A raw milk magnate has spent years fighting public health agencies. Will RFK Jr. take his side?

In December, the Los Angeles County Public Health Department reported that five house cats had died after drinking raw milk. Four of their bodies subsequently tested positive for H5N1, the bird flu virus. But Cindy, a sleek gray tabby, is feeling fine, according to Mark McAfee, founder and CEO of Raw Farm, the farm where Cindy spends her days.  

While Raw Farm does produce raw milk and cheese—including the milk allegedly given to the dead cats—the Fresno-based dairy has gone beyond retail to position itself as one of the biggest players in the raw milk universe, intent on proving its health benefits, spreading its gospel, and firing back against its detractors. 

These are heady times for McAfee. Raw milk is an intensely visible part of the online ecosystem, with influencers singing its praises and downplaying the risks of unpasteurized dairy. In natural and holistic health spaces, it is viewed not just as a holy grail product, but also as a symbol of how many of its drinkers would like to see themselves: rugged, unafraid, and not averse to owning the libs. In November, raw milk fan Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who McAfee says is a longtime customer, was tapped by Donald Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration. If Kennedy’s nomination goes through, McAfee may serve a role in shaping the country’s raw milk policy. 

McAfee has an obvious passion for his work, a missionary zeal, and an ability to quickly cite studies that he claims prove raw milk’s miraculous benefits. He likes, for instance, to point to research suggesting that kids living on farms in Europe develop lifelong protective mechanisms against asthma. (The FDA says raw milk advocates have long “misused” the study and are conflating raw milk with farm milk, a conclusion McAfee and the experts he cites disagree with.) Moments after we first connected on the phone, he said raw milk “makes asthma go away,” something he also told Mother Jones in 2012. I asked him if he was making a medical claim about his products, as the FDA has told Raw Farm not to do on its labels or social media.

“I can make a medical claim on your platform,” he replied serenely. “Not on mine.”

But for all McAfee’s talk of health benefits, the dead cats are hardly the first time his products have been linked to the spread of disease and endured government scrutiny. 

The cases stretch back to when Raw Farm was called Organic Pastures. (The company changed its name in 2020, it says, “to reflect our RAW values and standards.”) In 2008, McAfee and Organic Pastures resolved a federal criminal case by pleading guilty to two misdemeanor counts related to the interstate sale of misbranded food. According to their agreement with prosecutors, McAfee and the company admitted to shipping products labeled as “pet food” despite knowing they were for human consumption. In the summer of 2023, Raw Farm entered into a consent decree with federal prosecutors to resolve charges that the company had violated an order stemming from the case prohibiting it from shipping milk intended for human consumption across state lines. Until at least 2028, the settlement allows the FDA to make unannounced inspections and imposes audits and outside review of Raw Farm’s claims on its products and on social media.  

McAfee says the farm has “been fully compliant” with the FDA’s interstate commerce rules, but still complains about what he views as unfair targeting by the agency. 

“The consent decree and this entire thing puts me under their thumb,” McAfee says, “so that I get specialized treatment that nobody else gets.”

Since the 1930s, most milk sold across the country has been pasteurized, especially after it was discovered that raw milk could transmit tuberculosis. The roots of today’s raw milk cause go back about as far, to a dentist named Weston A. Price, who traveled the world on a self-styled study of traditional food cultures. “Price made a whirlwind tour of primitive areas,” explains one critical physician, “examined the natives superficially, and jumped to simplistic conclusions”—broadly, that Indigenous people were healthy because they didn’t eat a Western diet composed of flour, sugar, and pasteurized foods.

The fight over whether raw milk was better and healthier, particularly for children, continued to crop up in American life. A 1950 pamphlet from an outfit calling itself the National Nutrition League held that “protective qualities” in raw milk were stripped in the pasteurization process—functionally the same argument that McAfee and other raw milk proponents make today. “In the best interest of every child, infant and adult the first requisite is pure raw milk,” the pamphlet added, “carefully supervised as to bacterial count.” 

In 1987, a new FDA regulation formally prohibited the interstate sale of raw milk. In the wake of the agency’s action, the libertarian “health freedom” movement, which advocates for fewer government regulations in food and medicine, also took on the restrictions.

Nonprofits and special interest groups sprang up to promote the cause: In 1999, a nutrition enthusiast named Sally Fallon Morell founded the Weston A. Price Foundation, which says it supports “wise traditions in food, farming, and the healing arts.” In practice, that has meant advocating for the legalization of raw milk, greater consumption of animal fats, and a ban on soy infant formula. (In furthering its agenda, the organization has also sometimes pushed pseudoscience: Fallon Morell wrote in 2022 that she believed she contracted Covid after exposure to wifi and 5G technology; another article in the group’s house publication Wise Traditions calls Covid vaccines “bioweapons.”)   

