Lactose In Tolerance

“Americans’ milk drinking has been on the decline for decades. Between 1975 and 2024, the country’s per capita milk consumption dropped by 47%, according to USDA data. It’s the kind of dragged-out downslide that suggests more than just a slump, but the steady drift toward cultural obsolescence. But the tides may be shifting. Suddenly, milk’s half-century-long flop era is showing signs of reversal.” It’s partly about protein and plants, but like it always is when it comes to milk, it’s also about politics. Why everybody’s drinking milk again.

+ The politics of milk never stops. A couple decades ago, raw, unpasteurized milk was mostly popular among Whole Foods shopping, boxy Volvo-driving, hippy-clinging lefties who liked to use it wash down the personal blend of GORP they custom mixed by scooping just the right ratio of organic, artisanal, raw pumpkin seeds, sun-dried chia-powdered chard, carob-covered banana chips, and all-natural sugarless, tasteless granola from fairtrade plastic grocery bins into their hemp-based reusable shopping bag. At the time, reversing this trend would have seemed like milking a duck, but in a condensed period of time, this group’s love for raw milk evaporated and an entirely different group of voters, let’s call them the Milk Men—intolerant of everything but lactose—were chugging the raw stuff double-fisted on the hood of a gun-racked, gas-converted Tesla cybertruck—partly to quench thirst, partly to own the libs, and partly because the milk mustache hid the fact they couldn’t grow a natural one—and were milking legislatures to allow unpasteurized goods to bypass science and adopt a new American socio-dietary movement: Teat to Table. Fraught Milk?