In May 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat in the White House and downed a shot of raw milk to celebrate the publication of the MAHA Report, a document full of AI slop and fake citations that was meant to present the Secretary of Health and Human Services’s solutions for chronic diseases and other ailments plaguing America. Kennedy had been a loud proponent of raw milk for years, promising in an October 2024 tweet that under his tenure the FDA, a key milk regulator, would stop “suppressing” the drink.
“Washington has become a three ring circus I don’t want to be associated with.”
According to Mark McAfee, the founder and CEO of Raw Farm, the country’s biggest raw milk company, Kennedy is a longtime customer. But less than a year on from the White House event, he complains that the HHS secretary won’t return his calls or texts.
“I emailed him, texted him, contacted the people who knew him, including Nicole Shanahan,” McAfee told me last week, referencing Kennedy’s former running mate, who visited Raw Farm during their 2024 campaign. “Nobody could get ahold of him and there was no response.” (HHS also did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)
For all the drastic and often disastrous things Kennedy has done as HHS Secretary—unilaterally overhauling the childhood vaccine schedule, personally overseeing the placement of false anti-vaccine rhetoric on the CDC’s website, refashioning the food pyramid after the typical diet of “traditional masculinity” obsessed podcasters—he has thus far taken no action to advance raw milk.
Instead, the Trump administration has trumpeted their emphasis on whole milk as a bold change, posting endless weird memes on the subject. But raw milk, or milk which has not been pasteurized, is simply not the same as full-fat whole, and its proponents have been left angry and disappointed. Kennedy was confirmed in February 2025; by June, NBC News was already reporting that raw milk advocates were confused that he had not actively taken up their cause.
McAfee says he’s only had direct contact with Kennedy one time. “I received one text from him on my phone in March 2025, last year, and it basically said, ‘When Marty Makary is confirmed we’ll talk about raw milk,’ something like that,” McAfee says. (Makary, the U.S. Commissioner of Food and Drugs, leads the FDA.) “Marty was confirmed within two weeks of that text message and there was no further discussion.”
This is a disappointment to McAfee personally and the raw milk movement more broadly. When I profiled him in January 2025, McAfee was not only was being discussed as someone who might shape new, pro-raw milk federal policies, he also believed Kennedy’s impending confirmation was the only thing that could bring an end to his own long and rancorous fight with the federal government. “If RFK doesn’t make this, I don’t see making it,” he said at the time.
While McAfee stridently disagrees there is any health danger associated with his California farm’s products, raw milk carries inherent and serious risks, because pasteurization kills harmful dairy-borne bacteria and viruses, including E. Coli and campylobacter. Children who consume raw milk are especially at risk, because their immune systems are less developed.
For at least two decades, stretching back to when Raw Farm was called Organic Pastures, McAfee has feuded with the government and been sued by families who say that his products made them or their children sick. In 2023, Raw Farm entered into a consent decree with the feds to resolve accusations it shipped raw milk intended for human consumption across state lines, which is illegal under federal regulations.
Raw Farm has also settled cases with the families of children who say they became seriously ill after drinking its milk; some developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a potentially fatal blood and kidney condition. Mary McGonigle-Martin, for instance, became a food safety activist after her son Chris nearly died when he contracted E. Coli after drinking raw milk from Organic Pastures.
McAfee says all current lawsuits against Raw Farm have been resolved—“the insurance company has taken care of all of them, completely,” he says—including one from a man who said his cats died in late 2024 after drinking his milk. At the time, Raw Farm’s milk had been temporarily pulled from store shelves in a voluntary recall after the H5N1 virus, which causes bird flu, was found in tested samples. The company was also barred from shipping new products then under a state quarantine, which was lifted on January 10, 2025.
“Public health officials everywhere think raw milk consumption is a bad idea.”
The FDA’s policies and public guidance on raw milk have not been updated since 2024, and most related text on its website has remained the same since 2011. For McAfee, that amounts to the Kennedy-supervised agency still “denying the science,” he told me.
One of his most dedicated opponents disagrees. “FDA’s longstanding policy is based on the historical fact that most public health officials everywhere think raw milk consumption is a bad idea,” says Bill Marler, a Seattle-based food safety attorney who has repeatedly sued Raw Farm. “That’s what created the ban on interstate sales of raw milk.” Legalizing such cross-border sales would be a boon for McAfee and other raw milk producers’ business, Marler says—and it would also likely increase the number of people who end up sick.
“You might as well call it the ‘Bill Marler Full Employment Act,’” he says dryly. That’s because shipping raw milk over many miles “even in refrigerated conditions, can allow for the increase in the bacterial load,” he explains. “E. coli and salmonella populate. The farther you are from the actual production, the more likely it is that the bacteria can reach a point where it overwhelms your body’s immune system, especially if you’re a kid. I would be really worried about producing raw milk in California and drinking it in New York.”
McAfee says his goal is to make the safest raw milk possible. He notes that “no food is perfect, none,” pointing to E. Coli outbreaks in foods like romaine lettuce. McAfee also correctly says that pasteurized milk has caused illness and death. However, Marler, who has represented clients in such cases, points out that their illnesses were due to containers being contaminated after the milk was pasteurized.
McAfee is also the founder of a nonprofit called the Raw Milk Institute, which provides certification and training to other raw milk producers on how to make what their website calls a “low-risk food.” He says 65 farmers have so far been certified by the program, and argues that by not working with raw milk farmers to help create federal safety guidelines, the FDA is leaving it up to people like him to figure it out on their own.
“I want to be pragmatic and constructive,” he says. “At one point, that constructive participation was going to help RFK and Marty Makary with a problem we have with America, which is that there are no standards for raw milk.”
“I put this at the feet of the FDA,” McAfee says, of current federal raw milk policy. “They have paychecks that depend on it.” (Raw Farm’s website denounces attacks from the “corrupt” FDA and media—as well as an unnamed food safety attorney who seems to be Marler.)
As Kennedy’s silence stretches on, McAfee has become distressed by other Trump administration actions, specifically how brutal immigration raids have affected farmworkers, the vast majority of whom are immigrants.
“They build our houses. They take care of convalescent homes. They create our food,” McAfee told me, referring to immigrant workers. “They are America… The Trump administration and Noem and all those people involved with ICE are absolutely crazy.”
McAfee says he “was very disappointed” to have not gotten a call from HHS seeking his expertise last spring. “But since that time, I’m quite happy I didn’t participate. Washington has become a three ring circus I don’t want to be associated with. It’s ridiculous what’s going on with trade policy, Venezuela, Greenland. We don’t want to be associated with anything that poorly considered.”
At this point, McAfee says, if Kennedy were to finally break his silence, he’d have to figure out if and how it would be possible to work with the Trump administration. “I would be very reserved in jumping in right now to do anything,” he says. “I’d consider it, but it would not be an immediate yes.”
McAfee hopes that in an increasingly polarized time, he can still somehow be seen as a “middle of the road” person.
“I love all, serve all, and feed all,” he says. “I’m going to keep my humanity under my feet.”