On the Fourth of July in 2007, Fallon Morell began forming a new legal architecture to advance raw milk, helping found the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal advice to farmers and which set a goal, she wrote, “to make raw milk sales legal in every state.” In 2011, Liz Reitzig, who helped popularize raw milk buying clubs as a way to help members make purchases despite legal restrictions, took part in launching the Farm Food Freedom Coalition, which sponsored the Raw Milk Freedom Riders, a caravan of self-described frustrated mothers who wanted the repeal of federal raw milk laws. 

All this advocacy has been incredibly successful. Raw milk is now legal to sell in some way in 43 states, and every time a raw milk advocate faces trouble, a huge fundraising and legal apparatus comes to their aid. Take Amos Miller, a Pennsylvania Amish farmer whose farm was raided in January 2024, a decade after the farm was linked by the FDA to a deadly listeria outbreak, after which he refused to obtain state permits to sell raw milk. As Miller’s fight continues, he was greeted with a huge show of support from both the raw milk community and right-wing and libertarian figures; he’s also raised more than $300,000 on the Christian fundraising platform GiveSendGo.  

In the fall of 2006, Mary McGonigle-Martin walked into a natural foods store in Temecula, California, and saw a dairy aisle banner advertising Organic Pastures. At the time, her son Chris, who was 7, was grappling with ADHD and head congestion that wouldn’t go away. She didn’t want to put him on “stimulant medication,” she says; from her own time working at a vitamin store in her 20s, she trusted solutions that felt more natural. 

“I went, ‘Oh, that’s right, raw milk is healthier,’” she says. “I would’ve never gone looking for this.” 

McGonigle-Martin says she bought raw milk for Chris just three times, but the third bottle was contaminated with E. coli. Soon, he was very sick, developing, as a subsequent lawsuit detailed, a blood and kidney condition called hemolytic uremic syndrome. 

Today, McGonigle-Martin, a retired school counselor who co-chairs the board of an organization called Stop Foodborne Illness, has an in-depth PowerPoint presentation that she shows to journalists and advocacy organizations to underscore how food poisoning is, she says, “not just vomiting and diarrhea.” 

It begins with photos of Chris on a ventilator in a pediatric intensive care unit, his blond hair matted and hands tied to the bed so he couldn’t pull a nasogastric tube out of his throat. For five days, “he was on death’s door,” his mother says. He was given Versed and morphine to calm him and keep him from ripping out the tubes; every time he woke, his eyes would widen into a panic as he tore at them. “He was also suffering from acute pancreatitis,” McGonigle-Martin says, “and couldn’t eat for two months.” 

Chris was in the hospital at the same time as an 11-year-old girl sickened by the same outbreak; McAfee, McGonigle-Martin recalls, took a small private plane to visit both kids’ families. “He flew down to the hospital and waited outside the pediatric intensive care unit to talk,” McGonigle-Martin says. When she and McAfee met in the hallways, “I hugged him and said, ‘I can’t imagine how worried you are about all this.’” (McAfee says that he made a visit in his Volvo and that Chris was out of the ICU when he arrived.)  

The spirit of collaboration did not last: McGonigle-Martin and the family of the other child both sued Organic Pastures, eventually settling out of court; all parties have declined to discuss the terms. Asked today about whether he believes his products could have sickened the children, McAfee replies, “We don’t know, but our insurance company settled the issue in 2007.” He went on to claim that an outbreak linked to lettuce spread similar pathogens around the same time and that “a pathogen was never found in any of our products” by state investigators.

Chris ultimately made a full recovery and is now a healthy young adult. But he and his mother were both traumatized by his hospitalization. Chris’ experience also turned McGonigle-Martin into an activist. 

“He is a miracle,” she says. “He should not be in the shape he’s in. That’s always given me the energy to speak out and tell my story so another parent wouldn’t make the same mistake. I support health food. I eat organic. I can support RFK Jr. on all of this stuff. But raw milk is in a different category.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s belief in raw milk runs deep. Not only is he a drinker, but he’s also been a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Weston A. Price Foundation. Kennedy’s own 2024 VP pick, tech entrepreneur Nicole Shanahan, made a campaign stop at Raw Farm and praised its cleanliness while denouncing the “constant media attack and regulatory scrutiny” the company is under. According to the Guardian, McAfee has said members of Kennedy’s transition team have asked him to apply for a federal “position advising on raw milk policy and standards development.” 

Such a job would allow him to advance his near-messianic belief in raw milk’s abilities, at a time when avian flu threatens to contaminate the industry’s products. But McAfee is exceedingly dismissive of bird flu—he calls it a “huge scam” pushed “by pharma to create fear and produce a new vaccine…after Covid closed up.”

“Trace the money,” he wrote in an email, in which he also denied bird flu could be a threat to his business or his customers’ health.

“We don’t think avian flu causes things to be unsafe,” he explains. “You may think I’m some kind of crazy person. But show me one person who’s ever gotten sick from raw milk with avian flu.” 

