Sun Tzu, he told me that he had learned not to engage in “their war,” but in his own.

“You win the war they don’t expect you to fight,” he said. While authorities gathered evidence, he focused on “educating” consumers. One day he delivered his message to dozens of people at once. Now online influencers are spreading it to millions of people. “They have the guns and the money,” he said of the government. “I have the truth and the mothers.”

His work could soon bear fruit. A month after shaking McAfee’s hand and leaving his farm, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, reintroduced the Interstate Milk Freedom Act, which would prohibit “federal interference” in the interstate sale of raw dairy products in states where raw milk is already legal.

Massie, who served raw milk during his recent marriage, owns a farm of 50 cattle, and Pingree, a former dairy farmer and the bill’s only Democratic sponsor, raised its own grass-fed beef. “The Interstate Milk Freedom Act would make it easier for families to purchase the milk of their choice,” Massie said when announcing the bill, “by reversing the criminalization of certain dairy farmers.”

When asked if she was concerned the bill could increase access to a product that puts people at risk, Pingree told me the bill doesn’t address raw milk marketing or health claims. “I trust state departments of agriculture and health to monitor compliance, assess health risks, and enforce the rules in place to protect consumers,” she said in a statement. statement sent by email. Massie did not answer my questions.

Chapter 5: The Devoted

Six weeks after leaving Raw Farm, it happened.

On March 15, federal regulators publicly linked its cheese to another outbreak of E. coli.

Nine people were infected in three states; more than half were under 5 years old. Of the three people who required hospitalization, regulators said, one developed the same serious kidney disease that Martin’s son had battled two decades earlier.

Initially, federal health agencies did not urge the public to avoid cheese or throw it away, c as they had done under previous administrations. Instead, a CDC advisory said consumers should “consider” not eating it; the FDA has not given any consumption guidelines. Three federal health workers later told me that political appointments had watered down the original text. (The agencies’ advisories have since been updated. Neither the CDC nor the FDA responded to my questions.)

The fact that the agency was under Kennedy’s leadership did not make Raw Farm more compliant when regulators asked it to recall its products. He refused. “If there was ever a question about whether our products contained a pathogen,” McAfee later told me, “I would be the first to recall it immediately, voluntarily.”

He said he texted Kennedy to “call the dogs back” but received no response.

When FDA inspectors showed up unannounced at the farm, it complied with an investigation. And when the agency threatened to issue a recall, the company reluctantly issued its own, 18 days after the outbreak was announced.

The farm attached several unusual statements to its April 2 notice:

This voluntary recall is carried out under protest.

This voluntary recall is carried out as a way forward.

The farm retracted these statements five days later, but continued to dispute the cause of the outbreak and dispute the agency’s findings. The company tested its products, found no pathogens and was not at fault, McAfee said.

However, during its investigation, the FDA also sampled and tested the company’s cheese. Although it did not find the strain from the recent outbreak, a sample tested positive for E. coli. During their inspection, agency officials also discovered that the farm’s cheese had recently been allegedly tested. positive for pathogens even after 60 days, showing the limits of its aging process. The operation destroyed these contaminated batches.

I contacted McAfee and asked if these illnesses could be linked to his practice of using problematic milk to make cheese. But now he told a different story.

“In the old days, we turned to cheese making,” he told me. “We don’t do that anymore.” He did not say when exactly the farm made the change, citing dates from two years ago to last summer. “It’s been a while.”

I mentioned the fact that he had done similar disclosures in podcasts last year and for me a few weeks earlier. But he doubled down.

“I think you’ve caught me in something where there’s a problem between practice and what I say,” he said. “If I said it, I believed it was true at the time, but I know now we don’t use questionable milk.”

Almost at the same time, McAfee emphasized that his farm would not have broken any laws if it had done so. “It’s not illegal,” he said. “This is why the FDA abandoned its project.” (California regulators told me such a practice was “concerning.” The FDA declined to answer questions about it.)

Speaking to a congressional subcommittee on April 16 regarding epidemicKennedy noted that companies generally comply with recalls immediately. “But we dragged our feet,” he said. “This company was uncompromising.”

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut, asked Kennedy if, in the face of these serious new illnesses, it was time to change his message: “You are the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Isn’t there a moral responsibility or compunction to say, ‘Don’t drink raw milk’?”

“Every product can contain contaminants,” Kennedy responded. “What we do is inform the public and we let them make their choice.”

On April 30, the FDA farm its investigation without taking any coercive measures. McAfee told me its raw cheese products are back in stores. Sprouts and HEB, two large retail chains that sold his cheese, did not respond to my email questions about the outbreak.

“We don’t feel bad at all,” McAfee told me about the entire episode. “Our sales have never been higher, and the feedback online from influencers is: If the FDA says something, do the opposite. It’s safer. They don’t trust them at all.”

On a sunny weekend in early May, hundreds of people gathered at Raw Farm for its annual Camping With the Cows event. The blue sky stretched to the horizon and a small colony of tents, campers and campers sprawled across the lush alfalfa fields. Influencers wearing cowboy hats drank cartons of milk. Matt James, the leading man on Season 25 of “The Bachelor,” was walking around with his mom in a T-shirt that said “Raw Milk Club.”

Many participants were not bothered by recent illnesses. They said they consumed raw dairy because they wanted to reduce inflammation, avoid additives, prevent lactose intolerance, cleanse their skin and balance their hormones. They wanted nutrients that didn’t exist in “boiled to death” milk. They wanted to drink it “naturally”.

Alyssa Wolfer, 42, a mother of two from Bakersfield, considers raw milk a symbol of “true American freedom,” she said. “I’m very much in favor of people being free to choose what they consume and less regulation.”

“I’m seven months pregnant and I drink raw milk because that’s how God created it,” said Lindsay Espinoza, 34, lying on a haystack with her husband and young son. “There is so much fear behind raw milk, but it makes sense to us. »

Some, like Melanie Copeland, 58, of Huntington Beach, questioned whether the outbreak had happened. “The chances of this being true are slim to none,” she said, “and people need to do their research.”

McAfee mingled with his flock. Some stopped him to take photos as he beamed the camera and gave a thumbs up.