How Raw Milk Went from a Whole Foods Staple to a Conservative Signal – By Marc Novicoff (Politico) / March 10, 2024
The poles of American politics have become scrambled. Just look at unpasteurized milk.
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.
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