“Viruses,” he says, “don’t exist in raw milk. They die off quickly.” 

“Fearing viruses is ridiculous,” he says; he holds that only people lacking “strong microbiomes” and good immune systems need worry. Of Covid, for instance, he says: “I got it and it was mild. I’m a raw milk drinker. It didn’t hardly faze me.”

“We’re always going to have a new threat. We’re ignoring the blueprints of life, which is raw milk,” he told me. “Inflammation and chronic disease are rampant. The solution is whole-food nutrition.” 

McAfee also insists that Raw Farm’s safety standards are top of the line, boasting of his “on-farm pathogen lab,” which can deliver “results in 20 hours so that we don’t have to wait four days.” 

“We can find the needle in the haystack,” he says. McAfee is also the founder of a nonprofit, the Raw Milk Institute, which offers certifications and safety training for other farmers. Farmers who want to become RAWMI-certified, he says, have to adhere to the same high standards he boasts of at Raw Farm.

But the idea that there’s any way to make raw milk as safe as pasteurized milk is simply not true, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan.

“I appreciate the fact that he’s tried to distinguish his business from less scrupulous raw milk providers,” she says, “and has all these standards that he’s tried to put in place. But the fact is you can have the cleanest cow udders in the world and take all this care with your milking equipment and do this monitoring, but if you’re not pasteurizing your milk, you’re always going to be at risk of these more common foodborne pathogens.”

In general, virtually every major public health body—both in the US and in Europe—agrees raw milk contains unavoidable risk. (The European Food Safety Authority, for instance, recommends it be boiled.) 

Rasmussen tracks the ways that false ideas about disease, viruses, and “wellness” spread online, and since Kennedy endorsed Trump in late August, she’s seen raw milk become a tenet of the Make America Healthy Again bible. If Kennedy is confirmed to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, “he’s mentioned it by name as something that he’s going to deregulate or make more available to people,” she points out. 

RFK and his fellow advocates, Rasmussen says, have extended their philosophies about health and liberty beyond vaccines, looking for more things to hold out as “alternatives” to mainstream concepts of health and wellness, freedom, and safety. “It looks like raw milk is one of those things,” she says. 

Bill Marler is a Seattle-based food poisoning attorney who has repeatedly sued Raw Farm, representing McGonigle-Martin and other parents who claimed their children were sickened by his products. “He’s a really interesting cat,” Marler says of McAfee, not without a kind of respect. “He has a bit of the religious fervor of a proselytizer. He woos a lot of people. He’s a very charismatic character. He’s found his niche where the hippies and the preppers converge.” 

Under Trump and Kennedy, Marler says, the government could step back and give raw milk merchants like McAfee more latitude to operate. “What you may see is a lack of enforcement, a lack of inspections,” Marler says. “You may not necessarily see it in publications that there’s an increase or decrease in food poisoning cases. They may stop counting.” 

Bird flu could offer an early test of this Trump-era regulatory framework. In December, after the virus was found in samples of Raw Farm milk being sold and headed for store shelves, the company agreed to a voluntary recall and was barred from shipping new product under a state quarantine that lasted until January 10. After it was lifted, McAfee sent me an email: “The joy is palpable,” he wrote, with his “consumers driving 3 hours to the farm with ice chests because they could not wait for deliveries to stores in LA.”

The cows powering those sales, he claimed, “are producing H5N1 antibodies in their raw milk. Just like nature provides.” Similarly, the first time I spoke with McAfee, when Raw Farm was under quarantine, he insisted no one—not even cats—should be able to contract bird flu from his milk by the time it reached the region’s store shelves, claiming “bioactives” inside it would neutralize the virus. (Rasmussen points out that some of the antiviral compounds raw milk advocates claim as a health benefit are “also present in pasteurized milk” without the risks; either way, studies involving influenza haven’t found meaningful antiviral effects.)

At this point, it’s simply not clear whether avian flu can be transmitted to people through raw milk. But the concern from health agencies is substantial—and the deaths of the house cats is another data point adding to it. 

When I asked McAfee about the cats’ deaths, he emailed me several photos of Cindy, the Raw Farms barn cat, looking hale. Cindy’s good health, McAfee says, is due in no small part to all the fresh raw milk she drinks—and living proof of the unjustified war the FDA is waging against him and against the life-changing benefits he insists raw milk provides. 

“The FDA is lying to consumers, saying that pasteurization does not change milk,” he wrote in an email. “It does, radically. Our consumers know this is a lie and don’t trust the FDA at all.”

But the makeup of the FDA could soon change, and the long dispute that McAfee has had with the agency could end. As Kennedy’s confirmation hearing looms, McAfee is pinning his hopes on the man he says is a loyal customer taking charge of the agency that’s targeted Raw Farm and offering relief, vindication, and stable ground to keep building his raw milk empire. It all, he says, hinges on Kennedy.

“If RFK doesn’t make this, I don’t see making it,” McAfee said.