Connecticut is one of the easiest U.S. states to get raw milk in. Why? WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Jan Ellen Spiegel to discuss her article, “CT could play outsized role in Trump political battle over raw milk,” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. You can read her story here. WSHU: Hello, Jan. How did Connecticut become one of the easiest states to get unpasteurized milk, and how do you expect that will play with the incoming Trump administration? JES: Well, I don’t know originally how the rules and regulations that the state has had for a while now came to be at that point. I do know that it has stayed in place, largely through a fairly serious incident, in which, back in 2008 there was a particular dairy that had a bad contamination. Fourteen people got sick, a few kids got very, very sick, and that dairy closed. At that point, there was a little effort to tighten the rules a little, and they were tightened, but they were not tightened as dramatically as they might have been. I think it’s worth understanding, from a national perspective, how this all fits together. The issue of pasteurization of milk, which goes back to the 1800s, really got put into place federally in an advisory way. In the early 1900s a lot of people used to get sick from foodborne illness in milk. I don’t think people understand what a real health scourge it was up until that point, and for the most part, there were some federal regulations, not laws, regulations put in place that really helped tighten things up. It addressed pasteurization, but it didn’t address the continuation of raw milk. Remember, if you go back to when things were a lot more agrarian, there are fewer people in cities. People had cows out back. WSHU: They milked the cows and drank the milk from their own cows. I’ve been here for a while, and I remember there used to be some dairy farms in Bridgeport. JES: Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, there were major cities where you could graze cows, you know, like on the Boston Common in Boston. But this issue of raw milk was left unregulated and up to the states. And states were allowed to set regulations however they wanted. Some states did an outright ban on no more raw milk, but that has largely fallen away. There may be a couple of states left, one or two left. Some states said, ‘Well, if you want raw milk, you have to go to the farm and get it, which makes it a little harder, especially in largely urban areas.’ But states like Connecticut have allowed the retail sale of it, which means it can be sold in any store that sells milk. In Connecticut, you will largely find that specialty stores and gourmet-ish stores can be very expensive. The agricultural commissioner told me in this story that on a farm he was on, they charged three times as much for raw milk than other types of milk. And the question of why it has become so popular lately? Well, that’s a whole other story. WSHU: So we’re talking about federal regulation here. Why don’t we have a blanket federal law affecting raw milk? JES: What we have is a law that does not allow the interstate transport of raw milk. Each state can regulate what it wants to do with raw milk, but you can’t transport it from state to state. There are workarounds for that, in that there are things some states allow or don’t regulate at all, known as a cow share, or a herd share, you literally are buying into a cow, and therefore that’s your milk. You can go get it, but you can’t sell it. That is a piece of what is so concerning now as we move into the Trump administration, and Donald Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr., is a proponent of raw milk. WSHU: One regulation on the federal level that can be changed that would make a big difference is allowing the interstate trade of raw milk. JES: That is absolutely correct, and it’s not as if it hasn’t been tried before. There have been members of Congress who have tried to get rid of it over time, going back really into the first Trump administration. Remember, Donald Trump has a very deregulatory approach to things, and there is a concern that this will be tried again. With Kennedy potentially at Health and Human Services, he would be a big push for that. Now, there are a number of other things that have come into play here. Raw milk seems to have gotten popular a little bit during the pandemic. People went to farms to pick up food because it was a safer way to pick up food. They learned about raw milk, and it became a little popular. Then, people generally think adulterated food is better for them. That may not always be the case in the case of milk, where pasteurization actually makes it considerably safer, considerably safer. Another antithetical thing that’s going on right now is the bird flu issue. Bird flu is obviously in birds, as I’m sure listeners know, and it has been found in dairy herds. It’s mostly out west. It has not been found in dairy herds here. There is no evidence yet that drinking raw milk with bird flu in it will give you bird flu, but there are dairy workers who have gotten bird flu, and they feel it sort of came from the spray of milking and that sort of thing. That said, one of the crazy things going on, and this is what has the health department in Connecticut very worried, is this notion on the internet that if you drink raw milk infected with bird flu, it will give you antibodies against bird flu. It will not. Period. We have also seen in Texas and I believe, California, where farm cats that are often given leftover raw milk to drink have gotten bird flu and died. So there’s kind of that hanging out there too. So we have this, this, amalgam of factors right now that have, at the very least, brought raw milk to a higher interest level, just in the news world with all these things coming together. WSHU: You talked to some folks at UConn. What do they have to say about this whole issue about whether or not raw milk is available, and how are they trying to deal with it? JES: What we’ve seen over the last, really quarter century, is a very large push on the internet by certain organizations claiming that raw milk is healthier for you than other sorts of milk that the pasteurization process, which uses very high heat to kill pathogens for a period of time, destroys all kinds of vitamins. It is absolutely clear that it does not destroy all kinds of vitamins. About the only thing it knocks out the most is vitamin C. Here’s the thing, though: there’s very, very, very little vitamin C in milk to begin with, and people do not drink milk for vitamin C. Pasteurized milk also has vitamin D added to it to make it better. So the loss of health is due to pasteurization. According to any major scientist, CDC, or FDA, the list is long, and that just doesn’t happen. The other thing you hear, and this has been pushed by certain organizations on the internet, is that it will cure things like asthma and allergies, and for people who have a certain lactose intolerance, they can handle raw milk. None of this is true. I’m afraid to say it’s going to be the same, at least according to scientific data. The interesting thing that I think is worth noting is, you know, back the first time I really covered this, during the problems in 2008, there was a lot of internet presence by groups pushing raw milk. And if you Googled raw milk, you got those organizations and not scientific information. The CDC, the FDA, and many scientific groups have clearly pushed back in the interim because now there’s tons of material on the internet. The FDA, in particular, fact sheet that is up online goes point by point, talks about them, and then lists huge lists of data and studies as reference material. So clearly, they have come back around in the last several years to make a real presence on this so people will understand what they’re reading. But I have not run into a scientist who studies this regularly, does it for a living, who buys into any of the, you know, it’s healthier for you, it’ll get rid of this, that and the next disease. What folks are kind of waiting for now is to see whether there will be a link in raw milk that will make you more vulnerable to bird flu. The scientists I talk to, they don’t advise taking any chances. So there you have it. It’s the same concerns that were around, you know, 14, 15, years ago, the first time I took a look at this.